Dependency by Law: Welfare and Identity in the Lives of Poor Women (original) (raw)

Dependency by Law: Poverty, Identity, and Welfare Privatization

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2006

Privatization of welfare reflects the political pressure to limit public responsibilityfor protection ofsocial citizenship. Recent welfare reforms incorporate three classic market-like privatization mechanisms-contracting out servicesforcing allocation of a limited pool of benefits, and deregulation. Deregulation entails strategic diversion and disqualification of large numbers of would-be applicants who are left without alternatives to the labor market. In this article I discuss an empirical study of the effects of deregulation of welfare on the self-perceptions of recipients. Interviews with recipients and with low-wage health care workers, former recipients, show that, criticisms of welfare notwithstanding, they have embraced welfare reforms valorization of market laboi; despite the women's continuing poverty. The interviews suggest that the "consent" of women in low-wage health care work is grounded in both powerlessness and resistance. Care taking, a role devalued by welfare reform, is valued by them and a foundation for identity and an imagined career *This is a revised version of a paper first presented at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, Las Vegas, Nevada, June 2005. The article discusses one aspect of an empirical research project examining the effects of welfare reform on recipients, former recipients, frontline workers, and administrators of welfare programs. Other aspects of the research are considered in earlier published and unpublished work, including, Frank Munger, Dependency by Law: Welfare and Identity in the Lives of Poor Women, in LIvEs IN THE LAW

Resisting the Welfare Mother: The Power of Welfare Discourse and Tactics of Resistance

Critical Sociology, 2004

This paper examines the impact of dominant discourses on welfare on the lives of women caught up within the American welfare system, focusing primarily on community differences in levels of stigma and the possibility for resistance to the dominant practices. Based upon interviews with 36 women conducted in 1997, one year after the passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the paper compares women living in concentrated poverty in the inner cities with those living in rural and suburban communities. The levels of stigma vary dramatically between the two areas, with women in mixed class communities experiencing much more negative treatment and internalizing the punitive welfare discourse to a far greater extent. Women experiencing lower levels of welfare stigma are able to enact more resistive practices to counter the effects of the dominant discourse.

Women's Lives and Poverty: Developing a Framework of Real Reform for Welfare

J. Soc. & Soc. Welfare, 2008

The historic 1996 welfare reform is typically regarded as a successful public policy. Using the limited success metric of "reducing welfare rolls," welfare evaluations and analysis have obscured the lived ex-periences of recipients, particularly among women, who are dispro- ...

Deconstructing the Welfare Queen: Towards a Standpoint Theory of Poverty

Depending on what region of the country you are from the Welfare Queen could be black, white, Latina or any other ethnicity. In most of the U.S., however, she is usually depicted as African American. One question that comes to mind when thinking of the double bind of the Welfare Queen is: What do the differences between the mass media depiction of the Welfare Queen and the lived experiences of women dependent on the welfare system say about the status of poor women in a capitalist economic society? Within this question I see the double bind for women struggling with poverty where capitalism creates a system of dependency for women living on welfare while simultaneously condemning them for being dependent on it. To analyze this double bind, this paper conducts a qualitative analysis of the citizens' media welfare mothers create through the organization POOR Magazine. This data is analyzed through a feminist lens that includes the theory of intersectionality and standpoint theory to argue for a standpoint theory of poverty that provides a more accurate representation of women living in poverty.

Women, Work, Welfare: A Rhetorical History of Images of Poor Women in Welfare Policy Debates

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2003

This article examines images of poor women that circulated in welfare policy debates from the Progressive Era through the late 1960s. Although competing demands for work and caregiving informed welfare policy debates throughout this period, policymakers' views of poor single mothers shifted principally ftom imagining these women as domestic caregivers to imagining them as paid workers.

Reforming Poor Women: The Cultural Politics and Practices of Welfare Reform

2003

This article employs participant observation and interviewing at a community-based job readiness program operating under welfare reform to explore how attempts at cultural retraining (that is, bringing presumably deviant behavior in line with dominant cultural norms) are delivered, received, and interpreted by welfare-reliant women. This study finds that poor women—the targets of these reforms—largely resist cultural retraining, but, ironically, assert its usefulness for welfare-reliant women generally. These ethnographic data support and expand upon previous interview and focus group studies that have encountered the same attribution paradox among welfare-reliant women.