“I Try Not to Depend on Anyone but Me”: Welfare‐Reliant Women's Perspectives on Self‐Sufficiency,Work, and Marriage*

Welfare reformers sought to reduce “dependency,” or reliance on state‐supported cash benefits and deployed a discourse of “self‐sufficiency” to promote the legitimacy of efforts to remove welfare recipients from publicly funded cash assistance through either wage labor or marriage. We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare‐reliant women to examine what self‐sufficiency means to them and their perspectives on how work and marriage affect their ability to be self‐sufficient. Grounded theory analysis revealed that for these women, self‐sufficiency means formal independence from both the state (i.e., Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) and men (i.e., marriage). Although they value marriage as an institution and would ideally marry, they do not consider marriage to be a likely route to self‐sufficiency given the pool of men available to them. Rather, they embrace their own market‐based wage labor as the means by which they can attain some measure of independence. Taking our lead from the women in this study, we challenge the emphasis on marriage in current welfare policy. We argue that employment training that results in better jobs for women and men and work supports that make low‐wage work pay are clearly the appropriate direction for policy aimed at the welfare‐reliant and working poor.     

“Where the Danger Lies”: Race,Gender, and Chinese and Japanese Exclusion in the United States, 1870–19241

Race too often is used as the explanatory variable for understanding immigration exclusion, marginalizing the significance of race making, ethnic differentiation, and gender construction in particular. This article explores these processes by examining exclusionary policies implemented against Chinese and Japanese immigrants from the mid‐1870s to 1924, the year the National Origins Act was passed. Politicians, intellectuals, and moral reformers used a gendered logic—the construction of idealized gender norms, roles, and sexual propriety and the attachment of these meanings to male and female bodies—to distinguish Japanese immigrants from the Chinese immigrants they followed, allowing for ethnic differentiation and dissimilar policies. The convergence toward exclusion rested on a racialized logic—the construction and attachment of inferior status and meanings to immigrant groups through discourse, formal and informal categorization, or social closure—which claimed that the Japanese were unassimilable and racially undesirable like the Chinese. Exclusionists focused on the immigrant women, decrying their sexual and gender impropriety as evidence of the groups’ threats to the sanctity of white families, which imperiled the nation. Gender and race both mattered in these logics and their meanings were constructed as their salience interconnected.     

Barack Obama,the New Politics of Race,and Classed Constructions of Racial Blackness

Based upon an analysis of the print and online media, this article examines the discourse of the “new politics of race” between 2007 and 2014. Part of the politics of postracialism, the new race politics first emerged as a set of guidelines for candidate Barack Obama, concerning how he should and should not handle racial matters if he hoped to win the presidency. In a larger sense, however, the new race politics is a class‐specific discourse of racial color blindness, one which positions the black upper middle class as a 21st‐century model minority, racialized in contradistinction to the black poor.     

Resisting the Neo‐liberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens

This article describes the impact of both neo‐liberal and conservative discourse upon poverty policy and welfare reform. In it, I summarize the discursive construction of welfare queens and deadbeat dads and the influence upon welfare reform while incorporating globalization in the discursive critique. This paper also describes the resistance to the discourse evidenced by those most affected by the poverty or welfare reform discourse. I suggest ways of critically examining our own discourse as well as the welfare reform discourse and our participation in it or resistance to it. The conclusion questions assumptions about dependency, welfare receipt and justice.     

The resonance of moderate feminism and the gendered relations of austerity

During the tenure of the UK Conservative‐led coalition government (2010–15) austerity policy was rolled out in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–08. In this article a discourse analysis of mainstream newspaper representations of austerity, which appeared throughout this period, is undertaken using the principles of Cultural Political Economy (Jessop 2004). Three key questions are posed: 1) How is gender drawn upon to render austerity intelligible? 2) How do these discursive constructions contribute to the reproduction of particular ideas regarding contemporary gender relations? 3) What do these gendered austerity discourses reveal about the institutionalisation of particular forms of feminism? A critical gender discourse which emphasised equality appeared alongside constructions of gender that reproduced problematic assumptions. Made meaningful in this way, austerity, as a strategy for restoring pre‐crash social arrangements, also restored particular aspects of gender relations. This is theorised as the product of the successful institutionalisation of a hegemonic, moderate liberal feminism prior to the financial crash. The findings contribute to debates within feminist scholarship about the dynamics of gender inclusion and extend our understanding of the associated implications for feminist critique.     

Negotiating the dichotomy of Boffin and Triad: British-Chinese pupils' constructions of 'laddism'

Little research has examined constructions of gender among young British‐Chinese. This paper seeks to further understanding in this area, particularly in relation to notions of ‘laddism’ currently deployed in educational policy discourse around gender and achievement. As a group British‐Chinese boys tend to very high achievement in the British Education system. The notion of ‘laddish behaviour’ as an explanation for boys’ apparent underachievement in comparison to girls at GCSE level was discussed with British‐Chinese pupils. An overwhelming majority of British‐Chinese pupils supported this explanation, and a majority of these pupils applied notions of ‘laddish behaviour’ to British‐Chinese boys, to some extent contesting stereotypes of the Chinese as uniformly ‘good pupils’. However, the discourses of ‘the good Chinese pupil’ and ‘Chinese value of education’ were frequently drawn on by pupil respondents, with the result that the pupils often presented British‐Chinese manifestations of ‘laddism’ as mild versions in comparison with pernicious ‘others’. The paper discusses different presentations of laddism among some of the male respondents. It concludes by analysing the impact of ‘raced’ and gendered discourses on British‐Chinese constructions of masculinity. British‐Chinese boys may be able to adopt versions of masculinity which do not impede their learning, but this tended to result in their masculinity being problematised in teacher discourse.     

The power to fix the gaze: Gender and class in Victorian photographs of pit‐brow women

This article considers how Victorian discourses on gender and class operate both within and upon Victorian photographs of women miners (pit‐brow women) in their working clothes. The photographs come from the personal collection of Arthur J. Munby, a bourgeois man of the period. In contrast to other studies undertaken on his collection, this article considers these photographs in the context of their commercial sale. Thus this article aims to investigate why Victorian men, such as Munby, purchased such photographs. The article does this by rebuilding the discursive field that gave these photographs meaning. This reveals that the way in which these photographs were actively constructing categories of difference (class and gender) allowed them to signify in a number or erotic and sexualized ways. Furthermore, the article exposes how these particular photographs carried specific meanings of the erotic because these women, unlike other working‐class women, wore trousers. Finally it reveals the power such discourses held in structuring the experience of being a woman miner in the 1860's.     

Race,Hyper‐Incarceration,and US Poverty Policy in Historic Perspective

In this article, I bring scholarship on welfare reform into discussion with work on crime control and racial and ethnic relations. I locate the genesis of hyper‐incarceration and the moral suasion imposed on the recipients of contemporary social welfare services through the poverty policies of the Victorian era and later the postbellum south, implicating the checkered history of racial domination in the United States in the development of social welfare and criminal justice policy. I conclude by discussing the ways in which the United States has been reconfigured to facilitate these trends and of new terrain in the study of marginality in the neoliberal age. Doing so demonstrates the long‐standing collusion between welfare state and criminal justice actors, identifies the racialized target of punishment and poverty management, highlights the significance of race in the development of social policy, and exhibits the importance of social welfare policy in contemporary race and ethnic relations.     

Disclosure and (re)performance of gender‐based evidence in an interpreter‐mediated asylum interview

In order to handle the complexities of increasing influxes of people, asylum agencies tend to adhere to static categorisations of the variability encountered in the institutional space. This study demonstrates that, although classification is to some extent inevitable, isolation of social categories (gender, age, citizenship) into policy guidelines and routine procedures can be counterproductive in socially heterogeneous settings, such as the asylum determination interview, where several participants (asylum officers, interpreters, decision makers) are deeply implicated in the discursive co‐construction of client identities. Drawing on sociolinguistic micro‐analysis of gender‐based evidence from an interpreted asylum interview in the Belgian asylum procedure, this study shows how the (re)performance of gender issues is deeply embedded in and therefore cannot be understood outside the specific socio‐discursive dynamics and the broader institutional context of the asylum interview.     

Low‐income and Middle‐class Mothers Gendered Work and Family Schemas

Conflict between the demands of paid work and motherhood has been studied primarily from the experience of middle‐class and professional mothers in dual‐earner families. Recently, with the reform of welfare, a number of studies have focused on the problems of poor mothers in meeting the demands of paid employment and caring for children. This article explores the moral discourse of judgments about paid work and motherhood and how this differs for low‐income and married middle‐class women. It reviews research that considers why poor single mothers are seen as irresponsible when they leave work due to family demands when professional and middle‐class married mothers are seen as acting selflessly. It examines how gendered schema differentially influences the work and family choices of married middle‐class and professional mothers compared to poor and low‐income mothers.     

Troubling Discourses of Poverty in Early Childhood in the UK

Poverty in early childhood is pervasive, affecting every aspect of children’s lives. Under current government policies child poverty in the UK is predicted to rise to 40 per cent by 2022. Dominant discourses of poverty have historically focussed on an over‐arching discourse of moral responsibility, essentially relating to notions of deserving and underserving poor. This paper examines how government policy continues to significantly impact on young children and families on low incomes in early childhood and how stigmatised discourses about welfare, work are pervasive. It is argued that discourses of redistribution and children’s rights deserve greater recognition if poverty is to be addressed.     

The Business Case of Gender Equality in Swedish Forestry and Mining ‐ Restricting or Enabling Organizational Change

Forestry and mining constitutes an important part of Swedish basic industry. These industries are heavily male‐dominated and are expressing an ambition to become more gender equal and less gender‐segregated, arguing that this could strengthen their competitiveness in a number of areas. In this article we explore how company representatives construct gender equality as a business case and discuss how these constructions restrict and/or enable gender equality in these organizations. Departing from a social constructivist understanding of how language (re)produces gendered power relations in the workplace, the empirical basis of this paper consists of eight interviews with respondents who possess special insights into, and being of strategic importance to, gender equality issues in forestry and mining companies. In our analysis we found three dominant dimensions of the business case of gender equality Marketing (as) gender equality, Uncovering the male norm and Gender equality as a depoliticized value. We conclude that the business case framing facilitates for the companies to engage in issues of gender equality. However, issues concerning conflicting interests and power relations seem to be difficult to address within the business case discourse. This we argue affects and shapes the terms for gender equality in these organizations.     

Young people's reproductions of the ‘father as provider’ discourse: intersections of race,class, culture and gender within a liberal democracy

ABSTRACT

Despite a plurality of paternal forms available to men, certain enactments of fathering remain immobile. In South Africa the ‘father as provider’ discourse, which establishes the legitimate father as one who provides financially for his family, continues to be regarded as the primary mark of a good father. Using photo-elicitation interviews to interrogate the persistence of this discourse, this paper examines how adolescents from two low-resourced South African communities construct fathering. Using a critical intersectional discursive framework, the analysis focuses on how gender, race, class and culture are implicated in the reproduction of the ‘father as provider’ discourse. Participants’ constructions suggest that the father’s duty to provide is intensified within marginalised contexts. Central to participants’ reproductions of the ‘father as provider’ discourse was a neoliberal conception of ‘freedom of choice’. The paper concludes that South Africa’s post-apartheid reliance on discourses around liberal democracy has cast the low-income father’s ability to fulfil the provider role as a conscious choice. While the father is made responsible for his failure to provide, broader structural oppressions are in turn rendered largely invisible by such discourse.     

The operation and subversion of gendered war discourses: soldierhood,motherhood and military dissent in the public production of Kimberly Rivera

This article undertakes a discourse analysis of texts concerning a recent high profile case of opposition to war by Kimberly Rivera, a US soldier and a mother of five. Developing on previous research concerning how female soldiers, anti-war women and anti-war soldiers have been made intelligible within understandings of war and gender, the analysis traces the discursive repertoires constituting Rivera as a political subject. The article considers how, when and with what implications for broader discourses of gender and war, and their transformation, the categories of soldierhood and motherhood were invoked to construct and obstruct Rivera as an intelligible dissenting subject. The most common presentation of Rivera centered on her motherhood, understood to be in crisis due to her military role. With motherhood and soldierhood seen to be antithetical this crisis could be “solved” through opposition to war. This limited the extent to which Rivera was intelligible as a “thinking citizen” and reproduced motherhood and soldierhood as stable categories leaving their immanent discourses concerning war and gender untroubled. The article then considers ways in which alternative avenues for transformative interventions could open up if dissenters like Rivera were “written” as other than fundamentally contradictory figures.     

The Multiple Meanings of Work for Welfare-Reliant Women

Based on ethnographic and interview data collected at two welfare to work offices, this paper explores the various meanings that welfare-reliant women give to paid work. Although studies show that welfare-reliant women support work requirements and believe that welfare receipt should be temporary, even Progressives often fail to see the multiple meanings work has for poor women, and how similar these are to the meanings most Americans attach to work. Not only do poor women want to work for basic economic survival, but they view paid work as a means to family security, a path to fulfilling personal aspirations, and as their civic responsibility.

Kids Talking About Race: Tween‐agers in a Post‐Civil Rights Era

Our research examines how American children understand and talk about how race matters in their everyday lives. We draw on interviews with 44 middle school children who attend schools in an integrated county‐wide system and find that while some use color‐blind rhetoric, most children in our study know that race matters, while they offer alternative accounts for why and how. Some explain race as social inequality, while others offer cultural accounts of racial differences. Our analysis suggests that for white children, gender matters; more girls describe racial inequality than boys. For children of color, class seems to be key, with middle‐class children giving cultural explanations, including negative evaluations of others in their own racial group. We use an intersectionality framework to analyze the alternative and complex narratives children give for their own experiences of race and race relations between peers.     

Mafias,Markets, Mules: Gender Stereotypes in Discourses About Drug Trafficking

Popular and political discourses about drug trafficking are premised on a gender binary based on sexist stereotypes. Simply put, popular and political discourses about drug trafficking tend to describe men as the brains and women as mere bodies. Academic research on drug mules and drug trafficking tends to rely on, rather than problematise, this gender binary, limiting contemporary enquiry and knowledge about drug trafficking. Furthermore, this gendered binary informs anti‐drug trafficking policy international in harmful ways.