DIRTY DIAPERS AND THE NEW ORGANIC INTELLECTUAL

This article examines the conjuncture in the last decade of the political, economic, demographic and cultural forces in the USA that have facilitated the emergence of a complex identity category, the ‘single mom’ – a category that has come to stand for the failure of the welfare state and the purported possibilities of neo-liberal self-sufficiency as well as for the rearticulation of those conditions. The ‘rationalities of government’ that make freedom an increasingly difficult state for poor women to achieve are connected to the production of a set of ‘practices of the self’, in the form of cultural texts ranging from self-help literature to television and film that represent and advise single mothers on how to demonstrate their self-sufficiency and self-governance. It is argued that analysis of single mothers is a critical component of understanding current social conditions as they are played out in the USA in the realms of domesticity, family and mothering, realms often given short shrift in comparison to cultural studies' work on public cultures and spaces.