Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation

Inspired by the political interventions of feminist women of color and Foucauldian social theory, Anna Marie Smith explores the scope and structure of the child support enforcement, family cap, marriage promotion, and abstinence education measures that are embedded within contemporary United States welfare policy. Presenting original legal research and drawing from historical sources, social theory, and normative frameworks, the author argues that these measures violate the rights of poor mothers. Drawing on several historical precedents the author shows that welfare policy has consistently constructed the sexual conduct of the racialized poor mother as one of its primary disciplinary targets. The book concludes with a vigorous and detailed critique of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's support for welfare reform law and an outline of a progressive feminist approach to poverty policy.

Introduction; 1. From paternafare to marriage promotion: sexual regulation and welfare reform; 2. Biopower and sexual regulation; 3. Post-Foucauldian sexual regulation theory; 4. The ideological construction of paternafare; 5. Paternafare law today; 6. Welfare reform, reproductive heterosexuality, and marriage; 7. The normative assessment of paternafare: an ideal type analysis; 8. Feminist visions; Appendices; Index.

This book considers the 1996-2006 welfare laws in the United States from a feminist perspective. It focuses on the way the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program intervenes in the personal lives of poor single mothers, through the child support enforcement, family cap, marriage promotion, and abstinence education measures.

Anna Marie Smith is an associate professor of government at Cornell University. She is the author of New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain, 1968–1990 (Cambridge, 1994), and Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (1998). She has also written numerous articles published in New Formations, Feminist Review, Diacritics, Radical Philosophy, Social Text, Constellations, and Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, and she is the author of chapters published in numerous cultural studies and social and political theory anthologies.