The substantial decline in the welfare rolls, expansion
of collecting child support, and increased labor-force participation
among low-income mothers in the late 1990s demonstrated that welfare
reform, along with a booming economy, compelled many welfare recipients
to restructure their relationships with the state. This working
paper draws upon Foucaultian concepts of “governmentality”
and “resistance” to explore how power and regulation
were deployed in local welfare offices in ways that encouraged
these outcomes. It uses interview data from 30 female clients
who participated in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
(TANF) program along with ethnographic data collected in some
of the TANF offices frequented by study participants. It considers
the governance of low-income mothers within (and outside of) these
institutions and explores how women who relied on these bureaucracies
read and responded to attempts to transform their conduct.
Analysis shows that a casework model of surveillance-based
support and cultural narratives about impoverished mothers were
deployed to justify and enforce the new welfare policy. The working
paper also examines the ways that TANF-reliant mothers contested
or co-signed regulation through their engagement with the office,
including methods that might be considered subversive or even
“deviant.” It analyzes “the concealment strategy,”
the calculated presentation of information regarding one’s
case to a welfare caseworker, and the purposeful omission or alteration
of details. The author contemplates whether and how this might
be conceptualized as not only a choice driven by economics, but
also as a form of resistance to increasing social regulation.
Celeste Watkins, Assistant
Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Northwestern
University
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