In developing strategies to contest the systematic efforts to dismantle progressive social and economic policies generated through decades of activism, it is important to understand how discursive frames that were significant in social justice organizing in the United States have come to be subjugated, delegitimated, or co-opted, and have lost their power for social justice activism. Using a materialist feminist approach, I first examine the processes of subjugation and explore how movement actors choose frames within bounded discursive fields that become (...) institutionalized, but lose critical feminist or progressive intent. I then discuss the delegitimation of a citizen’s right to government support and the co-optation of progressive movement frames by conservative groups. I conclude with a materialist feminist call to attend to the multiple institutions that contour the discursive field and the everyday practices of social movement organizations. This is a call for collective research, since no single case can attend to all of these dimensions and processes. (shrink)

Contemporary social policy toward low-income women in the United States, as evidenced both by Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and by the AFDC programme that preceded it, is in part an artefact of long-standing conceptions of the nature of citizenship. This view sees citizenship as resting primarily on civil and political rights, not on rights with respect to economic, social, and cultural matters. Drawing on scholarly literature on the development of international human rights regimes, the feminist literature (...) that analyses social policy both comparatively and in terms of US domestic policy, and literature regarding contemporary movements among low-income persons, this paper analyses the efforts of one organization, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), to challenge US policy via international human rights law and international enforcement mechanisms. We will suggest that, despite some of the flaws of the KWRU, their approach is a promising one for low-income women. In particular, we wish to suggest that a broader conception of citizenship that takes into account economic, cultural, and social rights is necessary to create a more equitable and democratic polity for women. (shrink)

Recent revisions in child support and paternity establishment legislation enacted under the 1996 welfare reform act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, significantly alter the American welfare state's relationship to men's fathering. Through a critical review of prior research and social service literature, the authors argue that PRWORA actively constructs fatherhood not only through state policies that maintain males as “breadwinners” but also through state-sponsored social service programs that seek to influence men's identities as fathers. PRWORA's policies and (...) their accompanying discourses simultaneously reproduce and undermine gender hierarchy yet tacitly maintain structural race and class inequalities. (shrink)