Suchergebnisse

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

1. Retrieving democracy : the radical democratic imaginary -- 2. Essentialism, non-essentialism and democratic leadership : from Lenin to Gramsci -- 3. Subject positions, articulation and the subversion of essentialism -- 4. Self-determination, community and citizenship -- 5. Power and hegemony.

The first book in the Cultural Margins series is a 1994 study of racism and homophobia in British politics, which demonstrates the demonisation of blacks, lesbians, and gays in New Right discourse. Anna Marie Smith develops theoretical insights from literary and cultural critics, including Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Hall, and Gilroy, to produce detailed readings of two key moments in New Right discourse: the speeches of Enoch Powell on black immigration (1968–72) and the legislative campaign of the late 1980s to prohibit the promotion of homosexuality. Her analysis challenges the silence on racism and homophobia in previous studies of Thatcherism and the New Right, and shows how demonisation of lesbians and gays depends on previous demonisations of black immigrant and criminal figures. Overall, this book offers a devastating critique of racism and homophobia in late twentieth-century Britain

In her timely and provocative book, Kathleen Arnold examines the super-exploitation and disenfranchisement of the "new working class"—low-income immigrants, African Americans, and women workers—and utilizes these phenomena as a catalyst for sharpening our critical understanding of American governance in our globalizing conditions. She contends that the neoliberal state is deploying deregulation and massive policing interventions simultaneously. The latter range from the exposure of welfare mothers to the rigors of workfare to the war on drugs, post-9/11 domestic security operations, mean-spirited attacks on the homeless, and the crackdown on illegal immigration. Arnold proposes a sobering diagnosis that is loosely based upon Giorgio Agamben's theory of bare life: As the state operates outside the law on a frequent and even systematic basis to reduce these target groups to a subhuman status, we are witnessing the triumph of prerogative power in American society today.