{"title":"Cripping the Welfare Queen","authors":"Jina B. Kim","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9034390","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Drawing together feminist- and queer-of-color critique with disability theory, this essay offers a literary-cultural reframing of the welfare queen in light of critical discourses of disability. It does so by taking up the discourse of dependency that casts racialized, low-income, and disabled populations as drains on the state, reframing this discourse as a potential site of coalition among antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist disability politics. Whereas antiwelfare policy cast independence as a national ideal, this analysis of the welfare mother elaborates a version of disability and women-of-color feminism that not only takes dependency as a given but also mines the figure of the welfare mother for its transformative potential. To imagine the welfare mother as a site for reenvisioning dependency, this essay draws on the “ruptural possibilities” of minority literary texts, to use Roderick A. Ferguson’s coinage, and places Sapphire's 1996 novel Push in conversation with Jesmyn Ward's 2011 novel Salvage the Bones. Both novels depict young Black mothers grappling with the disabling context of public infrastructural abandonment, in which the basic support systems for maintaining life—schools, hospitals, social services—have become increasingly compromised. As such, these novels enable an elaboration of a critical disability politic centered on welfare queen mythology and its attendant structures of state neglect, one that overwrites the punitive logics of public resource distribution. This disability politic, which the author terms crip-of-color critique, foregrounds the utility of disability studies for feminist-of-color theories of gendered and sexual state regulation and ushers racialized reproduction and state violence to the forefront of disability analysis.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Text","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9034390","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"CULTURAL STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
Drawing together feminist- and queer-of-color critique with disability theory, this essay offers a literary-cultural reframing of the welfare queen in light of critical discourses of disability. It does so by taking up the discourse of dependency that casts racialized, low-income, and disabled populations as drains on the state, reframing this discourse as a potential site of coalition among antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist disability politics. Whereas antiwelfare policy cast independence as a national ideal, this analysis of the welfare mother elaborates a version of disability and women-of-color feminism that not only takes dependency as a given but also mines the figure of the welfare mother for its transformative potential. To imagine the welfare mother as a site for reenvisioning dependency, this essay draws on the “ruptural possibilities” of minority literary texts, to use Roderick A. Ferguson’s coinage, and places Sapphire's 1996 novel Push in conversation with Jesmyn Ward's 2011 novel Salvage the Bones. Both novels depict young Black mothers grappling with the disabling context of public infrastructural abandonment, in which the basic support systems for maintaining life—schools, hospitals, social services—have become increasingly compromised. As such, these novels enable an elaboration of a critical disability politic centered on welfare queen mythology and its attendant structures of state neglect, one that overwrites the punitive logics of public resource distribution. This disability politic, which the author terms crip-of-color critique, foregrounds the utility of disability studies for feminist-of-color theories of gendered and sexual state regulation and ushers racialized reproduction and state violence to the forefront of disability analysis.
本文将女权主义和有色人种的批评与残疾理论结合在一起,在残疾批评话语的背景下,对福利女王进行了文学文化重构。它通过将种族化的、低收入的和残疾的人口视为国家的排水沟的依赖性的话语,将这一话语重新构建为反种族主义、反资本主义和女权主义残疾政治联盟的潜在场所,来做到这一点。尽管反福利政策将独立作为一种民族理想,但对福利母亲的分析阐述了残疾和有色人种女性主义的一个版本,它不仅将依赖视为既定的,而且还挖掘了福利母亲的形象,以挖掘其变革潜力。为了将福利母亲想象成重新设想依赖的场所,本文借鉴了少数民族文学文本的“破裂可能性”,使用罗德里克·a·弗格森(Roderick a . Ferguson)的词汇,并将萨菲尔1996年的小说《推动》(Push)与杰斯米恩·沃德(Jesmyn Ward) 2011年的小说《拯救骨头》(Salvage the Bones)进行了对话。这两部小说都描写了年轻的黑人母亲在公共基础设施被废弃的不利环境中挣扎,在这种环境中,维持生活的基本支持系统——学校、医院、社会服务——越来越受到损害。正因为如此,这些小说使得以福利女王神话为中心的批判性残疾政治及其伴随的国家忽视结构得以阐述,这种结构覆盖了公共资源分配的惩罚性逻辑。这种被作者称为“有色人种批判”(crip-of-color)的残疾政治,凸显了残疾研究对有色人种女性主义关于性别和性国家调控理论的效用,并将种族化的生殖和国家暴力引入残疾分析的前沿。