Sexual Families and the State: Welfare Policy and Same-Sex Marriage in Shame Culture

Abstract

Sexual Families and the State: Welfare Policy and Same-Sex Marriage in Shame Culture Anna Marie Smith (bio) Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Cornell University Press) Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State (Princeton University Press) Valerie Lehr, Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myth of the Nuclear Family. (Temple University Press) Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (The Free Press) Martha Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (Routledge) Feminist theory and sexuality studies tend to suffer from the same sort of single-issue narrow specialization that is common throughout the social sciences.One way to overcome this sort of narrowness is to search for themes that are common to a diverse set of discourses and to bring those discourses into dialogue with one another. Although the texts under review may appear at first glance to have little in common — they deal with topics as diverse as American poverty programs; the use of bloodlines by the modern Western state to define citizenship; same-sex marriage and lesbian and gay politics; and family law — they actually complement one another quite well. They all take, as their point of departure, the constructionist idea that sexuality is not the product of an a-historical natural instinct or a trans-historical psychic complex rooted in the unconscious, but is fundamentally shaped by historical material conditions, and they all address the question of the role of the state in the regulation of sexuality. While the state does not operate in these texts like an omnipotent determining force, the importance of its work in delimiting the permissible, punishing the deviant, and setting the stage for subjectivation is made clear. Cruikshank situates herself in the recently consolidated political sociology tradition, the governmentality school, which seeks to explore the implications of Foucault’s later work for contemporary social and political analysis. By introducing the concept of governmentality, Foucault shifted his attention from the power/knowledge regimes that construct the modern subject towards the form of self-constitution — the “technologies of the self” — that becomes legitimate and compelling within specific historical contexts. In an important and original intervention in this literature, Cruikshank re-directs Foucault’s inquiry towards what she call “technologies of citizenship”: the “discourses, programs, and other tactics aimed at making individuals politically active and capable of self-government.”(1) “Technologies of citizenship” seek to transform the deviant, the excluded, the passive, the apathetic and the “at-risk population” into productive and self-sufficient members of society, but, in so doing, they tend to encourage a more or less regimented form of agency. Cruikshank warns that democratic activists need to concern themselves not only with the challenge of delivering governmental programs to the disadvantaged and mobilizing the disempowered to participate in the political process, and but also with the form of political agency that those who do gain access to public goods are encouraged to inhabit. In her empirical research, Cruikshank details the ways in which poverty assistance and child welfare programs do not simply impose rules upon their subjects but invite them to take part in professionally-designed self-transformation projects. These parenting classes, self-esteem workshops, sobriety programs, adolescent pregnancy prevention support groups, and so on are administered by trained therapists and social workers. Typically, social science research plays a key role in the relevant policy debates through which these programs are first established. Legislators and leading civil servants are exposed to biased social science findings that masquerade as the objective truth, and those findings present the self-transformation projects — or, for that matter, the favored policy approach of the day — as cost-effective measures.[1] Once the programs are put into place, the participant’s progress is often measured according to vaguely-defined standards of achievement, thereby creating substantial latitude for his or her case-worker. Furthermore, the case-worker must sum up the participant’s needs and compliance in the standardized format that is currently accepted in his or her governmental agency, for the agencies are subject in turn to oversight by the courts and the massive quality-control assessments conducted by the grant-providing governmental...