Welfare Reform, Reproductive Heterosexuality, and Marriage

Abstract

At first glance, there is nothing particularly mysterious about the family cap, the provision of family planning materials and services, the payment of “incentives” to TANF mothers who give up their children for adoption, abstinence education, and the promotion of marriage in federal and state welfare law. Each of these initiatives constitutes a State tool for discouraging childbirth and childrearing among poor women and for shepherding as many TANF clients as possible into legal heterosexual marriages. There is no question that these measures should be listed under the rubric of welfare sexual regulation. However, the analysis of the form of governance in welfare sexual regulation would be incomplete without a close examination of these policies, for it is only by studying their precise design that we can pierce the legitimating ideology of the neoliberals and religious right and grasp the emerging structure of the postwelfare State. These measures will undoubtedly fail to meet their ostensible objectives. Human sexuality is a complex and overdetermined terrain; it is extremely unlikely that these crude and superficial interventions will bring about the desired changes in the sexual practices, childbearing, childrearing, legal marital status, and kinship structures in any significant degree. By introducing these aspects of sexual regulation, however, the welfare reformers have accelerated the transition in governance from disciplinary inclusion and dialogical therapeutic intervention to brute exclusion and the increased exposure of poor mothers to harsh market forces.