Welfare reform and sexual regulation / Anna Marie Smith.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. From Paternafare to Marriage Promotion: Sexual Regulation and Welfare Reform -- TANF as Biopolitics? Agamben and Hardt and Negri -- Piven and Cloward's Regulating the Poor -- Sexual Regulation, Malthusianism, and the Dramaturgy of Relief -- 2. Biopower and Sexual Regulation -- Foucault's Biopower as Ideal Type and the Modern Capitalist State -- Paternafare and "Swarming" -- 3. Post-Foucauldian Sexual Regulation Theory -- The Limitations of Foucauldian Theory -- Child Support Enforcement and Commodified State-Subject Relations -- The Post-Foucauldian Analysis of Neoliberal Risk Management -- Toward a Theory of Neo-Eugenics -- 4. The Ideological Construction of Paternafare -- The Substitute Father Rule and King v. Smith -- Renaming Welfare Child Support Obligations as Paternafare -- Reaganism, the Gingrich-Clinton Consensus, and Paternafare -- 5. Paternafare Law Today -- The "Best-Case" Scenario under Paternafare Law -- Sanctioning the Noncooperating Payer -- Paternafare and Domestic Violence -- Paternafare's Significant and Yet Limited Antipoverty Effects -- 6. Welfare Reform, Reproductive Heterosexuality, and Marriage -- The Family Cap -- The Promotion of Family Planning in the TANF Program -- Encouraging TANF Mothers to Give Up Their Children for Adoption -- Teen Pregnancy and Abstinence Education -- The Promotion of Marriage as a Solution to Poverty -- Fatherhood Programs -- 7. The Normative Assessment of Paternafare: An Ideal-Type Analysis -- The Social and Political Rights of the Custodial Mother -- Program Avoidance, Retaliation, and Lost Allocations -- The Payer, the State, and Social Control -- Child Support Enforcement: The Ideological Impact -- 8. Feminist Visions -- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's Neoliberal Feminism -- Representative Patsy Mink's Progressive Feminism -- Imagining a Progressive Feminist Utopia -- The Transition to a More Progressive Society: Normative and Tactical Questions -- Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Maternalism -- App. I. Gender, Race, and the TANF Population -- App. II. Family Structure and Poverty -- App. III. Child Support Enforcement Allocations in a Neoliberal Fiscal Environment -- App. IV. The "Swarming" of Paternafare -- App. V. The Disconnection between Poverty and TANF Assistance -- App. VI. Race, Ethnicity, and the Family Cap.

"When Americans think about welfare reform, they generally refer to its "workfare" requirements and strict time limits. Anna Marie Smith argues, however, that the sexual regulation dimensions of welfare reform are also significant. Inspired by the political and philosophical interventions of feminist women of color and Foucauldian social theory, she explores the scope and structure of the child support enforcement, family cap, marriage promotion, and abstinence education measures that are embedded within contemporary welfare policy. Presenting original legal research on both federal and state law and drawing from historical sources, social theory, and normative frameworks, she makes the case that these measures seriously violate the rights of poor mothers. She also shows that welfare reform's intervention in the kinship structure and intimate behavior of the poor has several historical precedents. In particular, welfare policy has consistently constructed the sexual conduct of the racialized poor mother as one of its primary disciplinary targets. At the same time, Smith pays close attention to the political and institutional specificity of sexual regulation in the context of welfare law. She concludes with a vigorous and detailed critique of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's support for welfare reform law and an outline of a progressive feminist approach to poverty policy."--BOOK JACKET.