From Good Ma to Welfare Queen

This study explores literary, photographic and cultural representations of poor American women in a Foucaldian genealogy. In tracing the inscription of the poor woman historically and across genres the author reveals the contours of the objectification of the poor woman/mother and offers a clear view of the processes through which interlocking systems of race, gender and class oppression have marked the bodies of its subjects in specific and purposeful ways, in order to reify and reproduce privileged ideology and power. Through this exploration the connection between textual representation and social productions of the "Real" be come startlingly apparent. The study begins by examining contemporary public representations that position poor welfare women as antithetical to everything we have been taught to value and trust. The author argues that trying to stabilize and make sense of unpalatably complex issues of poverty and oppression and attempting to obscure hegemonic stakes in representation, these narratives reduce and collapse the lives and experiences of poor women to deceptively simplistic dramas, which are then offered up for public consumption. The terms of these dramas are palatable precisely because they are presented as simple oppositions of good and bad, deserving and undeserving. The author then goes on to connect these contemporary representations of the poor woman to earlier inscriptions that produced and continue to patrol this dichotomous template. Employing a genealogy of social/literary inscription the author traces the frantic writing of the body of the poor woman to her representations in the writings of John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Betty Smith, Claude McKay, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, Grace Lumpkin, Harriet Arnow, and Zora Neale Hurston; and to the photography of Jacob Riis and Dorothea Lange. In connecting these foundational templates to the contemporary production of the "poor American woman" the author demonstrates the power of these early texts to inform our understanding of the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor woman today.