Ensuring Poverty: The Gendered and Ableist Politics of Welfare Reform, 1996-2016

This paper will explore the ways in which the welfare reform policies of the middle 1990s, and their legacies through 2016, both reflect and shape shifting ideas about gender, motherhood, waged work, impairment, and disability.  The paper will draw upon research for a forthcoming book on welfare reform (Ensuring Poverty: The History and Politics of Welfare Reform, with Gwendolyn Mink), and will take that research in new directions, toward an exploration of the interaction between gender and (dis)ability in the making of modern social policy and politics. It will center the changing status of disabled adults in a policy world in which all adults are presumed to have primary identities as waged workers and in which definitions of disability within many policy arenas presume a total inability to participate in waged work. The paper will address the emergent twenty-first-century politics surrounding so-called “disability fraud,” and relate these politics to earlier media and political anxiety about “welfare fraud” and the need for “reform.” Source materials are federal statutes, to which I apply close readings, and archival materials primarily drawn from the collection of the late Representative Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii).