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A critique of public policy rhetoric from multiple feminist perspectives.
This diverse collection explores the rhetoric of a wide range of public policies that propose "to put women and children first," including homeland security, school violence, gun control, medical intervention of intersex infants, and policies that aim to distinguish "good" from "bad" mothers. Using various feminist philosophical analyses, the contributors uncover a logic of paternalistic treatment of women and children that purports to protect them but almost always also disempowers them and sometimes harms them. This logic is widespread in contemporary popular policy discourse and affects the way that people understand and respond to social and political issues. Contributors rethink basic philosophical assumptions concerning subjectivity, difference, and dualistic logic in order to read the rhetoric of contemporary public policy discourse and develop new ways of talking and acting in the policy domain.
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Women and Children First
Patrice DiQuinzio and Sharon M. Meagher
PART I: (Mis)representations of the Domestic Sphere: State Interventions
2. Homeland Security and the Co-optation of Feminist Discourse
Elizabeth F. Randol
3. Unsanctioned (Bedroom) Commitments: The 2000 U.S. Census Discourse Around Cohabitation and Single-Motherhood
Kirsten Isgro
4. Enemies of the State: Poor White Mothers and the Discourse of Universal Human Rights
Jennifer A. Reich
PART II: Medical Discourses and Social Ills
5. Fixing Sex: Medical Discourse and the Management of Intersex
Ellen K. Feder
6. Social Melancholy, Shame, and Sublimation
Kelly Oliver
PART III: Subjects of Violence
7. Predators and Protectors: The Rhetoric of School Violence
Sharon M. Meagher
8. Battered Woman Syndrome: Locating the Subject Amidst the Advocacy
Sally J. Scholz
PART IV: Mothers, Good and Bad: Marginalizing Mothers and Idealizing Children
9. Bad Mothers as "Brown" Mothers in Western Canadian Policy Discourse: Substance-Abusing Mothers and Sexually Exploited Girls
Norma L. Buydens
10. Behind Bars or Up on a Pedestal: Motherhood and Fetal Harm
Tricha Shivas and Sonya Charles
PART V: Protesting Mothers: Politics Under the Sign of Motherhood
11. (M)others, Biopolitics, and the Gulf War
Tina Managhan
12. Love and Reason in the Public Sphere: Maternalist Civic Engagement and the Dilemma of Difference
Patrice DiQuinzio
List of Contributors
Index