Pathologizing Poverty: Structural Forces versus Personal Deficit Theories in the Feminization of Poverty

Public understandings of the causes and roots of poverty as stemming from a personal deficit are still with us, as evident in the views put forward by popular writers such as Ruby Payne (1998), echoing and lingering in the ideological orientations and practical approaches of key professions that interface with the poor, such as Social Work and Human Services. Critiques of these frameworks are concerned with the blame-the-poor, personal-pathology paradigm embedded in such perspectives, including Payne’s arguments located in culture of poverty theories that date back to the 1960s work of Oscar Lewis (1961), Daniel Moynihan (1965), and Ben Seligman (1968). While they may resonate with commonsense understandings of the poor (e.g., generational poverty), their intimation to inherent flaws in the personal psychology and socialization practices of the poor--personal pathologies, so to speak--portend a dangerous form of social engineering. Alternately, deeper analysis of the confluence of structural forces that shape and determine poverty offered by leading scholars such as Charles Valentine (1968) and more recently Ida Susser (1996), Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky (2001), and Paul Farmer (2005) help us probe beneath the superficial determinants of and presumptions about poverty

Du sucre amer. Le genre de la violence structurelle dans l’économie de la canne à sucre au Sri Lanka

Introduction Cet article présente une étude sur les transformations sociales et économiques qui ont touché les femmes de milieu rural à la suite de l’introduction de la production de canne à sucre à l’échelle commerciale dans l’État insulaire du Sri Lanka, un pays nouvellement venu dans la production de canne à sucre à grande échelle. La recherche que j’ai menée pour cette étude s’étend sur plus de vingt ans et porte surtout sur le district de Moneragala au sud-est, la région la plus appauvri..

‘Neoliberal motherhood’: Workplace lactation and changing conceptions of working motherhood in the contemporary US

Through an analysis of policy texts, population statistics and a targeted sample from the popular press, this paper both furthers knowledge about changing meanings of working motherhood in the contemporary US, and proposes a refinement to existing conceptual work relating to how wage-work and care-work are combined. I focus analysis on recent US social policy which grants new rights and protections for women seeking to combine lactation and wage-work (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2011). I critique this policy through Bernise Hausman’s work on the politics of motherhood, arguing that it represents a form of work-life integration that is particularly burdensome for working mothers. I further argue that maternal practice as well as well as expectations of working motherhood in the contemporary US are being reshaped around the demands of neoliberalism, producing what I term ‘neoliberal motherhood’. I assert that this policy represents a way of combining wage-work and care-work that is not captured within existing feminist theory, and suggest that a re-working of theory in this area is needed in order to address cases in which embodied care-work is enfolded within the time and space of wage-work