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7 toward a Queer social Welfare studies Unsettling Jane Addams shannon jackson Just when our affection becomes large enough to care for the unworthy among the poor as we would care for the unworthy among our kin, is certainly a perplexing question.1 If we understand kinship to be a set of practices that institutes relationships of various kinds that negotiate the reproduction of life and the demands of death, then kinship practices will be those that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency.2 My task in this essay, located as it is in a volume that explores Jane Addams’s relationship to contemporary theory, is to imagine a relationship between the legacies of Hull-House and a body of thought that consolidated in the 1990s under the rubric of post-structuralist queer theory. To argue for that relationship is, to some degree, an improbable task. Many historians of social welfare place Jane Addams’s Hull-House settlement as an origin point in the invention of state welfare in the United States; meanwhile, many poststructuralist critics of sexual identity invoke the operations of state welfare as an insidiously dangerous source of social normalization. Similarly, many historians of the family position Addams’s Hull-House settlement as a central locus and activator of maternalist politics; meanwhile, many critics of gender and sexuality cite the rhetoric of the family and motherhood as an instantiator of gender and heteronormative inequity. Given the critical suspicion of the “maternal” “state” with which she has been allied, how could it be possible for Jane Addams and Hull-House to converse transhistorically Fischer_Addams_text.indd 143 10/29/08 10:26:18 AM with contemporary theoretical paradigms? I will say at the outset of this short essay that any conversation will require a more heterogeneous view of the concept of state welfare and a more heterogeneous view of Hull-House as a place of operation. As Licia Fiol-Matta demonstrates in her study of Latin American leader Gabriela Mistral in A Queer Mother for the Nation, the public and private practices of maternalism, sexuality, and the nationstate can intersect in complex and ambiguous ways.3 It is only by recognizing the challenge of both state welfare and of Hull-House to conventions of private and public that we can find an alternate way of connecting the dots between them. Indeed, whatever the limits of both of these spheres, I want to foreground the capacity of both state welfare and Hull-House to imagine a sphere of obligation and kinship that exceeds biological ties, undoing conventions of publicity and privacy along the way. It is only with such an alternate emphasis that we can begin to conceptualize the legacy of Jane Addams and Hull-House for post-structuralist critiques of sexual identity and social belonging. And it is only with such an alternate emphasis that we can begin to see queer politics as having something to do with the domestic politics that is state welfare. In an earlier book on Hull-House reform called Lines of Activity, I analyzed a variety of politically volatile Hull-House performance spaces—social clubs, festivals, athletics, gymnastics, theater, living history museums, dance, and folklore—in connection to larger issues of immigration, juvenile justice, and urbanization.4 Here, I want to develop the historiographic implications of another strain of settlement performance, specifically the everyday performances of “home,” “family,” “kinship,” and “domesticity” developed by reformers themselves. My goal is to argue for a connection between what I called Hull-House’s “queer domesticity” and several contemporary concerns. Those concerns are various but related. At a time when theorists of sexuality are attempting to map a relation between the psychic and the social, that is, between the most intimate and the most abstract structures of social life, the discourse of and around Jane Addams offers a useful case study. Conversely, queer studies offers a particular opportunity for staging an investigation of Jane Addams. Queer theory’s emergence within the discontinuous field of “gender studies” has revised feminisms of all varieties while also countering sexual essentialisms and sexual positivisms in gay and lesbian historiography ; hence, queer theory also provides a way of reevaluating some of the ways historians of gender and sexuality have made use of Jane Addams. More important, I want to use Jane Addams and Hull-House to argue for a more considered and mutually galvanizing relationship between the field of feminist welfare studies and the field of queer theory. It is my...

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