Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

9. Meticulous Rituals of Power and Structural Violence

9 Meticulous Rituals of Power and Structural Violence Historically welfare programs were implemented with the intent of protecting citizens against the fluctuations of life in an industrial society. Yet history has shown that welfare has not fully lived up to this intent. Policies and programs within welfare have regulated various aspects of social life, particularly in the area of labor—productive, domestic, and reproductive . And, as I have argued, the regulatory capability of welfare policy has had specific outcomes for women, outcomes that are differentiated by race. My goal has been to expose the ramifications of welfare reform for Black battered women and show the ways in which policy undermines their autonomy. It has also been my intention to examine the microsteps of welfare policy that disentitles and punishes women for not being in heterosexual relationships and offers a view of welfare reform policy as a form of extreme gender control linked to economic restructuring—that is a shift to a service economy and the perilous combination of gentrification and racialized residential patterns. Welfare reform-related activities, such as moving women into low-wage labor, forced child care arrangements , and housing restrictions, really illustrate how mechanisms of control are implemented in the most ordinary ways. As Sherita put it, welfare now was like “being on the inside,” a reference associated with incarceration, where being monitored , scheduled, and detailed is the norm. To underscore the 179 regulatory function of welfare policy, these case studies illustrate its particularly egregious impact on Black women. In this ethnography, I focused on one reason (of many) why some Black women use welfare—it is an outcome of the violence in their lives. The point has been to build on the emerging literature that connects two social problems—poverty and violence. The association between these social problems has led to an analysis showing that women are challenged by both violence and by the lack of access to resources. However, although challenged, women still attempted to formulate something that looks like “self-sufficiency,” not because of welfare reform, but, rather, in spite of it. I maintain that poor, Black, battered women, indeed, all women who are poor or lack access to material resources and choose, or need, welfare to gain independence, become caught in a “Kafkaesque-like web” (Mama 1989) of institutional relations . The U.S. policy toward the poor is designed to discipline and punish welfare recipients, proceeding from austere presumptions about poor people. To explain the punitive measures and outcomes, I use the term “institutional entanglement ,” which describes the phenomenon of poor women being controlled through welfare reform. It expresses the sum total of the institutional experiences of poor women seeking to have their basic needs met. Institutional entanglement consists of monitoring women’s performance and assessing their deficits and deviations. Judgments are passed, and the compulsion to control has ramifications beyond moving women off of welfare . Institutions (such as the Department of Social Services) dominate women’s lives partially because they are cloaked behind the façade of authority and expertise, which masquerade as a kind of impartiality (Best and Kellner 1991: 57). It is this domination that I have tried to expose because: . . . the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be 180 Meticulous Rituals of Power unmasked so that one can fight them. (Foucault 1974: 171) Other anthropologists have interrogated the relations between institutions and individuals. Explaining how homeless people are bound to social service institutions, for example, Susser (1993) concludes that families with male children are organized through institutional mandates, which forbid male children over a certain age from living in some shelters with their mothers. Similarly, Liebow (1993) analyzes women living in homeless shelters and illustrates the ways in which the shelter system disciplines women by micromanaging their everyday lives, such as determining when they can sleep. Foucault argues that regulatory practices are utilized to create the “docile bodies that are needed in a rational and efficient society” (Merquior 1985: 94). I suggest welfare reform policy as translated by the River Valley County Department of Social Services attempts to transform Black battered women on welfare into docile bodies to divert them from the rolls (chapter 4); to serve the labor needs of the...