Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge

21. Mothering, Disability, and Poverty: Straddling Borders, Shifting Boundaries, and Everyday Resistance

289 21 Mothering, Disability, and Poverty Straddling Borders, Shifting Boundaries, and Everyday Resistance S h aw n A . C a s s i m a n In this chapter I draw upon original research, in-depth interviews with disabled single mothers living in poverty, and detail their resistance to dominant social constructions of themselves as suspect because they are both disabled and welfare recipients. The interview data and corresponding analysis indicate that these women straddle many borders. They occupy policy borderlands, qualifying for disability benefits but requiring additional support for their children available through welfare. Welfare receipt carries with it a particular stigma of being bad or lazy mothers. They also occupy the borderlands of motherhood because of a stigma against mothering with disability. They resist these social constructions of themselves as “bad” mothers by demonstrating and arguing their commitment to their children. Their resistance strategies highlight how policy boundaries and the margins of motherhood are constructed and deconstructed through interactions with agency workers, medical professionals, and the general public. In the process of negotiating these interactions, these women construct themselves as both heroic resistors and victims of oppression. Their everyday resistance emphasizes the limited policy support for mothers in the United States following welfare reform, the impact and stigma associated with disability, and the selfless dedication demanded of all women who choose to mother in such an environment. 290 • Shawn A. Cassiman Borders of Motherhood Motherhood, like disability, is contested terrain. The increased attention to motherhood in recent decades is documented in Sharon Hays’s (1998, 131–32) discussion of the social construction of mothering with attention to the “mommy wars,” associated primarily with middle-class mothers in the United States. Competing ideologies of intensive mothering and “getting ahead” are played out as either “traditional” mothers devoted obsessively to home and family or as “supermoms” easily juggling careers and children. Although they may war over which is the appropriate or best way to mother, both types of mothers profess intensive mothering and selfless devotion to their children. Hochschild details the nature of mothering and marriage in The Second Shift (2003). She describes how “Supermoms,” engaged in work or career, remain responsible for home and children, in essence working a second shift at home after completing the workday, highlighting, as does Hays, the contradictions associated with paid work and motherhood. Anne Crittenden (2001) describes in detail the economic sacrifices professional women make in choosing to mother in an environment focused upon the economic bottom line; many lose seniority if they take advantage of leave policies, which can also lead to lifetime wage “penalties” of more than one million dollars. Jane Juffer (2006) focuses her cultural critique upon the emergent “domestic intellectual ,” the lone or single mother resisting the patriarchal imperative of the nuclear family. Each of these texts details the conflicting social and cultural values of mothering and the inconsistencies encountered when women attempt to reconcile such values with the reality of paid work in a capitalist corporate culture. There are some parallels between the literature on motherhood and the feminist literature on care, though the care literature offers a broader definition of care (i.e., beyond motherhood) and provides ample space for gender neutrality while still recognizing that the majority of care work is provided by women. Of particular interest to this project is that discussions of both motherhood and care draw attention to the financial implications of caring or mothering. Care work, and motherhood in particular, are devalued in a capitalist corporate culture (Mink 1998; Tronto 1994), Mothering, Disability, and Poverty • 291 and mothers are at a financial disadvantage in the paid work force upon returning to market work (Crittenden 2001). If we shift our focus to the conservative or neoliberal discourses about welfare recipients, mothers living in poverty, mothers with impairments, or mothers of color, the character of these discourses becomes increasingly one of suspicion, loathing, and disgust, as pointed out by Hancock (2004), emphasizing the need for surveillance (Swift 1995; Roberts 2002) and rehabilitation (Reich 2008). Disability studies analyses argue that mothers with disabilities are not disabled by virtue of their impairments but by inadequate social-welfare policies and the built environment. However, even with resources, they remain subject to some of the same surveillance that led to the sterilization of many women with intellectual impairments in our recent past (Reich 2008). That is, disabled women who desire children are frequently considered “selfish” or...