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.
Author(s): Sharon M. Meagher, Patrice DiQuinzio
Series: SUNY series in Gender Theory
Publisher: SUNY Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 271
City: Albany
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Public Policy
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction:Women and Children First
PART I. (Mis)representationsof the Domestic Sphere:State Interventions
2. Homeland Security and theCo-optation of Feminist Discourse
3. Unsanctioned (Bedroom) Commitments:The 2000 U.S. Census Discourse aroundCohabitation and Single-Motherhood
4. Enemies of the State:Poor White Mothers and theDiscourse of Universal Human Rights
PART II. Medical Discourses and Social Ills
5. Fixing Sex:Medical Discourse and theManagement of Intersex
6. Social Melancholy, Shame,and Sublimation
PART III. Subjects of Violence
7. Predators and Protectors:The Rhetoric of School Violence
8. Battered Woman Syndrome:Locating the SubjectAmidst the Advocacy
Part IV. Mothers, Good and Bad:Marginalizing Mothersand Idealizing Children
9. Bad Mothers as “Brown” Mothersin Western Canadian Policy Discourse:Substance-Abusing Mothers andSexually Exploited Girls
10. Behind Bars or Up on a Pedestal:Motherhood and Fetal Harm
Part V. Protesting Mothers:Politics under the Sign of Motherhood
11. (M)others, Biopolitics,and the Gulf War
12. Love and Reason in the Public Sphere:Maternalist Civic Engagementand the Dilemma of Difference
Contributors
Index
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