Domestic contradictions : race and gendered citizenship from Reconstruction to welfare reform
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Domestic contradictions : race and gendered citizenship from Reconstruction to welfare reform
Duke University Press, 2021
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [215]-225) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Domestic Contradictions, Priya Kandaswamy analyzes how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped welfare practices in the United States alongside the conflicting demands that this system imposed upon Black women. She turns to an often-neglected moment in welfare history, the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and highlights important parallels with welfare reform in the late twentieth century. Kandaswamy demonstrates continuity between the figures of the "vagrant" and "welfare queen" in these time periods, both of which targeted Black women. These constructs upheld gendered constructions of domesticity while defining Black women's citizenship in terms of an obligation to work rather than a right to public resources. Pushing back against this history, Kandaswamy illustrates how the Black female body came to represent a series of interconnected dangers-to white citizenship, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist ideals of productivity -and how a desire to curb these threats drove state policy. In challenging dominant feminist historiographies, Kandaswamy builds on Black feminist and queer of color critiques to situate the gendered afterlife of slavery as central to the historical development of the welfare state.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1. Welfare Reform and the Afterlife of Slavery 1
2. Making State, Making Family 29
3. Marriage and the Making of Gendered Citizenship 59
4. Domestic Labor and the Politics of Reform 105
5. The Chains of Welfare 151
Conclusion 193
Notes 197
Bibliography 215
Index 227
by "Nielsen BookData"