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B3 W2: Gender and Social Inclusion - Women, welfare and the politics of need interpretation

Fraser, N. (1989). Women, welfare and the politics of need interpretation. Politics and Social Theory, 104-122.

“Because women compromise the overwhelming majority of social-welfare program recipients and employees, women and women’s needs will be the principal stakes in the battles over social spending likely to dominate national politics in the coming period.” P.103

“the fiscal crisis of the welfare state coincides everywhere with a second long-term, structural tendency: the feminisation of poverty.” P.103

“the interpretation of people’s needs is itself a political stake, indeed sometimes the political stake.” P.104

““workfare” programs function to subsidize employers of low-wage” p.104-5 

"early modern states defined an economic arena and the corresponding role of an economic person capable of entering into contracts." p.106

"Today, in fact, women have become the principal subjects of the welfare state." p.106

"because women as a group are significantly poorer than men-indeed they now comprise nearly two thirds of all U.S. adults below the official poverty line-and because women tend to live longer than men, women depend more on the social welfare system as clients and beneficiaries." p.107

"It is well known that the sexual division of labor assigns women primary responsibility for the care of those who cannot care for themselves" p.107... "As unpaid caregivers, then, women are more directly affected than men by the level and character of government social services for children, the sick and the elderly." p.108

Rohingya refugees and the money they have loaded onto a card in order to buy their own groceries 

The social welfare system assumes there is a male breadwinner and a female homemaker who looks after the children, however this is so far from reality. But the welfare provisions are based on this imaginary ideal. Men are more likely to claim unemployment benefits whereas women are more likely to claim welfare benefits (family-orientated, such as food stamps and Medicaid)

" In sum, "masculine" social insurance schemes position recipients primarily as rights-bearers" p.111

The feminine sector of the social-welfare system in the US: "The relief programs are notorious for the varieties of administrative humiliation they inflict upon clients. They require considerable work in qualifying and maintaining eligibility; and they have a heavy component of surveillance." p.111

The unemployment benefit comes in cash, allowing the recipient to spend it as they wish, positioning them as a subject of the state, whereas the social-welfare comes administered in kind, earmarked for purpose, making the recipient essentially "abject dependent." p.112

"this system creates a double-bind for women raising children without a male breadwinner. By failing to offer them day care, job training, a job that pays a "family wage" or some combination of these, it constructs them exclusively as mothers. As a consequence, it interprets their needs as maternal needs and their sphere of activity as that of "the family."" p.112

"Participants in the "masculine" sub system are positioned as rights-bearing beneficiaries and purchasing consumers of services. Participants in the "feminine" subsystem, on the other hand, are positioned as dependent "" p.113

"the social is a site of discourse about people's needs, specifically about those needs which have broken out of the domestic and/or official-economic spheres that earlier contained them as "private matters." Thus, the social is a site of discourse about problematical needs, needs which have come to exceed the apparently (but not really) self regulating domestic and economic institutions of male-dominated, capitalist society." p.116

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