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Abstract:
The Welfare Queen is an exquisite example of the need for intersectional analysis in understanding political and social phenomenon. The Welfare Queen is a public identity with a specific social location determined by race, gender and class. Yet existing research on welfare, and public opinion about welfare, tends to focus on either race or gender-rarely both. Here I use an intersectional approach to analyze data from two nation wide public opinion surveys. My analysis of the survey data helps to fill in the gaps left by conventional approaches, as I look for the combined influences of race, class, and gender on public opinion about welfare.
Keywords: welfare; intersectionality; public opinion
Ron Haskins is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, and former welfare policy advisor to Congressional Republicans and the Bush administration. Haskins was a principal architect of the welfare reform that replaced AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) with TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Haskins was interviewed for National Public Radio's Morning Edition in August 2006, on the 10lh Anniversary of the passage of TANF (National Public Radio, 2006). When asked to sum up the impact of the welfare policy change that he helped to author and actively championed, Haskins responded: "Goodbye Welfare Queens, Hello Working Moms." The key success of the 1996 welfare reform, according to this prominent welfare policymaker, was the banishment of the Welfare Queen. Success in reforming welfare was not primarily about reducing poverty or feeding children or supporting poor families; welfare reform was successful to Haskins because it sent the Welfare Queen packing and invited the innocuous Working Mother to take her place.
Invocation of the Welfare Queen by politicians, policymakers, and journalists cues common stories and media images of a sexually promiscuous poor single African American woman who scams taxpayers by having babies then demanding public support (Gilens, 1 999). She is demonized not just because of her race or her gender or her class, not just because she is single, and not just because she has children. The Welfare Queen is specifically located at the intersection of all of those status markers. The Welfare Queen is a rhetorical construct, but she has had a very real presence in the minds of politicians, welfare...