Women and Children First: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Public PolicySharon M. Meagher, Patrice DiQuinzio 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. |
Contents
Introduction Women and Children First | 1 |
Misrepresentations of the Domestic Sphere State Interventions | 15 |
Homeland Security and the Cooptation of Feminist Discourse | 17 |
Unsanctioned Bedroom Commitments The 2000 US Census Discourse around Cohabitation and SingleMotherhood | 37 |
Enemies of the State Poor White Mothers and the Discourse of Universal Human Rights | 57 |
Medical Discourses and Social Ills | 79 |
Fixing Sex Medical Discourse and the Management of Intersex | 81 |
Social Melancholy Shame and Sublimation | 99 |
Predators and Protectors The Rhetoric of School Violence | 121 |
Battered Woman Syndrome Locating the Subject Amidst the Advocacy | 137 |
Mothers Good and Bad Marginalizing Mothers and Idealizing Children | 157 |
Bad Mothers as Brown Mothers in Western Canadian Policy Discourse SubstanceAbusing Mothers and Sexually Exploited Girls | 159 |
Behind Bars or Up on a Pedestal Motherhood and Fetal Harm | 183 |
Protesting Mothers Politics under the Sign of Motherhood | 203 |
Mothers Biopolitics and the Gulf War | 205 |
Love and Reason in the Public Sphere Maternalist Civic Engagement and the Dilemma of Difference | 227 |
Other editions - View all
Women and Children First: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Public Policy Sharon M. Meagher,Patrice DiQuinzio No preview available - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
Aboriginal addiction agency American analysis argues autonomy bad mothers Battered Woman Syndrome birth blame boys Bush child child sexual abuse citizens citizenship civic engagement culture daughter depression DiQuinzio domestic violence drugs effects essential motherhood experience Feminism Freud gender girls guilt Gulf War gun violence harm Homeland Security human rights ideal identity images individual infertility intersex issues kids lives logic male marriage maternal maternalist discourse middle-class Million Mom March MMM's multiple births Newsweek oppression parents pathology person policy discourses political predation predator/protector pregnant problems programs prostitution protection public policy rape relationships representation response result rhetoric risks role Routledge Sacramento Bee school violence sex trade sexual abuse Sexually Exploited shame social melancholy subjectivity sublimation substance abuse suggests surgery Tammy theory threat Thurer tion Traci treatment U.S. Census U.S. Census Bureau University Press victims welfare women and children York