Reclaiming “good motherhood”: US mothers’ critical resistance in family homeless shelters

Abstract

Unhoused mothers not only contend with housing precarity and economic hardship but also intersecting classist, racist, and sexist stereotypes that position them as unfit mothers. Classed, raced, and gendered conceptualizations of “good” and “bad” motherhood are reified in US shelter regulations (e.g. strict rules governing parent and child behavior, curfews, mandatory participation in parenting classes) that seek to “reform” homeless mothers. To gain a better understanding of perceptions of and responses to shelter regulations, we interviewed 28 formerly unhoused US mothers about their experiences in family shelters. Participants overwhelmingly rejected “bad mother” stereotypes that equated lack of material resources with inadequate parenting and engaged in a range of overt (e.g. strategic recounting of life histories) and covert (e.g. subverting paternalistic rules) strategies to reclaim “good motherhood” and negotiate daily shelter life. Instrumental, discursive, covert, and overt critical resistance strategies were used to maintain parental authority, preserve one’s self-image as a “good” mother and obtain needed resources from shelter staff. Our findings highlight the complexity of critical resistance to class, race, and gender oppression and call for greater interrogation of how seemingly well-intentioned shelter rules and policies reinforce status hierarchies.

A Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis of mothers’ voiced accounts of the “duty to protect” children from fatness and fatphobia

“…Thereby, in recent years, “obesity” policy and research have increasingly targeted children, with the actions and influence of mothers a frequent target of research (e.g., Gross et al, 2014; Hughes et al, 2016). For years, feminist research has demonstrated the classed, raced, and gendered dimensions of conceptualisations of “good” and “bad” motherhood (Reppond & Bullock, 2020) and elucidated how mothers carry the burden of a social obligation to raise healthy and well-adjusted children (Rose, 1999), responsibilised for children's various outcomes and their actions interrogated from before conception (Parker & Pausé, 2017). Governmentality scholars have highlighted this responsibilisation of mothers as a “biopolitical project” in service to neoliberalism (Parker & Pausé, 2019), emphasising individual responsibility and justifying interventions for “problem bodies” (Rabinow & Rose, 2006).…”

An intersectional analysis of the feminization of homelessness and mothers’ housing precarity

“…Participants were recruited via flyers distributed at agencies serving low-income families. Interviews focused on mothers' experiences living in shelters and their interactions with shelter staff (see Reppond & Bullock, 2020). Interviews ranged from 100 to 195 minutes.…”

“…Among their many sacrifices, respondents relinquished their privacy, autonomy, and personal safety, exposing themselves to oversight and regulation whether via welfare programs, shelters, CPS, or controlling partners. These sacrifices often go unrecognized, with both low-income mothers and IPV survivors widely stereotyped as violating classed, raced, and gendered conceptualizations of "good motherhood" (Reppond & Bullock, 2020).…”

“…One manuscript based on data fromReppond's (2015) interviews has been published (seeReppond & Bullock, 2020). The current analysis focuses on different substantive issues and interview content than Reppond and Bullock (2020).…”

Using a Resistance Lens to Understand Performative Compliance of Low-Income Lone Mothers

“…Skeggs (1997, 2005), who outlined the struggle over respectability as a key fulcrum of women's subjugation, later (2005) argued that when we lose our focus on income as an analytic lens, we risk performing middle class biases and endanger our capacity to recognize and legitimate low-income women's experiences. Others have more recently intertwined these two frames, examining the way gender expectations work to delimit acceptable forms of agency while also documenting class struggle (Herbst-Debby, 2018; Reppond & Bullock, 2020). Given highly constrained income support benefits, we therefore draw, and build, on a resistance lens as initially developed by Scott (1985) to explore whether or how those subject to welfare-to-work directives enact what Scott identified as “small acts” of resistance.…”