Signs and Regimes: Rereading Feminist Work on Welfare States

Abstract

This paper reviews and reconstructs recent feminist work on welfare states and social policy regimes. We argue that the concept of "regime" should be stretched to incorporate the way that signs organize the relations among subjects authorized to operate on the field of power. We focus on feminist debates over the status of "maternalism" in welfare movements and states to put forward our expanded, culturalist conceptualization of gender regimes. Feminist research on welfare states has been an intellectually adventurous as well as a passionately political enterprise. Feminists have boldly broken with key conventions that inform sociological explanations of state social provision and regulation. So, for example, feminists no longer assume, as modernization theorists and structuralist Marxists do, that the main contours of welfare state development can be explained by the requirements of capitalist economic reproduction; nor do they insist, a la power resource modelers, that what matters most is the balance of forces between labor, and capital. Feminist researchers do assume from the get-go that gender-that is, in the most minimal sense, definitions of femininity and masculinity-has a formative role in state making, as it does in all known social arenas. 1 But feminists have been increasingly open to Social Politics Spring 2001

Remaking Power and Politics

“…Moreover, we should investigate why some hailings, using some signs-say, of "mother" or "citizen" or "submissive wife" or "mama grizzly"-resonate with some subjects (people!) more than others (Adams 2005;Adams and Padamsee 2001;Padamsee and Adams 2002; on interpellation, see also Wingrove 1999). These claims are also developed by feminist scholars who combine historical excavation and ethnographic investigation to probe how state regulation and the constitution of subjected agency work "on the ground," for example in Lynne Haney's fine books on "inventing the needy" (Haney 2002) and new therapeutic technologies of punishment (Haney 2010); here, the significance of "desires" as well as interests is underlined.20 We should not give up the insights of culturalism with respect to understanding agency, subject formation, power, culture, gender, empire, and race.…”

Comparative methods in research on gender and welfare states

“…A pioneering strand of this literature sought to develop new welfare state typologies in which gender is incorporated as a key source of variation (e.g. Lewis, 1992;Sainsbury, 1996;Adams & Padamsee, 2001). Although some researchers have questioned whether these new typologies were too narrowly focused on mothers and/or female employment (Jensen, 1997;Brush, 2002), this body of work has made a valuable contribution by identifying variation in the ways that welfare state ideology and policies assume and reinforce the traditional gender division of labour within families.…”

Gender, Politics and Institutions

“…The Three World typology and its relevance for gender outcomes, however, remained controversial (Adams and Padamsee 2001). Lewis (1992) had already showed that gender regimes do not necessarily coincide with Esping-Andersen's welfare regime: the male-breadwinner principle was quite modified in France (classified as a conservative welfare state) and rather strongly implemented in the UK (classified as a liberal welfare state).…”