Jennifer Randles

The Feminist Ethnographer’s Dilemma Reconciling Progressive Research Agendas with Fieldwork Realities

In this article, we use three case studies of conservative field sites to consider the dilemma faced when feminist analytic perspectives clash with observations. We note that feminism can operate as a blinder, limiting our ability to see and interpret empirical realities that do not conform with feminist expectations. Using our research on orthodox Jewish women’s practices of menstrual purity, evangelical ex-gay ministries, and state-sponsored marriage promotion programs as examples, we discuss our shared experience that unreflexive feminist critiques of seemingly antifeminist social practices, groups, and policies can impede our ability to understand how feminism has influenced nonfeminist spaces. We use our cases to reflect upon a tension that informs all progressive social change research: the tension between our political sensibilities and goals and our intellectual mission to produce reliable knowledge. In responding to that tension, we argue that feminist researchers should incorporate institutional reflexivity on feminism itself as part of their ethnographic practice.

Repackaging the “Package Deal”: Promoting Marriage for Low-Income Families by Targeting Paternal Identity and Reframing Marital Masculinity

In the 1996 overhaul of federal welfare legislation, Congress included provisions to promote employment, marriage, and responsible fatherhood to prevent poverty among low-income families. Little previous research has focused on how marriage promotion policies construct paternal identity. Drawing on data from an 18-month study of a federally funded relationship skills program for low-income, unmarried parents, I analyze how responsible fatherhood policies attempt to shape ideas of successful fatherhood and masculinity in the service of the government’s pro-marriage, antipoverty agenda. The program promoted a class-specific version of what I call marital masculinity, one that seeks to redefine marriageability for low-income men by claiming that marriage comes before financial success and encourages fathers to earn more. It did this by targeting fathers’ masculine identities in two ways: first, by emasculating fathers who only provide financially for their children, and second, by promoting a highly gendered conception of paternal caregiving. By analyzing how this strategy can be understood as both empowering and controlling for low-income men, this research adds to the sociological literature on how welfare policies shape paternal identity and gendered family practices.

Learning to Labor, Love, and Live: Shaping the Good Neoliberal Citizen in State Work and Marriage Programs

Promoting work and marriage were primary aims of the 1996 welfare reform bill, yet implementation of these dual goals has not been analyzed comparatively. In analyzing our respective ethnographic data from government-funded work and marriage classes, we identified similarities in the programs’ focus on teaching the cognitive and emotional skills presumed to comprise what we call the good neoliberal citizen. Drawing on the programs’ curricula and our class observations, we reveal how both pillars of welfare reform sought to promote individual responsibility and economic self-sufficiency among poor parents by teaching skill-based strategies for regulating participants’ thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. We argue that by framing economic mobility as the result of learned capacities for skillful self-regulation and proper planning in the realms of work and family, welfare programs’ attempts to create good neoliberal citizens obscure the structural factors that sustain poverty and the need for welfare.

Redefining the Marital Power Struggle through Relationship Skills How U.S. Marriage Education Programs Challenge and Reproduce Gender Inequality

In 2002, the United States federal government created the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a policy that has distributed almost

Gender, Families, and Social Policy

1 billion in welfare money to marriage education programs. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in classes for a purposive sample of 20 government-approved marriage education programs and textual analysis of more than 3,000 pages of curricular materials, I analyze how U.S. healthy marriage policy addresses issues of gendered communication and power. This case reveals the limitations of what I call ‘‘interpersonal gender interventions,’’ which obscure how gendered ideologies and inequalities are often maintained through institutionalized practices and state action. Specifically, I argue that by focusing on negotiation, communication, and conflict-resolution strategies—or what marriage educators call “relationship skills”—at the interactional level, state-sponsored marriage education masks persistent institutionalized gender inequalities, namely, latent and hidden forms of marital power. More broadly, I use this case to reveal how interpersonal gender interventions will likely have limited utility if individuals learn to develop more gender-egalitarian beliefs in the absence of institutional changes that enable them to act on these values.

Toward a Feminist Ethnography of Feminist Ethnography: A Response

This chapter summarizes the state of research and theory on how social policies related to family life in the United States reflect and reinforce the gender structure. First, I discuss how feminist theories of social policy explain how gender ideologies and inequalities influence the policy-making process and policy implementation. I then summarize theorizing on dominant gender paradigms of policy and how they have shaped family members’ abilities to utilize and benefit from social provisions. Contemporary U.S. family policies reinforce the gender structure largely through legislation that still assumes a married male breadwinner/female caregiver family model. I offer critiques of each paradigm and discuss how gendered assumptions of family life embedded in social policies limit our political abilities to help family members balance their care and paid work responsibilities. This discussion highlights how policies perpetuate the gender structure by not accounting for women’s and men’s overall different socioeconomic and political positions, especially as they intersect with class and race inequalities. This pretext of gender neutrality is a policy problem that points to necessary directions for future research by gender scholars, particularly empirical and theoretical work on the gendered and heteronormative effects of social policies.

“Manning Up” to be a Good Father: Hybrid Fatherhood, Masculinity, and U.S. Responsible Fatherhood Policy:

In “The Feminist Ethnographer’s Dilemma: Reconciling Progressive Research Agendas with Fieldwork Realities,” we reflected on methodological tensions we each experienced when our feminist theoretical frameworks did not adequately explain what we observed and heard in the field.1 Our fieldwork consisted of multiyear ethnographic studies of three conservative, seemingly nonfeminist social spaces: orthodox Jewish women’s practices of menstrual purity, evangelical ex-gay ministries, and a state-sponsored marriage education program. In identifying this shared tension, we argued that feminism2 can operate as a blinder when our feminist political commitments to progressive social change—particularly the eradication of gender inequality—constrain our ability to analyze our data adequately and accurately. To address this tension, we advocated for institutional reflexivity, a supraindividual reflexive practice focused on interrogating the political and intellectual commitments learned through feminist ethnographic training that inform our fieldwork and analysis. Since we began writing about the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma in 2009, we have had the privilege of sharing our work in a variety of academic

Making Men into “Responsible” Fathers:

Drawing on theories of masculinities, I analyze how a U.S. government funded “responsible fatherhood” program utilized a political discourse of hybrid masculinity to shape disadvantaged men’s ideas of successful fathering. Using data from three sources that uniquely traces how this discourse traveled from policy to program implementation—including analysis of the curriculum, in-depth interviews with 10 staff, and in-depth interviews and focus groups with 64 participating fathers—I theorize hybrid fatherhood. As a discourse of paternal involvement that incorporates stereotypically feminine styles such as emotional expressiveness, hybrid fatherhood discursively reconfigures patriarchy by drawing distinctions between mothering and fathering and dominant and subordinate forms of masculinity as they relate to men’s parenting. I analyze how the promotion of hybrid fatherhood for poor men of color legitimates and sustains gender, race, and class inequalities through U.S. welfare policy.

Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social ConservatismFamily Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, by CooperMelinda. New York: Zone Books, 2017. 416 pp.

Responsible fatherhood programs are the rare issue that can boast decade of bipartisan support, and interviews reveal the unintended yet powerful lessons they impart

29.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781935408840.

of the past and that all three have foundered on the shoals of race, gender, and class politics. Drawing on feminist theory, she emphasizes that the impact of these and similar social movements will depend on the social location of the activists and which groups stand to benefit the most from their activism. Thus, the Wisconsin movement to protect government workers failed in part because these public sector jobs disproportionately employed and provided services to women and people of color; as Collins writes, ‘‘racialized and gendered histories of public sector work shaped the perceived legitimacy of those who provided its services and those who used them’’ (p. 135). In the face of the virulent racism and sexism of the conservative forces arrayed against them, this Keynesian-inspired movement to ‘‘revalue’’ these workers and the services they provided did not stand a chance. Scott Walker was reelected by a wide margin. But for Collins, the importance of these three ‘‘revaluation projects’’ does not lie in their size or persistence or even their influence, but rather in what they reveal about ‘‘antipolitics.’’ This concept refers to institutionalized efforts by conservative think tanks and legislatures to reify economic inequality, create the impression that social injustice is inevitable, and squelch the emergence of any alternative discourse. Antipolitics works by designating an issue as the rightful purview of technical experts, not concerned citizens. These three movements are significant precisely because they were able to open up public discussions on the question of value. Although their efforts have so far been fleeting and limited, all three movements insisted that regular people should play a role in determining the definition of a healthy economy. That these mild-mannered critiques of capitalism were crushed by opponents tells us how neoliberal hegemony operates and exactly what is at stake in its overthrow. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, by Melinda Cooper. New York: Zone Books, 2017. 416 pp.