Discursive Struggles Within Social Welfare: Restaging Teen Motherhood

Abstract

This paper is an attempt at exploring the contemporary neo-liberal contexts in which social and community services operate and the opportunities for undertaking struggles around rights and entitlements to social welfare within this context. It discusses the centrality of single motherhood for the redefinition of the relationships of shared well-being among citizens and proposes the frameworks of discourse analysis and identity construction as central in contemporary debates. The paper examines the discourses of an agency servicing teen mothers and explicates some strategies through which these discourses perform an entitled teen motherhood. Subverting the general identity assigned to these mothers by society, research and traditional social services, the discourses of this agency open a space in which poor young women are enacted as young parents, entitled to supports, respite and a voice in society. The discursive strategies have been successful in attracting resources for the mothers involved with the agency, though questions remain regarding the possibilities of their widespread application within other social welfare environments. A few concluding thoughts explore the new social welfare environment and call for a renewed understanding of the contexts of practice and the possibilities of subversion.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 192 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.