Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity ed. Maurice Hamington and Michael Flower (review)

Abstract

inflicted upon them. Similarly, in the negative media portrayals about welfare recipients, women like Yvonne Johnson and others come through as making deliberate choices about the kinds of work they will do or their use of recreational drugs to mitigate stress caused by the oppressive structure and sheer disrespect of welfare-to-work programs. However, these concrete examples of Black women’s agency, even within structural limitations, are much too few. More of these would have buttressed Kandaswamy’s queer theorizations. They would also have furthered Kandaswamy’s methodological commitment to working with a hostile archive to further illuminate a more complex history, specifically the ways in which Black women utilized mobility and migration, leisure and recreation, and epistemologies and praxis to not just resist the structural violences of Reconstruction and welfare era policy, but also the ways they worked to manifest their freedom dreams. Domestic Contradictions serves as a methodological model in interdisciplinarity. More importantly though, it offers readers ideological and policy linkages between Reconstruction and Welfare Reform, connections not generally clear to students at all levels—from high school to graduate school, whether US history or gender studies majors. The book demonstrates the ways both eras constituted economic, political, and cultural crises ripe for the emergence of more just approaches to human need. And yet state policies and practices of these two eras “forced Black women to adhere to heteronormative ideals and [to] engage in highly exploitative forms of labor,” in order to be citizens deserving of support (196). Examining the similarities across the eras showcases the “centrality of forced labor” (194) and the role of “gendered forms of anti-Black racism” (196) in US welfare ideas and policies.