THEORIZING AGONISTIC AND GENDERED PRACTICES OF DISSIDENT CITIZENSHIP

Agonistic democratic theorists conceptualize political agon, or struggle, as the life-sustaining oxygen that powers democratic politics. If political contestation is suffocated, these scholars argue, the generative disorders of democratic politics at best will subside into an unreflective “consensus” that does nothing to challenge undemocratic practices and powers and at worst will allow forms of authoritarianism and even totalitarianism to flourish. Whether advocating for practices of “unsettlement” (Honig Reference Honig1993), “disturbance” (Connolly Reference Connolly1995), “disagreement” (Rancière Reference Rancière1999), or “dissent” (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2005), agonistic theorists argue that disruption is a necessary counter to the forces in political life that seek to establish stability, permanence, and control.

These theorists show that there are many possible modes of agonistic disruption, but I wish to use this body of work to focus on one especially vital agonistic practice: political dissent. Although contemporary scholars sometimes use “dissent” as a catchall term for nearly any disruptive action, including violent revolutions, vigilantism, and covert forms of resistance (Coleman and Tucker Reference Coleman and Tucker2012; cf. Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2008), in my view such all-encompassing conceptions mask some of dissent's crucially distinctive features. The word itself comes from the Latin dissentire, meaning to differ in sentiment (dis-, “apart,” and sentire, “to feel, think”), but calling a position or an act “dissent” typically connotes something more intense than a minor difference of opinion or a short-term disagreement. Dissent instead marks a form of “feeling apart” that is more sustained or deeply held. It is also not a secretly held belief but a public refusal to acquiesce or concede, a disruptive holding of one's position in the face of strong, possibly even overwhelming, opposition. Dissent, finally, also involves a refusal to abandon or destroy the institution, community, or polity from which one dissents. To put this in perhaps more familiar language, dissent is a public, disruptive practice that nonetheless enacts a form of allegiance or loyal opposition.Footnote ⁴

Acts of political dissent can appear as the work of a single individual, like the hunger strikes of Cesar Chavez, or as the placards and chants of a million people in London opposed to going to war against Iraq. Dissent can include the highway blockades of Black Lives Matter activists, the disturbing video trucks of animal rights advocates, the angry speeches of Tea Party activists at the U.S. Capitol, or a candlelit vigil in favor of immigration reform. As these examples suggest, dissidents publicly contest current beliefs, practices, laws, and policies through embodied and discursive practices of disruption ranging from the silent to the spectacular. They are acting, in other words, as dissident citizens with a part to play in democratic governance and decision making, regardless of whether they are de facto citizens and regardless of whether traditional channels of democratic participation are open to them.Footnote ⁵

There are two conjoined facets of dissident citizenship that agonistic democratic theory helps illuminate. Dissident citizens both “expose” or “declare a wrong,” to adopt Rancière's (Reference Rancière1999, 39) provocative language, and performatively disrupt the status quo. For Rancière the declaration of a wrong does more than simply name a grievance; it performatively and disruptively constitutes the object of dispute and the parties to the quarrel by redrawing the categories that currently assign people to particular roles, places, and statuses. In declaring the wrong of racism, for instance, U.S. civil rights activists constituted a collision between their claims of equality and practices of racial hierarchy and, simultaneously, constituted civil rights supporters and opponents as the parties to the dispute. Their boycotts, protests, marches, voter registration drives, and strikes were performative tactics of democratic disruption that continuously restaged that quarrel.

Political identities play a critical part in dissident efforts to declare the wrong and unsettle the status quo. For agonistic theorists, identities are not pre-given or pre-established formations that must be adequately “recognized” by others, but rather they are contingent, performative political articulations that take shape only in relation to other identities and thus are always in process and incomplete (Connolly Reference Connolly1993; Markell Reference Markell2003). Identities, or what some of these theorists, following Stuart Hall (Reference Hall, Hall and du Gay1996), more helpfully conceptualize as identifications, are also never simply positive or benign achievements; they are always subjectivating in a Foucauldian sense. Any identity or subject position that is assigned, claimed, or occupied brings with it both agentic capacities as well as forms of subjection to power that can be contested and politicized (Chambers Reference Chambers2013, 98; Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank1999).

Agonistic theorists also usefully emphasize the importance of social and political movements in articulating the identities and subject positions through which political disruptions are constituted. Mouffe's (Reference Mouffe2005) hope, for instance, is that progressive movements can articulate radical democratic citizen identities that will unsettle the current neoliberal regime. Connolly sees a vital role for movements in placing new identities onto the “register of justice” so that “hidden injuries in established norms, laws, and practices are exposed, contested, and sometimes changed” (Reference Connolly, Campbell and Schoolman2008, 314). Rancière (Reference Rancière1999), in turn, argues that movements disrupt the current order when activists disidentify with their assigned place (see also Chambers Reference Chambers2013).

Movements and identity struggles, in sum, are crucial facets of the irruptive dynamics these theorists argue are so democratically significant. Yet agonistic theorists frequently gloss over the difficult, sustained, and repeated struggles that movements in general and dissident citizens in particular find necessary to constitute themselves as parties to the quarrel and to enact (and defend) their public disruptions. Declaring a wrong or disrupting the status quo is rarely a quick, one-shot effort; such struggles are far more likely to be difficult, iterated, and long-lasting. Agonistic democrats sometimes acknowledge these prolonged, purposeful struggles, as when Connolly (Reference Connolly1995) notes the importance of a “politics of disturbance” in disordering settled political arrangements, ideas, and identities. Without drilling down into how those collective struggles are cultivated and sustained, however, agonistic theories of politics fail to account for important political dilemmas that dissidents regularly confront and miss the fundamental importance of gender formations in constituting dissident disruptions.

Closer examination of political movements shows that dissident citizens and their critics deploy and contest gender in two distinct fields of dissident struggle. The first field I call agonistic standing struggles. Because nondissidents so rarely welcome disruption, when dissident citizens declare a wrong, they are not only performatively articulating claims for justice, dignity, redistribution, rights (Zivi Reference Zivi2012), or another political goal. They are also declaring their position as dissidents with political standing, with an equal stake in the decisions and practices of their polity. The claims-making identifications and disidentifications that disrupt the current order and support the declaration of a wrong, moreover, are not usually the singular, overarching identities often cited by agonistic theorists—for instance, Rancière's (Reference Rancière1999) examples of “women” or “the poor”—but are far more typically plural and intersectionally gendered.

Sometimes the gendered claims are quite explicit, as when the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina disruptively asserted their standing as mothers and wives to demand government action on the problem of their “disappeared” relatives (Ackelsberg Reference Ackelsberg2010), or when the striking sanitation workers in Memphis whom Martin Luther King, Jr., supported in his final days proclaimed “I Am a Man!” (Estes Reference Estes2005). Sometimes the gendering is more subtle, as when Tea Party activists invoke Revolutionary War heroes and the founding fathers to claim standing as patriots eager to “take back” their country (Sparks Reference Sparks2015a). Dissidents’ critics, in turn, contest gendered standing claims to undercut a declaration of the wrong. Rush Limbaugh's infamous charge that Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke was a “slut,” for instance, was designed to disrupt her standing as an advocate for equal access to birth control through Obamacare (Sparks Reference Sparks2015a). Because successfully disrupting a dissident's standing claim provides one way to disrupt an articulation of a wrong, this is regularly a contentious site of dissident struggle. Agonistic theory, in short, must attend more carefully to the intersectional politics of agonistic standing struggles, or the ongoing, repeated efforts of dissident citizens to become acknowledged parties to the dispute and their critics’ labors to undo or refuse those positions.Footnote ⁶

A second field of dissident action where dissidents and their critics deploy intersectional gender is what I call agonistic disturbance struggles, or the continuous efforts of dissident citizens to enact, cultivate, and defend their provocative but democratic acts of dissent. In situations in which the ethical norms of “receptive generosity,” “agonistic respect,” and “critical responsiveness” promoted by agonistic scholars are often sorely lacking (Coles Reference Coles1997; Connolly Reference Connolly1995), cultivating and enacting disruptive practices can be enormously challenging. Dissident citizens are regularly disavowed by their critics as lawbreakers; they are also sometimes harassed, threatened, fired, arrested, jailed, deported, injured, or even killed. Intersectional gender formations can be vital as dissidents work to disidentify with violence on the one hand, or with apathy, fear, and passivity on the other, while instead cultivating subject positions that enable disruptive yet democratic action.

Activist identifications as proud black men, for instance, provided important support to young students confronting threats and arrests during the Freedom Summer (Estes Reference Estes2005). Disidentifications with militaristic men and identifications as nurturers and caretakers have been critical for mobilizing dissent against nuclear power and war (Managhan Reference Managhan2007). Gendered activist identifications are also crucial for defending dissident disruptions from critics, as when contemporary gun control activists have defended their “stroller jams” and boycotts in the wake of Sandy Hook and other recent mass shootings as the actions of grieving and protective moms and dads for “gun sense” (Sparks Reference Sparks2015b).

Intersectionally gendered identifications and practices thus regularly suffuse standing and disturbance struggles in ways that agonistic scholars have not fully theorized. Attending closely to gender instead generates more nuanced accounts of agonistic disruption that highlight the critical dilemmas dissident citizens confront, as well as the force exerted by intersectional gender norms when both dissidents and their critics engage in disruptive politics. Advancing this gendered account of agonistic struggle still further, however, requires turning to poststructuralist accounts of identity, performativity, and resignification offered by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theorists. This literature not only has critical resonances with the account of identifications and subject positions that agonistic scholars adopt but also offers at least three additional contributions to a robust theorization of intersectional gender in agonistic struggle.

First, the account of gender articulated by many of these theorists offers deeper insights into the way gender operates as part of the unquestioned background norms and conventions we cite knowingly or unknowingly during political disputes. Dissident practices and the gendered identifications that help constitute them are citational, in that they acquire meaning and become intelligible through the repetition of previously articulated identities and performances (Butler Reference Butler1999). Moreover, the identities and performances available for citation are shaped by “orders and structures of power” (Brown Reference Brown1995, 119) organized by hegemonic discourses of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nation, empire, class, caste, and ability (Hall Reference Hall, Hall and du Gay1996; Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988). Such discourses construct a “horizon of intelligibility” that delineates “what is possible, what can be said and done, what positions may legitimately be taken, [and] what actions may be engaged in” (Norval Reference Norval1996, 4). The very contingency and provisionality of those political articulations, however, means that a subject position or practice can be contested and possibly even re-formed or resignified (Butler Reference Butler1999; Smith Reference Smith1998). Agonistic standing and disturbance struggles, as I have suggested, often involve precisely these sorts of contestations and resignification struggles over the intelligibility of intersectionally gendered political positions and claims.

Second, these theorists invite attention to the way that disruptive practices, including dissent, are embodied and must be cultivated and are often embodied and cultivated in distinctly gendered ways (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; Zerilli Reference Zerilli2005). Kotef and Amir's (Reference Kotef and Amir2007) analysis of feminist dissent by the Israeli group Checkpoint Watch, for instance, highlights how gendered embodiment complexly shapes how the activists are able to disrupt violence and cruelty at the checkpoints. Older activists sometimes attempt to position the Israeli soldiers as their sons, and younger activists sometimes flirt with soldiers and commanders (Kotef and Amir Reference Kotef and Amir2007). Arguments like these draw critical attention not just to the disruptive impact of particular intersectionally gendered bodies in particular spaces but also to the ongoing activist work required to cultivate the gendered dissident subjectivities necessary for those bodies to dissent.

Third, in contrast to many mainstream feminist and queer explorations of dissident movements, scholars such as Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2005) and Schreiber (Reference Schreiber2008) highlight the importance of nonradical gender performances and identifications. Much, if not most, dissident citizenship does not involve “gender trouble,” nor is it often feminist, antiracist, anticapitalist, or progressive in any way. Dissident citizenship nonetheless entails an agonistic and performative “politics of troubling” (Chambers and Carver Reference Chambers and Carver2007), even if that troubling consolidates gender normativity, heteronormativity, nationalism, racial hierarchies, neoliberal capitalism, and so on. Often, dissidents inhabit normative positions on one front in order to trouble another, as when civil rights activists dressed and acted “respectably” to mitigate the racial “trouble” they were enacting (Sparks Reference Sparksn.d.). The frequency of such normative claims and performances suggests that even the dissent we judge most commendable, most necessary, and even heroic nonetheless participates in practices of power that demand sustained critical scrutiny.

I turn next, then, to a critical analysis of the dissident citizenship of welfare rights activists, focusing on how intersectionally gendered practices of power shaped agonistic struggle during this vibrant period of democratic activism. I begin with background on the movement and an exploration of the standing struggles these activists instigated.

CHEATS, SUFFERERS, AND CITIZENS: THE INTERSECTIONAL POLITICS OF DEMOCRATIC STANDING IN THE U.S. WELFARE RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The U.S. welfare rights movement has been nearly erased from popular accounts of the 1960s and 1970s, eclipsed by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “Poor People's Campaign,” the federal “War on Poverty,” and its more successful and long-lasting fellow travelers, the civil rights, Black Power, antiwar, feminist, and gay and lesbian movements. Few people now recognize the names of Johnnie Tillmon, the longtime national chairwoman of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), or George Wiley, the primary national architect of the movement (and one of the six or seven most important black leaders in the country at the time).Footnote ⁷ From 1966 to 1975, however, Tillmon and the other welfare recipient members of the NWRO, backed by Wiley and an array of organizers, staff, volunteers, financial contributors, and political allies, successfully organized and linked together welfare recipient groups to become a national force in antipoverty activism.Footnote ⁸ At its height, the NWRO claimed to represent 75,000 poor people from more than 40 states, from both rural and urban settings and from a wide range of ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. The mostly middle-aged welfare mothers at the heart of the movement deployed a range of disruptive practices (including marches, sit-ins, guerilla theater, and bureaucracy jamming) and initiated political quarrels about the meanings of democratic citizenship, the American dream, the definition of work, and whose children and whose futures count. Categorized by the left as an insurgency that went down in dismal and heartbreaking defeat and by its right-wing critics as an audacious revolt of the undeserving poor beaten back just in time, the movement offers a rich resource for theorizing the intersectional and agonistic politics of dissident citizenship.Footnote ⁹

The movement's initial declaration of a wrong emerged shortly after the coordinated nationwide protests that inaugurated the national phase of their movement in 1966. Welfare rights activists articulated four demands—adequate income, dignity, justice, and democratic participation—that became known as the movement's “Bill of Rights” (Wiley Papers, box 7, folder 7). This declaration problematized the poverty-producing inequities of American-style capitalism and welfare programs, the catch-22s and paternalistic rules that made dignified survival nearly impossible, and the rights violations allowed by law and exacerbated by illegal welfare department practices.

Perhaps most striking, however, is that NWRO activists also problematized their exclusion from political debates about the programs and laws that most affected the poor. One arresting example of this demand to participate occurred in September 1967, when the Senate Committee on Finance convened hearings on a welfare bill that welfare activists found appalling. The proposed bill would force single mothers on welfare with very young children to work full-time jobs (with little to no childcare support), would cap the number of children receiving AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) benefits nationally, and would exclude “illegitimate” children from benefits altogether. Wiley, as executive director of the NWRO, had been given just 10 minutes to testify at the hearing, but he brought more than 75 NWRO members with him and won permission for seven of those women to testify in his place (Senate Committee on Finance 1967, 1463).

For 40 minutes, the women analyzed the effects the new bill would have on AFDC recipients across the country. Rather than respecting the usual testimony-giving structure of such hearings, the activists insisted on asking the senators questions (and expecting them to answer), and several times suggested that they and the senators should “go off in another room” together to write a new, more adequate welfare bill (Senate Committee on Finance 1967, 1470–74). But one by one, the six senators present left the room until just one remained. When the NWRO members objected by asserting that they were citizens and voters who deserved a hearing, especially because they had “suffered so hard and begged and borrowed money and gas and drivers and whatnot to get here” (1470–71), the last senator informed them their time before the committee was up. He recessed the hearings over the women's objections.

Angered they had been cut off, the women staged an impromptu sit-in. When the chair of the committee, Senator Russell Long (D-LA), returned to the room, he furiously adjourned the hearings for the day by slamming his gavel so hard it broke. Instead of acknowledging the NWRO women as voters and citizens, he blasted them as “brood mares” (Kotz and Kotz Reference Kotz and Kotz1977, 250–51) who should be “picking up litter in front of their houses or killing rats instead of impeding the work of Congress” (NOW!, September 22, 1967).

As this episode makes clear, even in a time when the War on Poverty notion of the “maximum feasible participation of the poor” still enjoyed a currency unimaginable today, poor dissident citizens in the 1960s and 1970s confronted a deeply hostile environment. To the politicians and nonpoor members of the American public who believed that welfare was charity and not a right, welfare activists’ demands to participate were outrageous. Many found the idea of welfare recipients as full participants in joint democratic governance completely unintelligible and argued that welfare mothers who agitated for rights and more resources instead of trying to find paying jobs, husbands, and birth control were greedy troublemakers.

Views like these meant that welfare activists engaged in pitched, nearly constant battles with critics over their democratic standing. As feminist scholars have persuasively argued, in the 1960s and 1970s, hegemonic discourses about welfare recipients positioned them as drunks and drug addicts, “chiselers” and “welfare cheats” (i.e., lazy, able-bodied people out to defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned cash) and, especially in the case of women of color, as hyperfertile, immoral, “bad mothers” who produced illegitimate children they then expected taxpayers to support.Footnote ¹⁰ These discourses made welfare mothers, particularly welfare mothers of color, intelligible only as the “undeserving poor”—as “deviants” who required paternalistic, invasive, and disciplinary correction (Cohen Reference Cohen1997; Fraser and Gordon Reference Fraser and Gordon1994; Smith Reference Smith2007; Soss, Fording, and Schram Reference Soss, Fording and Schram2011). Activists’ efforts to disidentify with these negative positions and to constitute more positive identifications to support their democratic standing were thus vitally important.

Intersectional gender norms helped structure two possible modes of disidentification. First, welfare activists sometimes sought simply to identify as the “deserving poor.” When accused of being “prostitutes” and of “producing litters of illegitimate children,” activists instead attempted to set the record straight on typical AFDC family sizes (only 2.7 children in 1972) and actual “illegitimacy” rates (Wiley Papers, box 2, folder 6). When cast as bad mothers who perpetually made irresponsible choices, activists stressed that poor mothers were just as caring, devoted to their children, and self-sacrificing as middle-class mothers. As Ohio activist Marian Hall argued, “though we want to be clean, we can buy no soap. We want our children to learn, but can afford no school supplies. We love our children, but can never give them even the small things they need” (Wiley Papers, box 14, folder 9). And when welfare recipients were charged with being lazy cheats intent on draining the public coffers, they argued that they were former workers who had lost good jobs or become disabled; wives who had been widowed, divorced, or deserted; or mothers who were otherwise down on their luck (Whitaker Papers, box 3, folder 11).Footnote ¹¹

By identifying as loving, self-sacrificing mothers and vulnerable sufferers who needed help, particularly from male politicians, welfare recipients sought to inhabit feminized positions as “citizen-mothers” deserving support and protection, not disdain. These positions, legacies of post–Civil War and Depression-era welfare programs supporting “worthy widows” (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2007; Gordon Reference Gordon1994), were still intelligible in the 1960s but were fading as welfare populations diversified racially and white women's employment patterns changed. As Rebecca Wanzo (Reference Wanzo2009) has convincingly argued, moreover, the history of U.S. racism has always made women of color's public occupation of such vulnerable and suffering positions nearly impossible. Indeed, evidence from the welfare rights archive suggests that suffering mother claims were far more likely to be made by and on behalf of white women welfare recipients.Footnote ¹²

Given the difficulty of making their own suffering politically legible, most welfare activists instead identified poor children as the primary victims of inadequate welfare. For example, an NWRO funding plea featured two appealing babies in diapers, captioned “A Couple of Shiftless, Cheatin’, Good for Nuthin’ Welfare Recipients.” The text discussed how children would be the ones harmed by welfare cuts and in effect framed advocates of welfare cuts as willing to sacrifice innocent children's lives and health (Wiley Papers, box 15, folder 5). Welfare rights activists sought to reposition antiwelfare politicians as heartless and cruel men who “refuse[d] to feed babies” and refused to “go to bat for” American children (Senate Committee on Finance 1967, 1465), thus figuring their opponents as failing to adequately occupy their proper role as “masculinist protectors” (Young Reference Young2003). The ongoing struggles over these dis/identifications, in other words, depended on the legibility of intersectional gender formations.

The activists’ second mode of disidentifying with negative figurations of welfare recipients to support their democratic standing was far more ambitious: welfare activists claimed standing as full citizens—as voters, taxpayers, and workers with power and rights. These positions challenged the historical legacies of “poor laws” that demanded the poor relinquish their positions as rights-bearing citizens in exchange for economic support (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2007). Although not explicitly gendered on their face, these identifications nonetheless were constituted by intersectional gender norms that made it difficult for poor welfare mothers to occupy them convincingly.Footnote ¹³

Welfare recipients sometimes carried picket signs at rallies proclaiming “I am a registered voter” (Wiley Papers, box 14, folder 9). But much more frequently, they asserted standing claims based on their positions as American citizens. In their “bill of rights” document, for instance, NWRO activists made this claim forcefully: “We are not willing to exchange our rights as American citizens … In order to obtain the physical necessities for our families (Wiley Papers, box 7, folder 7; emphasis in original). Activists also criticized the response to their standing claims as undemocratic and unbefitting treatment of full American citizens. At one hearing, for instance, Dorothy DiMascio compared the senators’ treatment of the welfare mothers to the experiences of people living under “dictatorships” (Senate Committee on Finance 1967, 1468).

Activists also claimed democratic standing by contesting the opposition their critics constructed between welfare recipients and the “taxpayers” who supported them. As activist Diane Wilkins argued, “I have worked and paid taxes since I was 14 years old…. Don't talk about ‘charity’ to me” (Whitaker Papers, box 3, folder 11). Activists further asserted that the “taxpayers” who begrudged welfare recipients their small grants received far more in subsidies from the government than welfare recipients could even imagine. As Tillmon argued, “Farmers get welfare. Middle-class homeowners get welfare. Airlines get welfare. Oil millionaires get welfare. Almost everyone in this country gets some kind of government handout. We get the crumbs!” (NOW!, June 28, 1968). NWRO activists thus foreshadowed important contemporary scholarship on how tax breaks and other indirect expenditures produce a “hidden welfare state” for the nonpoor that is far less stigmatized (Abramovitz Reference Abramovitz2001; Gordon Reference Gordon1994; Howard Reference Howard1997).

Perhaps the most controversial political identifications that NWRO activists forwarded, however, involved their assertions that they were workers who deserved respect and a place at the democratic table. In the face of discourses, laws, and programs that constructed welfare recipients as idle, lazy “takers” who should be forced to work in exchange for support, welfare activists insisted that they already had difficult and important jobs as mothers. As NWRO activists argued, “the belief that welfare mothers can work [full time outside the home] assumes that they are not working now…. Scrubbing floors, preparing meals, changing bed linens, sewing, caring for the sick, budgeting, and helping to educate and discipline children—all this is very hard work, as every woman knows” (Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization 1972, 77). “Why, then,” these activists asked, “do welfare mothers get paid less for their job than anyone else? If a child is brought up in a public institution in Wisconsin, his guardian gets $9,600 a year. … But if the child's own mother brings him up in his own home, she gets only $660 a year” (77).

Welfare activists’ identifications as hard working mothers also supported their specific criticisms of mandatory work programs, or what they called “workfare,” “illfare,” and, most explosively, a return to “slavery” (The Welfare Fighter, October 1971). Activists argued that programs that forced recipients to work for less than the minimum wage or for no wage at all reinstated the “involuntary servitude” of chattel slavery rather than treating poor Americans as full citizens and human beings with rights. NWRO activists particularly criticized programs that forced mothers with small children to work outside the home, even in areas where unemployment was triple the national rate.

The political argument that mothering work and care work are valuable and deserve generous public support has been extremely hard to forward in the United States since World War II, even for white or otherwise privileged women (Fineman Reference Fineman1995; Mink Reference Mink1998; Tronto Reference Tronto2013). For poor women to assert democratic standing as workers while simultaneously advocating for increased government support to become stay-at-home mothers also ignored, as historian Marisa Chappell (Reference Chappell2010) has argued, the collapse of the family wage system that had enabled many white women to stay home with their children. The resulting pushback against dissident claims by welfare mothers of color for more money and the right to be full-time mothers, in turn, frequently involved disputing their standing to participate in politics at all. One “middle-class wife,” for instance, wrote to Congress to blast the fact that NWRO activists were lobbying Congress instead of going to work like her. Her solution was to sterilize “the lazy, shiftless men and women” on welfare because she was “fed up with having to work, taking my child to a baby-sitter's so some other mother can sit home and not do a blankety blank thing!” (House Committee on Ways and Means 1969, 1042).

In a political context in which the mothering of women of color was so profoundly devalued, the NWRO activists’ claims of political standing based on mothering work were clearly audacious, unsettling, and provocative.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, as critical feminist scholars have also argued, by making claims through such a conventionally gendered position, the NWRO activists simultaneously participated in solidifying well-established norms that “pitted wage earning against motherhood” and continued to codify “women's secondary status as economic citizens” (Mink Reference Mink1994, 171). In other words, their identifications as mothers provided both agentic, dissident possibilities and forms of subjection to power.

Welfare activists, in sum, sought to disidentify with their assigned place as necessarily bad citizens, bad workers, and bad mothers who had no business participating in democratic politics and instead declared wrongs and claimed positions as full citizens, hard workers, and good mothers with the right to take part in public debates about welfare. The ongoing agonistic struggles with their critics over these wrongs and their democratic standing clearly cited gendered, racialized, and other intersectional norms and practices in ways that shaped not just the activists’ but also their critics’ democratic participation (see also Mackin Reference Mackin2013, chap. 4). An intersectional analysis of agonistic struggles thus provides critical insights into whether and how dissident citizens can appear as speaking subjects in the democratic public sphere.

MILITANT MAMAS AND THE “BROOD MARE STAMPEDE”: AGONISTIC DISTURBANCE STRUGGLES IN THE U.S. WELFARE RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Intersectional gender formations were equally central in welfare activists’ efforts to performatively disrupt the status quo. In the face of the backlash that accompanied their declarations of the wrong and their claims of democratic standing, NWRO activists cultivated subject positions that sustained and supported acts of disruptive dissident citizenship, or what they often called “hell-raising.” Welfare rights hell-raising included sit-ins, vigils, marches, pickets, disruptive heckling, public shaming of welfare officials, and bureaucratic jamming that deliberately flooded welfare centers with people and paperwork. Infuriated by the public scapegoating of poor people, NWRO activists drew on intersectionally gendered identifications as protective and militant mothers to encourage welfare recipients to refuse their “proper” place as compliant, fearful, despised objects of the welfare system and to instead identify as courageous, uncompromising, powerful welfare activists. Many of these women adopted the movement's exemplary subject position of “mad, militant welfare mother” with pride and delight.

Appreciating the full significance of this militant, angry subject position requires understanding just how much welfare activists had to fear. Social workers, welfare administrators, politicians, and the police controlled welfare mothers’ livelihoods, their access to many political and legal institutions, and the means of force, and they did not hesitate to use these powers to encourage fear and undermine dissent. NWRO activists, for instance, regularly faced financial and other forms of coercion that could be directed against economically vulnerable welfare recipients. Tillmon's check was stopped by the welfare department in California when she began organizing other recipients (Kotz and Kotz Reference Kotz and Kotz1977, 221), and NWRO activists across the country faced similar forms of economic harassment.

Welfare administrators also knew that activists feared arrest and jail because most of them were single parents with sole responsibility for their children. Jan Linfield, a Chicago welfare organizer, described a sit-in during which welfare officials “threatened the mothers with having their children taken away from them. To these mothers, with an aggregate of 44 children, such a threat was terrifying.” During the protest, moreover, welfare officials “sent investigators to the homes of all the mothers in the hope of being able to accuse them of neglect for having left their children alone” (Piven and Cloward Reference Piven and Cloward1993, 298–300).

Activists also regularly confronted the possibility of police brutality. Welfare rights protestors in Roxbury, Massachusetts were beaten by police when they refused to end a sit-in, an event that led to the 1967 Roxbury riot (Whitaker Papers, box 3, folder 3). Welfare mothers in Madison, Wisconsin, ended up facing off with police and National Guard troops armed with guns during a protest in 1967 (The Welfare Fighter, April 1970). Protesters in Washington, D.C., found the doors locked and snipers on the roof when they attempted to meet with the secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1967 (Kotz and Kotz Reference Kotz and Kotz1977, 250). And in New York City in 1969, mounted police broke up a march of welfare activists and their allies by pushing crowds onto sidewalks and into buildings. Several people were trampled by horses, and others were beaten while being arrested (Wiley Papers, box 24, folder 10).

To combat the paralysis such fears could generate, activists sought ways to disidentify with the hopeless and fearful subject positions that welfare programs and administrators promoted. The most important alternative identifications drew from the recipients’ experiences as mothers. Welfare activists often talked about defending their families, “woman power,” and the “mother power” of welfare recipients acting together to change the system. In a speech made during the Poor People's Campaign, for instance, Tillmon told the crowd, “We have built our own nationwide organization. We are black and white, Mexican, Puerto Rican and Indian. We are together and we have our own special kind of power. That power is MOTHER POWER. … We will fight for the welfare of our children” (NOW!, June 28, 1968). Recruitment campaigns also cited recipients’ self-understandings as protective, loving mothers to encourage activism. One flyer for a school clothing action said, “Mother, Is your child going to be warm this year???? What [are] you as a mother doing about it? Something, or nothing?… Come fight!” (George A. Wiley Papers, box 24, folder 10). By defining activist dissent as part of a mother's duties to her children, in other words, welfare activists used familiar, legible identifications to encourage disruptive action.

The same discourse helped Tillmon reframe Senator Long's scornful slur against welfare mothers into a new activist identification: “Last Fall, Senator Long called us brood mares. At welfare departments across the country, we will show Senator Long a brood mare stampede!” (NOW!, June 28, 1968). The idea of a “stampede” suggested an irresistible, furious surge of activism that would overwhelm any resistance to dissidents’ demands for justice, dignity, and participation. In reconstructing “brood mare” as an activist identification, then, welfare activists not only sought to resignify a racist and sexist stereotype but also further laid claim to anger and militancy as vital approaches to welfare activism.

NWRO activists’ performances of anger and militancy, however, and their failure to adhere to expected norms of political civility during their political protests more generally, meant they were constantly defending their dissent from critics. Senator Long was not alone in objecting to the dissident tactics welfare activists had used to demand his attention. But NWRO activists argued that if Congress and their other critics continued to be unresponsive to dissent, they would invite more violent forms of unrest. As Etta Horn admonished the senators, “The only time you listen to us is when the cities are burning and the people are dying. The time to listen is now” (Senate Committee on Finance 1967, 1469).

To many of their critics, however, welfare mothers’ militant, disruptive activism justified their exclusion from democratic debates. To be sure, given the local autonomy of welfare rights groups, not all welfare activism was nonviolent. Some protests involved vandalism at welfare offices, harassment of social workers, and shoving and pushing (Wiley Papers, box 14, folder 6). Yet even activists who remained nonviolent were still cast as dangerous and violence-spawning because their militancy and incivility was not legible as the properly sedate democratic participation expected of full citizens. NWRO activists regularly contested this perspective, but even their allies asserted this view. During a House committee hearing on welfare, for example, Beulah Sanders argued, “I think it is about time that you all realize either you include us in decisionmaking that is going to govern our lives, or I am going to tell you right now, we are going to disrupt this State, this country, this capital and everything that goes on” (House Committee on Ways and Means 1969, 1034). Yet Congressman James A. Burke (D-MA), a liberal supporter of welfare activists, heard her threats of disruption as a threat of violence:

Burke's charge that welfare activists “hurt their own cause” with anger and threats was one the NWRO activists confronted repeatedly.

The illegibility of angry, militant welfare mothers as full citizens with standing was also evident in the Washington, D.C., welfare director's advice regarding what she considered a more appropriate approach for welfare activists. As the Washington Post reported in 1968, Director Winifred Thompson found “the ‘bombastic’ tactics of welfare rights militants” to be “no longer effective.” Instead, she advised them to “go to the Hill and ‘tell their own stories in a calm but very factual way’… They should relate how much money they get, how their children live and the indignities they suffer, and the effect on the youngsters’ behavior and attitudes.” The parents of “retarded children” had used this tactic successfully, she argued. “Everybody is sympathetic to children, and most people are sympathetic to mothers who point out in a very passionate but objective way what happens to their children.”Footnote ¹⁵

Beyond the fact that welfare activists had tried for years to tell Congress about the effects of inadequate welfare on children, Thompson's suggestions reflect the view that to be heard, welfare activists had to engage in democratic politics as suffering victims and charity cases rather than as angry activists and competent democratic citizens. Militant poor mothers of color who strongly criticized racist and sexist welfare programs and the suffering produced by capitalism, in other words, were intelligible not as equal citizens or as equal quarrelling partners, but only as threats—as democratically disloyal, ungovernable troublemakers.