The Birth of Truth Telling
-- Mission District, San Francisco
While writing my final paper, I came across this quote:
“Women’s bodies are like the earth because they can create life, and not to let anyone mess with them. Black women’s bodies are often shapeshifting where they strategically choose from a variety of gender, race, and class displays depending on the situation. ”
The quote is from an ethnography by Aimee Meredith Cox, called Shapeshifters. In Shapeshifters, Aimee Meredith Cox (2015) conducted an ethnographic study at a homeless shelter in Detroit, Michigan for eight years. She analyzed how Black women pushed up against social hierarchies that are put into place to marginalize them. Although her book covers a range of stories using creative outlets these young women use to exercise agency, for the purposes of this post, I will be looking at the construction of Black girls as social problems. Interestingly, she uses the idea of choreography to describe how the women navigate their bodies within systems of oppression by shapeshifting. When thinking of choreography, the women are using the physicality of their bodies to embody meaning making, physical storytelling, and their space within social contexts that cause them to actual shapeshift depending on their space, themself, and their situation.
Specifically, Weitz (1994) explains that women who do not fit the normative mold of women “represent subjectivities outside of marriage- prostitutes, single mothers, mothers involved with multiple partners, and particularly black single mothers” (p, 47 in Fine, 1992). When specifically looking with young mothers of color, our society often gives adolescent woman a lot of attention in the context of institutions such as our welfare and social service systems. Specifically, our society fears single mother pregnancies, especially teenage pregnancies with the fear of young women of color depending on welfare and social systems.
Since society has portrayed the pregnant teenage body as ‘dangerous,’ public policies are focused on controlling, regulating, shaping, and (re)producing bodies (Pillow, 2003). Over the last few decades, society has stigmatized and marginalized teenage pregnancy, especially teenage mothers of color. Young mothers of color are going against the normative trajectory that neoliberal policies uphold – education, career, marriage, then childbirth (Wilson & Huntington, 2005). Interestingly enough, the rates of teenage pregnancy are declining, yet the knowledge streamed into society continues to problematize young mothers. The reason for this is due to policy makers being seduced by quantitative measures. Numbers from quantitative studies and a deficit view of teenage mothers drive policies due to beliefs that young mothers are in social isolation and dependent on welfare (Wilson & Huntington, 2005). Therefore, social isolation and welfare dependency has become the “truth” of teenage pregnancy within the greater society.
Pillow (1997) expands on Foucault’s concepts of “truth” and genealogy of works to focus on how feminist genealogy focuses on the structures that embody policies that are raced, gendered, and sexed to re-interpret truth. Pillow (2003) used this framework to understand educational policies of teenage mothers in schools. Pillow (2004) examined several discourses and how the teenage mother is treated differently depending on her social class and race. The author uses the theoretical approach of feminist genealogy, which “emphasized that the formation of policies are about regulating, reproducing, and surveilling certain bodies” (p. 9). She conducted interviews with school staff and conducted document analysis on policies. One discourse is regarding “contamination,” in that pregnant teens may “contaminate” other students at school by being a bad example. Another discourse is around “education responsibility,” in that a teen mother needs to attain an education as to not need welfare and burden taxpayers.
Specifically in the 1990s there were changes in the welfare system, which made life as a teen mother more difficult. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Welfare Reform) made the lives of those living in the margins of society, often young women of color, very trying. Young mothers of color trying to earn money, raise their children, and finish school were up against a difficult battle. Often times insitutitions meant to support these young women understood how they were marginalized, but not how racism played into the equation (Cox, 2015) and how it intersected with sexism, classism, etc. Basically, the welfare reform made staying at home with young babies only for those who could afford to, and otherwise mothers needed to be in the workforce, deeming mothering and the unpaid labor attached to it as obsolete. Ramifications of these policies led to increased poverty and lower income for single mothers. Important to note, there was an increase in women needing to stay in homeless shelters (Ehrenreich, 2003). American culture has used racial stereotypes to scapegoat young mothers of color, when in fact there are more white than African American pregnant teenagers and that there are more “unwed mothers” in their 30s than there are teenagers (Luker, 1996).
The pregnant teen girl as policy subject is known and situated as an ‘Other’ - she is the problem, different and separate from ‘our’ lives. However, questioning the construction of teen pregnancy as a problem, but about continued gender and racialized inequities evident in US society is important. The social construction of the ‘problem’ of teen pregnancy in the US is really about who is getting pregnant, when, and how (e.g. un-wed mothers and a pathology of pregnancy and mother- ing by race) than to actual teen birth-rate increases or decreases. What do you think you know to be truth, but if you dig deeper as what you think is common sense thinking, what is the real truth?