A chapter by Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Vivyan Adair was recently published in Feminist Perspectives on Young Mothers, and Young Mothering from Demeter Press. According to its editors, the book is “about being young, being a mother, and grappling with what it means to inhabit these two complex social positions and identities at the same time.”
Adair’s chapter, “Single Teen Mothers on Welfare Share ‘The Missing Story of Ourselves,’” begins with the words of a 22-year-old welfare recipient and single mother of three, who with only a 10th-grade education, expertly reads and articulates a complex theory of power, bodily inscription, and socialization that arose directly from the material conditions of her own life.
“She sees what many far more so-called educated scholars and citizens fail to recognize: that the bodies of poor women and their children in the U.S. have been produced and positioned as texts that facilitate the mandates of an increasingly didactic, profoundly brutal, and mean-spirited regime,” Adair says.
