Continuing in my anthropological readings, I took on Hancock’s The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. This seemed like a logical follow up to Marcus’s Where have all the homeless gone. This book-length treatment of the public image of welfare recipients and especially the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act (PRWA) of 1996 would have been better rendered as a long article, perhaps 20 to 40 pages. At 250+ pages, it’s full of repetitions. However, it could also be a fine class syllabus on the topic, as it continually reinforces past learnings as it moves through its theses.

Hancock presents the politics of disgust as characterized by four features: perversion of democratic attention; monological not intersubjective communications; representative thinking; and finally a lack of solidarity between citizens marked and unmarked as the target of the PRWA legislation. The first of these features means not providing attention to all citizens claims, thus presented a highly circumscribed view of the issue at hand. The second feature implies that one has one voice in front of a large microphone instead of many voices. Representative thinking is when people react to stereotypes or the representative image of a person or issue, instead of the actual person or issue. In other words, the politics of disgust displays how emotions regulate power relationships. This brings to mind, for me, the frame concept I discussed in my posting on Lakoff’s book. Stereotypes are frames we have in our head; and we’re more likely to throw away facts that discredit those frames rather than disposing of the frame.

A large portion of her analysis is textually-based, looking at public, media, and Congressional documents and how they frame, or de-frame, welfare recipients. This analysis shines a light on the public identity of welfare recipients, an identity that “serves as an unconscious filter through which Americans receive the policy options presented in pubic discourse about welfare reform” (Hancock 2004: 115). She notes how “policy options were discussed, selected, and implemented with no effective contributions from those affected most” (Hancock 2004: 115). More insidiously, this public identity serves to delegitimize welfare recipients' claims and lived experiences. She writes that “democratic deliberation falters as public identities long debunked by empirical research persist in the memories of elites and citizens” (Hancock 2004: 150). While welfare recipients have agency, the ability to act themselves in the public sphere, this agency can be severely circumscribed by the construction of the public they inhabit.

In an epilogue, she looks at the renewal process of the PRWA Act under the second Bush administration. With the President turning towards faith-based, hetero-normative values, he is seeking to impose ideology rather than policy. The administration posits marriage as a panacea to income and social inequities, without any regard to how this devalues female voices and potentially forces woman back into abusive relationships that some of these woman fled from. Welfare was their safety area and with it being removed, the return to the nest, as it were, is not a medicine that’s palatable to them.