“Dependency” Demystified: Inscriptions of Power in a Keyword of the Welfare State

Dependency is the single most crucial term in the current U.S. debate about reform. Welfare in the United States means someone who relies on one of the stigmatized programs of public assistance, as distinguished from honorable programs such as old age insurance, which are not called welfare. The paradigmatic dependent is the poor solo mother who collects benefits from the stingy and politically unpopular program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Welfare reform today means reducing by getting claimants off the rolls. Few concepts in U.S. social policy discussions do as much ideological work as dependency. The term leaks a profusion of stigmatizing connotations—racial, sexual, misogynist, and more. It alludes implicitly to a normative state of independence , which will itself not withstand critical scrutiny. Naming the problems of poor solo mothers and their children dependency, moreover, tends to make them appear to be individual rather than social problems, as much moral or psychological as economic. The word carries strong emotive and visual associations and a powerful pejorative charge. The most common image is a welfare mother, typically figured as a young unmarried black woman of uncontrolled sexuality and fertility. This stereotype haunts even the most neutral-sounding talk about dependency in discussions of reform.