Women on Welfare: Conversational Sites of Acquiescence and Dissent

Criticism of the invisibility of women in many studies of political resistance has engendered a broadening of traditional conceptions to include not only overt protest, but also everyday and hidden forms of dissent. Different theories of resistance, however, make different claims about the nature of personhood, power and discourse. In this paper, I explore resistance and its opposite, accommodation, within a poststructuralist problematic. I draw on a 17-month study with two welfare rights groups, during which I tape-recorded, transcribed and then analyzed everyday conversation for expressions of complicity and contestation. Foucault's concept of “reverse” discourse proved particularly useful in analyzing talk that deploys dominant ideologies for subversive purposes. I argue that, while not undermining the value of structuralist analyses of discourse, a poststructuralist approach provides useful insights into the relationship between acquiescence and dissent, as well as into the implications of this relationship for conceptualizations of human agency and intentionality.