Interrogating the plan’s discourse and reps opens up new understandings in less biased, gendered ways.

Postmodern policy analysis offers the prospect of interrogating how public policy discourse helps construct identity and difference. Such analysis is part of what William Connolly (1991) sees as the democratizing potential of 'critical histories of the present,' or what Michel Foucault (1991) called 'genealogy' or 'eventualization.' Analyses such as these highlight what discursive practices have made it possible for things to happen and do so in such a way as to denaturalize those discursive processes, thereby leaving them open to contestation. For Connolly, agonal democracy thrives on genealogy. Rather than accept the 'official story,' or the state's version of how policy relates to problems, analysts examine public policy for how it is implicated in the reality it ostensibly takes as given. Interrogating welfare policy for its constitutive role 266 in the marginalization of single women with children provides a basis for rethinking social policy and the biases it helps reinforce. Without such an examination, welfare policy can continue be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Without an interrogation of the embedded distinctions of welfare discourse and how they help reproduce prevailing structures in society, welfare policy will continue to be part of the discursive practices serving to blame female-headed families for their problems. This insight points toward the necessity of a discursive politics as a first step that paves the way to challenging existing welfare policy, not just as benefits but as a cultural formation. Such interrogations can open up possibilities for alternative understandings of self-sufficiency/dependency, deserving/underserving, family/promiscuity and other dichotomies in less gendered and less destructive ways. This not to say that change will flow easily once welfare politics comes to be a cultural politics centered on what welfare signifies about families. Given its active involvement in promoting two-parent families, the welfare state has vested interests in perpetuating its own cultural construction. To recognize the legitimacy of affirming and supporting, rather than marginalizing and blaming, alternative family arrangements would necessitate seriously entertaining alternative policies. Therefore, welfare policy discourse continues to construct poverty as a problem of family structure and seeks to find its solution in the two-parent family. In fact, discursive moves on behalf of the twoparent family intensify especially as that ideal becomes harder to sustain. Denial of the economic and social forces at work during the current postindustrial transition confine policy space to the familiar discursive structure. Insisting the family breakdown is a cause rather than a symptom of growing poverty allows social policy to continue to legitimate itself even as it becomes less and less able to address the social problems it is ostensibly designed to attack. To be sure, blaming female-headed families for growing poverty provides a convenient and culturally ascendent way to deflect attention away from the deleterious effects of postindustrialism on poorer segments of society (see for instance Murray, 1993). The scapegoating of family structure for problems embedded in the sexist, racist and economic exclusionary practices of the 'contemporary postindustrial society of economic decline' propels popular resistance to public assistance and aggressively silence attempts to articulate a family policy which could ensure that all families have the resources to be able to avoid poverty. Moving from a 'culture of poverty' argument which blames the poor for their problems, policy discourse stresses what could be called a 'culture of single motherhood' (Thomas, 1992) to further promote a punitive approach to poor women with children. The dwindling economic opportunities associated with the current economic transition can thus be ignored. In the current climate, the prospects for affirming support for all families is not good. Yet, challenging the embedded biases welfare policy discourse therefore remains an important part of attempts of achieving a more equitable, pluralistic and democratic welfare state.