Welfare

Welfare Queen - Bought forward by Ronald Reagan - One of the goals of welfare is to help people leave abusive relationships

Criminalizing Poverty - Welfare policies increasingly mandate the intensification of surveillance and the criminalization of welfare recipients.

Welfare as fraud
“Welfare fraud has become welfare as fraud. Thus poverty, welfare and cr

Criminalization of Welfare:
-Mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients
-Anonymous snitch lines for reporting suspected welfare abuse
- “Zero tolerance” for fraud in the form of permanent ineligibility
-Biometric fingerprinting.

-Welfare is one of the few ways that the state provides some financial support for the work traditionally done by women
- Without welfare, mothers who work inside the home are deprived of equal citizenship, for they alone are not paid for their labor
- Often poor women have been left out of feminist movement

-Equality movements concerned solely with independence for women through paid employment are problematic
-the point of welfare is to supper mothers finically for caregiving- but this has gradually been eroded

Deserving and undeserving poor
-Difference was made between the deserving and the undeserving poor
-Basis for classification changes, but the imperative to discover who is worth of aid persist.

-Michael Katz; a study made to classify the “impotent” from the “able” bodied poor. These attempts at classification have endured as those seeking aid from the state are divided by age, gender, race, mental ability, (dis)ability and parental status in order to evaluate the legitimacy of their claim.

Welfare and the Canadian Context
-Harris adopts ideological, pseudo-scientific, criminalizing measures despite US evidence.

Ontario Works Act - Reforms mandated by Ontario Works: o Workfare o Automatic withdrawal of benefits for welfare non-compliance and welfare fraud (Kimberly rogers) o Life time ban on benefits

Waging a Life (Documentary) - Shame in of financial status

Feminist Comics and Tangles - Some of today’s most riveting feminist cultural production happens in comics. - Stories to which women’s graphic narrative is dedicated are often traumatic - Feminist comics offer a way of visualizing trauma without making it pornographic, or claiming that trauma is universal or all the same.

- Authors do not project an identity defined by trauma. - Tangle shows the complexity of a mother-daughter relationship, lesbian identity, memory, and loss and death and dying. - Tangles main character Sarah is a complex human being whose identity is not all reduced to her experience of the trauma of her mother getting Alzheimer’s, but also, this experience is shown to shape her life and world. - Shows the everyday of caregiving.

Picturing Feminism - Graphic novels we read for class is not only about events, but also, explicitly bout how we frame them. - Author revisits their past and literally repictures them - Wanted to teach feminist comics because they offer an alternative to the usual images we get of women

Women’s Bodies in Feminist Comics - See women’s bodies leaking, decaying and dying iin ways that are not photogenic - Feminist comics takes up the hard realities of women’s lives: offering us alternative pictures of racism, poverty, sexual violence, dying as well as the everyday joys of community, friends, family, and connections.

Feminist comics and Trauma
-Feminist theorist Cathy Caruth asserts that to “be traumatized is to precise to be possessed by an image or event”
- Quilt artist say that they spend their lives interpreting images that are stamped in their minds during childhood.
- Graphic narratives like Tangles struggles with the risk of representation
-Gives us alternate ways of thinking about unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility that have tended to characterize trauma theory
- That is, what might it look to picture trauma without rendering it as a commodity or pornographying it.
- All the comics we study are feminist in that they investigate concerns typically relegated to the silence and invisibility of private, particularly centered on issues of sexuality, sexism etc..
- Images in comics appear in fragments, just as they do in actual recollection; this fragmentation, is particularly prominent feature of traumatic memory.

Comics, Time and Space - Comics shape stories into a series of framed moments - Comic represent time as space - What is special about comics from a feminist perspective is that unlike film they allow the reader to control their consumption of a particular text.

Comics VS Film - Comics cede the pace of consumption to the reader and beg rereading through its spatial form. - It allows us to think about reading as a feminist process, one that is not only goal-oriented in terms of “finding out what happens”. - Comics release the reader from experiencing a work (like a film) in a controlled time frame. - This can be a crucial, even ethical difference, especially in presenting traumatic narratives that may include disturbing images. - Comics avoid the manipulation often associated with film- in which the camera lingers on an outrage for too long or is wash over it too casually- on the other hand- by allowing a reader to be control of when she looks at what and how long she spends on each frame. - One of the important effects of time on comics is slowed-down reading and looking.

One! Hundred! Demons!
-Barry emphasizes the ordinary, reveling in small talismans of childhood like security blankets and old photographs
- Also writes about her own radicalized identity and the complication of passing for white. (she is a Filipina American, passes as white)

Feminist Cartoonists - Feminist comic artist commit to the confessional style of treating one’s childhood as a serious object of study. - The small details of a life, and the memories that one has of them, and deserving of our writing about them. - She focuses on the practice of art as an experience, rather than as a finished product. - How do we experience pleasure in creation, rather than only judgment? - How turning off our inner critics can yield the experience of deep play in ways that make life meaningful beyond only producing art as a commodity. - Everyday art should be implemented to further enhance out quality of life

-Because she works so often in the form comics, still associated with the juvenile, Barry must contend with a devaluation of her work as not simply about children but for children
- But it’s an investigation of the ways that traumatic events in our childhood “haunts” us and stays with us and informs our current day lives.

-In one hundred demons, she does not display trauma so much as work in the edges of events, unsettling readers by leaving us to image the incidents.

- Her work intervened in comics- inline comics in newspaper or how we imagine the genres of comics are. Her work is more serious and sad.

-BELL HOOKS SAYS THAT WE NEED A FEMINIST THEORY THAT HELPS US MAKE THE MATERIAL QUALITY OF OUT LIVE BETTER.
- Barry is asking to go and pick up pens and write about and illustrate the small moments of our lives, in parts that help us lift off memories weighting us down.
- Helps our memories not to live only at the back of our mind, half-suppressed and half-remembered.
- Bringing them into light of day in ways that helps us to see that as children, we were never at fault.
- She talks about the ordinariness of trauma.

Extra assignment is making a personal comic*** on slide
Don’t have to hand it in just need to tell her you did it

Persepolis (video) - In Barry’s work the body, and (traumatic) sex-wrongly and too often understood as being contained to the realm of the private (household) are the focus - For Satrapi, makes links between individual trauma and collective trauma - And yet, weather trauma happens in the private sphere of the home or the public sphere of the state should not affect how we understand these graphic narratives as political- both are in different ways. - Persepolis is about the ethical visual and verbal of “not forgetting”. It contest dominant images and narratives of history. - Satrapi has managed has intervened as a feminist to talk about veiling practices, including the ban in France and Quebec. - While she opposes the obligatory veiling for Iranian women who do not want it, she also expresses how forcing women to remove it is bad. - This video explores the boundaries of identity, destabilizing tropes of east and west, particularly as they bear on female experience- rather than enforcing them