In her book, Anna Marie Smith meticulously analyzes the racial and gendered dimensions of the U.S. welfare state and the ways in which it punishes the unmarried and imposes hetero-normative standards on all types of poor families. Smith's aim is to “expand the disciplinary limits of feminist political theory” (p. 6) by drawing on case law, public policy, and social theory. She exposes highly undemocratic practices directed at poor women and men, as well as what amounts to a eugenic project seeking to limit poor people's reproduction. Significantly, individuals of color are targeted by the state for eugenic control and moral policing. In particular, Smith points out how welfare reform and the implementation of “paternafare”—a program that forces poor women to identify biological fathers so that the state can pursue these “deadbeat dads”—do not help the one group who even conservatives agree are “innocent”—children. Very rarely are any party's circumstances elevated by this system, and most often “payers” are forced into deeper poverty. Furthermore, the state's hetero-normative stance marginalizes lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals (LGBTs) in a legal system in which their rights are already deeply compromised.

Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation is divided into three major parts. In the first, Smith examines theoretical approaches for investigating poor laws and the contemporary welfare state, criticizing the theories of Foucaultians like Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Although her critical comments are perceptive, it is unclear why she largely dismisses these authors, whose ideas are so close to her own. In the second, and largest part, of the book, Smith develops a legal analysis of the change from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to both Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the passage of the Personal Responsibility Act (PRA) in 1996. This section centers on a discussion of welfare and paternafare as ideal-typical schemes. She also develops a more radical alternative, a caregivers' initiative that, unlike the other models, does not stigmatize the poor or punish people for their gender or race. Nor is it coercive or divisive: Families of all types would be free to form and seek the backing of the state on their own terms. This discussion successfully demonstrates the degree to which most existing programs are undemocratic, sexist, and racist (not to mention class biased). In the book's third section, Smith elucidates a radical feminist vision of how families and family law should be changed (or ended); among other measures, she advocates having only one legal guardian per child (something others may find problematic). Her version of the welfare system would reward caregiving and destigmatize poverty. Essentially, this vision would transform not just how the very poor are treated but American society as a whole.

The second section is the heart of the book and analyzes the transition from AFDC to TANF and the PRA. In this account, Smith outlines the absolutely outrageous and arbitrary moral policing of poor women under AFDC. What is most interesting is that given the pre-1996 Supreme Court rulings striking down these sorts of invasions of privacy, the PRA did not attempt to broaden its scope—ensuring that all eligible children receive welfare—but has instead facilitated and systematized these invasions, thereby making welfare expulsions easier. According to the author, AFDC was relatively neutral toward different groups of poor people, and under it unfair expulsions were not routine. Today, stricter enforcement of compliance with welfare rules has led to increasing numbers of expulsions (for which states can gain bonuses). This effectively punishes women and children, generating neither “moral uplift” nor poverty reduction. Thus, poor children are placed in an increasingly precarious position, and often this situation is used against the mothers, who are then encouraged to give up children for adoption. Others are accused of abuse or neglect, charges that Smith shows are often assumed rather than proved. Throughout the text, she highlights how racism has informed welfare practices at every step—from excluding minorities through the 1960s, to including them and yet punishing them for lower marriage rates and allegedly higher reproductive rates, to putting pressure on minority men and women to comply with a child-support system without understanding the roots of their poverty in the first place.

This book also emphasizes the control of poor men and other ex-partners as “payers” in custody agreements that are designed to hold biological fathers responsible for their children but, interestingly enough, also to subsidize the welfare state. This section in particular is a significant contribution to the literature on welfare, as it focuses on the devastating effects of this program on men and not just women. The state goes to great lengths to track down deadbeat dads and make them pay even though these men are often already very poor. The alleged goal of actually lifting the mother and child out of poverty is not met, but these policies do lead to close to two decades of a parole-like control of the “payer.” Smith's remarks on this coercive situation are apt. Because women are required, except in the case of domestic abuse, to name a payer or be expelled from the welfare program, these rules make the former partners inform on each other, practically guaranteeing a contentious relationship. The power dynamics of state control, the forced unity of parents and yet the structural division built into this situation, and the child caught in the middle result in a situation that never leads to a more unified family or a better future for children—and is likely to traumatize all parties involved and create significant obstacles in an already difficult situation.

Smith also claims that while political rhetoric focuses a great deal on the moral transformation of the poor through family caps, abstinence programs, and marriage workshops, because of limited funding and ineffective programs the state's efforts are half-hearted and do not achieve any of its purported goals. She thus concludes that ultimately, the state is not really serious about any therapeutic transformation but merely wants to police the poor and to save money.

I do not agree that the state simply goes through the motions of “moral reformation.” As Smith herself contends, relationships of caregiving and childbearing cannot be reduced to material concerns, and as long as the state continues to commodify these relationships, it will never succeed in controlling the poor. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the state is indifferent to sexual practices or reproduction as it certainly seeks to control women in a multitude of ways, however ineffectively and cheaply it does so. If the state was truly indifferent it would not, for example, punish the unmarried for having illegitimate children, outlaw discussions of abortion in public clinics, attempt to dismantle Roe v. Wade, teach abstinence in schools, or back pharmacists who refuse to dispense birth control.

The empirical research in this book is exceptional. But I do have reservations about the theoretical interpretations offered in the first section. For instance, Smith focuses on the confession in Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality (1978) as a therapeutic mechanism and argues that this is not relevant in understanding today's family caps, abstinence programs, and marriage workshops. In contrast, I have always viewed his discussion of the confession as centered on an asymmetry between speaking subject and listener that produces knowledge-as-power. I thus do not think this idea is irrelevant or dated simply because these programs are not therapeutic. Further, while she is sympathetic to Foucault's project, Smith mostly collapses his concepts of disciplinary power and bio-power, which leads to a distinctive reading of bio-power. Perhaps for this reason, she rejects the ideas of Hardt and Negri and (separately) Agamben. This is surprising because her ideas seem to be fairly well aligned with theirs. For example, many of Hardt and Negri's arguments in Empire (2000) are compatible with her radical feminist conclusion; they call for recognition of productive and reproductive work as having equal value, the end of the public-private divide, and a living wage (rather than a family wage, which they recognize as paternalistic and hetero-normative).

Smith also dismisses Agamben's work, although the power dynamics she explicates so well are precisely what Agamben wants to warn us about. For instance, she contends that Agamben's “bare life” is literally outside the polis and therefore, he does not account for those inclusively excluded in the polis itself. In fact, I would argue, the opposite is true: The point of Agamben's work is to elucidate how bare life is inclusively excluded, and this in turn is exactly illustrated by welfare recipients who have been forced to trade citizenship rights for aid and surveillance.

It is curious that Smith devotes the attention she does in Part I to theorists such as Agamben, Hardt, and Negri if they are as bereft of useful insights as she seems to believe. The rest of the book is virtually free of references to such theorists, except for Foucault. A more serious incorporation of the insights of these theorists would only strengthen Smith's powerful conceptual and empirical arguments. At the same time, she admirably specifies the gendered, racial, and hetero-normative content of a eugenic project that in important ways suspends democratic norms and the law. Her book is a truly valuable contribution to theorizing about democracy and its limits, and about the ways in which gender, race, class, and (hetero-normative) sexuality intersect with democratic citizenship and state power.