Let me begin by thanking Kathleen R. Arnold for her comments and Jeffrey Isaac for the invitation to participate in this exchange. Clearly, Kathleen and I are both indebted to the Marxist and Foucauldian traditions. For my part, however, I find the Gramscian insistence on the historically specific, complex, and contradictory character of every historical bloc and hegemonic institution more compelling than the social theories that envision the social structure as a closed totality (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) or construct state power in an ahistorical and one-dimensional manner (Giorgio Agamben). Contemporary welfare reform, for example, resembles the racially exclusionary “substitute father” rule of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But welfare reform, with its workfare requirement, child support enforcement, family cap, fatherhood programming, abstinence education, and marriage promotion dimensions, is also somewhat unique. The Gramscian paradigm encourages us to be skeptical when it appears as if the state in a late-modern developed society is becoming either a simple instrument of capital that is obediently shrinking into irrelevance, or an omnipotent machine whose seamless coherence and unbroken continuity leaves democratic forces absolutely no strategic opportunity for constructing a counterhegemonic bloc and fighting back.

Welfare reform also differs from other types of poverty assistance retrenchment insofar as it is animated not only by the capitalist interest in disciplining labor but also by the backlash against the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the religious Right. The latter is attempting to diminish the rights that belong to a whole range of subjects, including lesbians and gay men, white middle-class women, poor white women, and low-income women of color. However, even where reactionary forces themselves join together and pursue an apparently coordinated set of objectives, we should not expect to see the various groups that bear the brunt of their policies automatically forming broadly based alliances amongst themselves. In my view, power relations strive to become, on the one hand, multidimensional and context specific, and, on the other hand, overarching and hegemonic bloc forming. Where they are fully developed, hegemonic strategies are endowed with a remarkable capacity to reproduce status distinctions and wealth-based stratifications and thereby frustrate the formation of popular alliances.

The genius of “divide and rule” and the specificity of each disciplinary deployment are such that simple invitations for unified resistance would go unanswered, and predictions of mass uprisings would lose all practical purchase. Fatherhood programs and child support enforcement, for example, could drive a wedge between poor men and women insofar as they incite the formation of diametrically opposed interests. If we are going to build on the “good sense” that is embedded within various moments of inchoate protest, oppositional discourse, and the formally structured democratic social movements, then we have to try to understand the ways in which domination is being tailored to impact each of our potential alliance partners in a somewhat unique manner.

In my book, I take liberal feminists to task for failing to come to the aid of welfare mothers, and I draw upon legal analyses to build a vision of a multisectoral, antiracist, and progressive feminist social justice agenda. However, I also try to enhance our understanding of the distinct nature of the assault on poor single mothers. Neoliberalism and the religious Right parcel out just enough privileges for white middle-class women such that the absence of liberal feminists from the poverty rights struggle becomes comprehensible. It is precisely because I want to enhance our understanding of resistance—which means, in the case at hand, diagnosing the weakness of multiracial and cross-class feminist solidarity in the United States—that I am attempting to describe the irreducible multiplicity of regulation regimes.