Creating Gender: The Sexual Politics of Welfare Policy

Extract

Creating Gender: The Sexual Politics of Welfare Policy. By Cathy Marie Johnson, Georgia Duerst-Lahti, and Noelle H. Norton. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. 261p. $55.00.

Creating Gender compels us to “make ordinary the analysis of gender in policymaking” (p. 228). As such, the authors “take up the question of how gender is created when policy is made” (p. 11) using an intimate and in-depth exploratory analysis of welfare policy in the United States to make their case. Their analysis is based on a “compound gender ideology framework” (p. 228), an original construction of the three authors designed to unravel and reveal gender ideology in the policymaking arena—specifically, the “adoption and implementation of the PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act)—welfare reform” (p. 11).