Journal of Poverty, 2002, 6(1): 1-20

The U.S. social welfare system has a long history of engaging in gendered and racialized social control of service recipients.This paper explores the utility of an approach to examining the interaction of such categories as race, class, and gender developed by African-American feminist scholars—the use of the heuristic concept of “intersectionality” — and applies the approach to one aspect of contemporary social policy in the United States: the domestic violence provisions of the 1996 federal welfare law. The paper discusses the evidence regarding the relationship between domestic violence and welfare receipt and analyzes the interaction between state, social, and individual partner's efforts to control women receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). (Author's abstract). Record #3945