Responsible Bodies: Self-Care and State Power in the U.S. Women, Infants, and Children Program

2015/07/04 by Katherine Mason · 1 voice · 1 citation
Medicine · Social Sciences · #Child Welfare and Adoption #Children's Rights and Participation #Reproductive Health and Technologies

paper · doi:10.1093/sp/jxv014

openalex publication_date 2015/07/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05

Abstract

While previous scholarship examining the U.S. Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program has focused on its cost-effectiveness and health outcomes, this article analyzes the social implications of WIC policy. Extending theories of neoliberal welfare and biomedicalization, I argue that WIC aims to produce health-conscious, self-surveilling subjects. Primary document analysis and interviews with WIC staff and clients reveal how WIC counselors pursue these aims through tactics of habituation, responsibilization, and empowerment. This multi-pronged strategy increases mothers' inclination to adopt WIC-approved health norms and practices as their own, and it disguises (but does not eliminate) the workings of state power.

Citations

• A Brief History of Neoliberalism
• The Subject and Power

Cited by

• “If I got it, she got it”: Black mothers' food provision and symbiotic mothering

Discussions

• This is such an important change! When I studied WIC in the early 2010s, I heard from many women—Latinas especially—that the message they got from WIC was that certain foods they didn't typically eat [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]

Related

• Mother-Blame in the Prozac Nation
• “Getting Gut-Level”
• Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment in Utero
• our bodies, our choices: reproductive justice and social embodiment
• Radical Care