Gendered administrative burden: regulating gendered bodies, labor, and identity

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Herd, Pamela; Moynihan, Donald
• 署名单位: University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1053-1858
• DOI: 10.1093/jopart/muae021
• 发表日期: 2024
• 关键词: UNITED-STATES; WELFARE-STATE; HEALTH; women; RACE; sterilization; policies; reproduction; ORGANIZATION; experiences

摘要

Gendered burdens are experiences of coercive and controlling state actions that directly regulate gendered bodies, labor, and identity. Burdens are not simply about preventing access to rights and benefits, they're about control and coercian. Gendered burdens generate gender inequality through four mechanisms. First, administrative burdens regulate reproductive bodies, legitimating the state's direct control over reproductive health care, including abortions, with consequent implications for peoples' health. Second, burdens require reproductive labor, shifting unpaid and underpaid reproductive labor onto women as the policies that support such labor tend to have high administrative burdens that impede access. Third, gendered burdens restrict reproductive labor, impeding the right to provide such care labor with dignity, by exerting control over how, and sometimes whether, care is performed, including in rights-granting venues, like redistributive benefits, and rights-depriving venues, like the supervision of families by child protective services. Fourth, burdens regulate gendered identities, reinforcing heteronormative and cis- normative constructions of gender, including by directly controlling gender identification. While gendered burdens are not only experienced by women, they are most strongly applied to poor and racially marginalized groups of women. These claims provide a basis for public administration scholarship to connect with feminist theory by illustrating the centrality of administrative processes and related experiences to structural patterns of inequality.