From Parent to Patient: The Medicalization of Lone Motherhood through Welfare Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Welfare reform in the United States is associated with “metaphorical medicalization,” a process involving increased reliance on monitoring and “technologies of the self,” such as life skills counseling focused on the personal problems, habits, and attributes of welfare recipients, rather than on job skills and training or educational needs ( Schram 2000, Social Text, 18 [162]: 82–107). Metaphorical medicalization is also a feature of the dynamics of contemporary neoliberalizing welfare reform initiatives in Canadian jurisdictions. In this paper, however, we argue that medicalization has become more than metaphorical for lone mother welfare recipients in British Columbia and Ontario. In exploring the development and extent of this medicalizing trend in the two provinces, and its more intensified form in British Columbia, we shed light on the critical gendered effects of ostensibly gender-neutral welfare reform.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".