Welfare-to-work policies have become a central priority of governments in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and Scandinavia. Drawing on multiple in-depth interviews generated as part of a longitudinal qualitative study, we explore how welfare is imbricated in lone mothers’ subjectivity and citizenship. We consider women’s everyday claims-making activities as we interrogate three dimensions of welfare reform in British Columbia, Canada: (i) the employment imperative underlying active citizen subjectivity and the way this plays out in terms of gender, race and class-based occupational streaming; (ii) the coerciveness of gendered norms instantiated in such streaming; and (iii) the resulting practices of stratified reproduction. Following in the tradition of critical poverty studies, our research focuses on claims-making activities to challenge prevailing public policy practice that risks positioning impoverished lone mothers ‘under erasure’, invisible as mothers or moral citizens, and visible only as low waged worker citizens.
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