HOMEBOYS, BABIES, MEN IN SUITS: THE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE” Lynne Haney University of California, Berkeley This article is a theoretically based ethnography of the gender practices of two state institutions. Feminist scholarship on the state has tended to con- ceptualize the state as a macro-level structure, embodied in social policies, provisions, and abstract principles. By conceptualizing the state at the insti- tutional level, I widen the scope of feminist state theory to include the micro apparatuses of state power. In my case studies, I depict the dynamics of two institutional gender regimes and the distinct patterns of control and contes- tation that characterize them. These ethnographic data capture how women’s relations to men, children, and welfare programs are constructed and recon- structed by state actors and female clients who regulate and resist each other From these data I demonstrate that the state is not a uniform structure that acts t0 impose a singular set of gender expectations on women. Rather, I propose that feminist theorists begin to conceptualize the state as a network of differentiated institutions, layered with conflicting and competing mes- sages about gender. I: the decade since MacKinnon (1983) boldly proclaimed that there was “no theory of the state” within feminism, state theory has become a central part of feminist scholarship. Feminists from multiple aca- demic disciplines and theoretical orienta- tions are now engaged in this project and are producing a diversity of feminist approaches to the study of the state. Examining topics as diverse as social policy (Abramovitz 1988; Gordon 1990, 1994; Skocpol 1992), legal/bureaucratic norms (Eisenstein 198: MacKinnon 1989), modes of institution building (Koven and Michel 1993; Muncy * Direct correspondence to Lynne Haney, De- partment of Sociology, 410 Barrows Hall, Us versity of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (Ihaney@ violet.berkeley.edu). Special thanks to Michael Burawoy for his support and encourage- ‘ment. [ also thank Robert Bulman, Nancy Chodo- row, Shana Cohen, Kathleen Daly, Craig Haney, Jerome Karabel, Louise Lamphere, Laura Lovett, Kristen Luker, Jackie Orr, Janice Peritz, Arona Ragins, Elizabeth C. Rudd, Maria Cecilia Dos Santos, Jirina Strickland, Andras Tapolcai, Mik- los Voros, the ASR Editor, and two ASR reviewers for their assistance with earlier drafts of this ar- ticle. [Reviewers acknowledged by the author are Lisa D. Brush and Christine L. Williams, —Eo.| 1991), and notions of citizenship (Jones 1990; Orloff 1993; Pateman 1988), feminist scholars have begun to delineate the con- tours of the state’s “gender regime” (Connell 1987). These different feminist perspectives are united by their assumptions about the na- ture of the state itself—their conception of the state as a macro-level, masculine entity. Although feminists disagree about the spe- cific arrangement and location of this “male- ness,” they agree in viewing the state as pri- marily a structural entity guided in some way by male interests, This view of the state has led feminists in revealing directions, but it has also left them with only a partial vision of the way the state patterns gender relations, The state is not sim- ply an abstract, macro-level structure; it is also a complex of concrete institutions with which women interact in direct and immed ate ways. To discover how women are social- ized at this latter level of state practice, I con- ducted ethnographic research in the juvenile justice system of a large California city—in the county probation department and at Alli- ance, a group home for incarcerated teen mothers, The institutional gender regimes I encountered in this work problematized the central tenets of feminist state theory. Instead American Sociological Review, 1996, Vol. 61 (October:759-778) 759760 of confronting a uniform, male-dominated state apparatus, I uncovered numerous insti- tutions in the juvenile system, most of which were staffed by women. These state actors did not work unilaterally to impose a singular set of gender norms on their clients. Rather, they set out to empower their clients by transmit- ting distinct messages of independence— messages that were shaped by their respec- tive institutional settings. I also found strik- ing patterns of resistance by clients—young women who evaluated and subsequently transformed these messages. In this article I apply these field observa- tions to prevailing feminist state theories and suggest ways of reconstructing those theo- ries. Instead of viewing the state as an ab- stract entity guided by masculine interests, 1 propose that feminist theorists begin to con- ceive of the state as a set of conflicting insti- tutional contexts. I also demonstrate how agendas for women are created in these dif- ferent settings and how female clients re- ceive them. In short, I argue for a more grounded, interactive theory of the state. I begin by examining the image of the state in- herent in feminist theory, and problematize that image by explicating the bifurcated na- ture of the juvenile system. I then explore the patterns of control and resistance character- istic of the state agencies I studied, connect- ing them to their institutional settings and their relations with the surrounding inner- city community. I conclude by reiterating the implications of my findings for feminist state theory. In the Appendix, I provide a complete methodological discussion of the fieldwork itself. FEMINIST THEORY, PATRIARCHY, AND THE STATE The state entered feminist theory largely through socialist feminism, The main contri- bution of this feminist tradition is its theo- rizing on the relationship between produc- tion and reproduction. This connection en- abled socialist feminists to see the state’s role in mediating gender relations of power. The state was necessarily more than an arbi- trator of class conflicts. Because these sys- tems of oppression were interconnected, the state simultaneously served the needs of capitalism and of patriarchy; it protected AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW capitalist relations of production while en forcing patriarchal relations of reproduction. Socialist feminists have made the case for the state’s enforcement of a patriarchal so- order in two ways. First, in their analy- ses of social policy, these scholars implicate the state in the oppression of women through its support of a specific household structure, the nuclear family, which relies on male wages and female domestic services (MeIn- tosh 1978; Zaretsky 1982). These theorists demonstrate how welfare policy bifurcates the social world into public and private spheres and polices their borders through a “traditional family ethic” (Abramovitz 1988; Eisenstein 1983). They also reveal how poli- ies such as AFDC and Social Security are premised on the family wage and on assump- tions of female dependence (Gordon 1994; Nelson 1990). Many then argue that the state ultimately encourages female dependence. By keeping welfare payments low or by fore- ing women to accept low-wage, unskilled jobs, the state coerces women to attach them- selves to men and to nuclear family struc- tures (Gordon 1990). Central to all of these arguments is the state’s role in upholding “private” patriarchy—individual women’s re- liance on individual men. In a second approach, socialist feminists implicate the state as instrumental in consti- tuting a new form of patriarchy—“public” patriarchy. In this case it is argued that men’s familial power has been passed over to the state. The state no longer oppresses women indirectly by supporting the nuclear family; this is now done directly by securing women’s dependence on the state itself (Brown 1981). Social welfare provisions are then analyzed for their tendency to make women dependent on men as a collective embodied in the state (Boris and Bardaglio 1983). This approach is often used in refer- ence to “manless” women for whom the state intervenes to “manage dependence” (Mink 1990; Nelson 1990). Burnstyn (1983) stated this idea vividly when she called the state “the great collective father-figure, a new rep- resentative of men-as-a-group . . . a bureau- cratic, impersonal pyramid of a group of men, who have taken the place of all those absent fathers” (p. 64). Taking this argument further, many non- socialist feminist state theorists assert thatTHE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE 761 patriarchy is endemic to the found the modern state itself. This theo: followed two directions. For some feminist theorists, the state’s viewpoint is essentially male (Eisenstein 1985; MacKinnon 1989). They see the state as the institutionalization of male subjectivity—the embodiment of ob- jectivity, neutrality, and rationality. State policy and law therefore “constitute the so- cial order in the interest of men as a gender” (MacKinnon 1989:162). For others, the prin- ciples of citizenship guiding modern polities constitute the state as a masculine entity (Jones 1990; Pateman 1988). These theorists argue that because employment, and the “in- dependence” it presumably bestows, deter- mine one’s ability to demand broad civil and political rights, the state adheres to a notion of citizenship that opposes the independent- worker male to the dependent-nonworker fe- male (Orloff 1993; Pateman 1988). Substan- tive state programs then reproduce this bifur- cation, positioning men as rights-bearing citi- zens and women as dependent clients (Fraser 1989). Finally, a few feminist scholars have moved away from a “top-down” perspective on the state and toward a “power resource” type of analysis. Rejecting the idea that ‘women are passive in their relations with the state, these scholars restore agency to femi: nist state theory. To do so, feminist histor ans emphasize women’s role in building the Western welfare state: how women, inspired by professionalism and maternalism, infused male bureaucracies and welfare systems with their values and norms (Koven and Michel 1993; Muncy 1991). Others focus on women as clients. They demonstrate how female cli ents use the state’s interest in the private sphere to their advantage, appropriating state resources and social workers in domestic power struggles (Gordon 1988). They also show how state policy can foster clients’ ac- tivism: how women use notions of entitle- ment to form alliances, demand social rights, and thus recast “public patriarchy” (Hernes 1987; Morgen 1990; Piven 1990). Hence, these theorists focus on the unintended out- comes of state gender regimes: how attempts to reproduce male dominance are challenged by women themselves. Although these feminist theorists have made important inroads into the “gendering” of the state, I believe their conceptualizations of the state are too narrow. Whether they im- plicate the state for participating in the con- stitution of private or public patriarchy, for its male stance or for its notion of citizen- ship, and whether they focus on intended or unintended effects, they conceive of the state in similar terms: as a national structure, em- bodied in policies or abstract principles, which seeks to advance female dependency. THE MYTH OF THE MONOLITHIC STATE: DUALISM IN THE JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM The one-dimensional quality of feminist state theory also characterizes feminist analyses of one specific “arm” of the state— the criminal justice system. Feminist crimi- nologists have tended to explore gender dif- ferences in treatment within the penal system (Cain 1989; Smart 1990). Particularly in their work on the juvenile system, they rely almost exclusively on quantitative data such as arrest statistics and sentencing rates These data then are used to make larger claims about the system's gender bias—that is, how the “system” reacts to young women more harshly (Chesney-Lind 1977) and/or more leniently (Visher 1983; Webb 1984). A similar approach marks the few qualitative studies conducted by feminist criminolo- gists: Interview data collected in prisons (Arnold 1990, 1994) and detention centers (Chesney-Lind 1992) are used to support as- sertions of the “system's” patriarchal nature. In both cases, feminist criminologists inter- pret the outcomes of specific penal institu- tions as evidence of the system’s overall gendered character. The result is an undiffer- entiated conception of a singular state appa- ratus operating with only one approach to young women. Yet from my initial interactions with the state actors working in the two institutions T studied, it was clear that no single state ap- paratus was at work in the juvenile justice system. Probation officers and the group home staff at Alliance saw themselves as separate from the “system.” They spoke in “us versus them” terms—referring to them- selves and their girls as “us,” and the police, courts, and prisons as “them.” In short, the juvenile system was bifurcated between co-162 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW ercive and permissive apparatuses, which op- erated according to different principles. Probation officer Carol Jackson was an African American woman in her early fif- When we met, her caseload had just in- creased to over 100, and she was over- whelmed, According to Carol, probation was a “special” part of the system. It did not exert to0 much control over clients, as did Juvenile Hall or the California Youth Au- thority (CYA), which she saw as hostile places oriented toward punishment. She, on the other hand, just kept tabs on her girls. Officially she was to meet with each girl twice a month. Laughing, she admitted that this would never happen; there was no time and no need. If her girls failed to report to her, she was supposed to issue a warrant for their arrest. This was also out of the ques- tion. In her eyes, these girls had been beaten down by their men, their friends, and “the system.” The system was most dangerous. “The courts treat my girls like a piece of meat to be processed,” she once remarked, “and when they reach Juvenile Hall, they're cooked.” Carol refused to take this approach with her female clients. Instead she tried to foster the determination and strength these girls already had. She believed they needed these attributes to survive, As Carol’s super- visor, Don, said, “We like "em feisty here. Carol does a good job keepin’ them feisty, and that’s great.” Carol Jackson’s distrust of the “system” was shared by the 15 other probation offic- ers (POs) in the Department. The great ma- jority, like Carol, were women of color: ap- proximately 60 percent were African Ameri- can, 20 percent Latina, and 20 percent Anglo. Like Carol, these other POs believed they were different from those working in other parts of the system. An aura of fear sur- rounded Juvenile Hall; it had a reputation as a brutal place. Probation wasn’t like that, however. This idea was articulated most clearly in a series of ongoing orientation meetings held by the Department for new cli- ents, Each meeting began with a discussion of the clients’ treatment in court and Juve- nile Hall. Horror stories of their experiences in these institutions inevitably ensued, and POs always distanced themselves from these facilities. “We don’t do you like that,” Don would say. “Yes, there are injustices in the system, but here you'll be treated like people, with opinions to be heard.” Although these POs tried to keep their dis- tance from the brutality of the coercive ap- paratus, they also used it to their advantage. The threat of “Juvie” loomed over Carol’s girls. When one of her girls, Temica, contin- ued to see her boyfriend despite Carol’s ad- vice, she reminded Temica that she could end the relationship by sending her to Juvie. Most often, Juvie just loomed, but POs occa- sionally sent their clients there for what they called “cool-off periods.” When Cassandra was arrested for assaulting a girl who “messed with her man” and gave Carol a “bad attitude” about it, Carol left her in Juvie for an extra week. When Rose, another PO, disapproved of the way one of her wards spoke to her, she sent her to Juvie to “learn to talk right.” Hence, although probation was one part of the system in which clients were not dehumanized, probation officers used the mere presence of the coercive arm to induce their clients to act in certain ways. A similar “us versus them” perspective prevailed at Alliance. The facility had a con- tract with CYA whereby any girl who entered the prison pregnant had the option of coming to Alliance for the length of her sentence Each girl was put on AFDC when admitted, and this money was used to support her. Al- liance received other state and local funds, but AFDC was its main source. In this way the facility relied on receiving girls from CYA. According to the director, Marika Jenkins, this was no simple task. She thought Alliance worked differently than CYA, and she believed that this situation put the two facilities at odds with each other: “They get nervous that we help girls make it on their ‘own,” she once told me. Like Carol, Marika expressed hostility toward the “system” and viewed Alliance as separate from it. She also wanted to keep her girls out of a “destructive system” that “entraps them and produces a horrible cycle of welfare and dependency.” The Alliance staff consisted of eight women, four African American and four Anglo. All these women believed that their ‘lity was different. They reminded the girls of this difference every day, telling them how lucky they were to be at Alliance. Limits placed on the girls’ daily routines were presented as being in their interest.THE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE, 163 They were learning to live productively. Wasn't this better than CYA, where they were coerced into acting in certain ways? As Denise, the house director, stated in a meet- ing, “If CYA had it their way, you would be stuck in little cells and your babies would be mothered by the government. We are doing this for you, so you won't be in jail or on welfare all your life.” Yet the staff members also used the threat of CYA to their advantage. If they thought a girl was not taking the program seriously, they raised the possibility of returning her to CYA. This threat was more serious for these girls because of their babies. A trip to CYA. meant that the babies would be placed in fos- ter care. Thus the staff followed through with this threat only for those girls who had not yet had their babies. Even so, they used the girls’ fear of CYA to force them to act in cer- tain ways. Tonya, who rarely woke before noon, was often threatened with a CYA stay. Maria, who smoked out a window, was re- minded of the sexual acts that girls had to perform in CYA for cigarettes. Hence Alliance’s more permissive approach rested on the existence of the coercive arm; its dis- cipline relied on the punishment of CYA. In this way, a common image emerged from the probation department and Alli- ance—an image of a juvenile system bifur- cated between a coercive arm, characterized by punishment and force, and a permissive arm, governed by discipline and indepen- dence. This picture complicates the homoge- neous conception of the state inherent in feminist state theory and criminology. The state actors I observed would be appalled to know that events in the courts or prisons were generalized to their work. Although they relied on these bodies in their work, they saw themselves as something separate. By replacing punishment with discipline and dependence with independence, they defined their work in opposition to what they per- ceived as the hegemonic practices of other state bodies; by trying to empower their girls, they believed they directly resisted what the coercive arm produced in clients. This situation was even more complex. Al- though these state actors were located in the alternative apparatus and both sought to in- still autonomy in their girls, they did so in different ways. These divergences were rooted in differences in their institutional set- tings and in their understandings of the forces threatening their girls. Yet because these were not the forces their girls felt threatened by, both approaches prompted resistance. Two patterns of control and contestation re- sulted—the patterns were enacted on the ter- rains of private and public patriarchy. UNDERMINING AND REINSCRIBING PRIVATE PATRIARCHY Itis orientation night at the Probation Depart- ment. Sixteen young women sit in a room and listen as their probation officer, Carol Jack- son, lectures them about the conditions of their probation. Carol lists a series of rules before reaching the most important one of all—her “rule of independence.” While under her care, Carol tells the girls, they will learn to rely on themselves and to realize that no- body, not even their boyfriends or homeboys, can take care of them. “You sittin’ here is proof that those boys aren’t carin’ for you,” Carol reminds them. As she speaks, two girls roll their eyes. Another puts on lipstick in a mirror; two others flip through pictures in their wallets and show each other photos of their homeboys. In their work on gender bias in the juve- nile system, fe criminologists have reached a common understanding of the gendered norms transmitted to young women in this system. Like feminist state theorists, feminist criminologists tend to conceptualize the penal system as a male, paternalistic en- tity that acts to “enforce women’s place in a patriarchal society” (Chesney-Lind and Sheldon 1992:80). Many of these scholars locate this orientation in judicial “chivalry” and/or “paternalism”—that is, in lingering notions of female fragility and vulnerability (Chesney-Lind 1977; Daly 1989; Datesman and Scarpetti 1980; Frazier, Bock, and Henretta 1983). This judicial stance alleg- edly teaches women that passivity and de- pendence are positive gender attributes, thus preparing them for traditional positions in nuclear family structures (Messerschmidt 1986). Other feminist criminologists trace the system's patriarchal nature to the kind of girls it draws into its web (Gelsthorpe 1989; Hudson 1990). They argue that state actors use status offenses to regulate female sexu-164 ality and to impose “traditional gender norms and behaviors” (Alder 1984; Visher 1983, Webb 1984). Still others focus on the kind of punishment inflicted on girls, arguing that girls are policed with hegemonic images of heterosexuality (Cain 1989) and are taught to become subordinate partners in heterosexual relationships (Lees 1989). All of these argu- ments entail a view of the system as an up- holder of traditional sexual mores and an en- forcer of private patriarchy. The “Be-Your-Own-Woman” Rule Many of the issues addressed by femini criminologists also concerned probation o ficer Carol Jackson and her colleagues. These state actors held expectations for their female clients—expectations that revolved around their clients’ sexuality and relations to men. Yet to clarify how they approached these issues, their work must be viewed in its larger institutional context. These POs. were overworked and overwhelmed. Carol’s girls dropped in for a quick meeting once ev- ery few months and then moved on. At the same time, Carol was committed to “protect- ing” her clients. This responsibility was two- fold: It involved keeping them out of the rest of the system and teaching them to make it in their community. The two elements were connected: By helping her girls stay afloat in the community, Carol effectively kept them. out of the system. Hence she spent a great deal of time figuring out what endangered her girls in their inner-city communities, and then attacked what she thought pulled them down, In this way, the terrain where Carol worked was the community itself. It was Carol Jackson against the inner city, or at least her vision of the inner city. This qualification is important because Carol had a particular view of these inner- city communities and the forces that endan- gered her girls there. For Carol and other POs, men were the biggest internal threat to their girls’ survival. According to Carol, most of her girls had been arrested for offenses re- lated to their “homeboys,” a term they used synonymously with boyfriend or lover. Her girls had been caught selling drugs for these men, fighting with them, or robbing stores with them. Even when it seemed that the men were not involved, a little digging by Carol ICAL REVIEW AMERICAN SOCIOLOG! revealed that they were the root of the prob- lem. Many of her girls had been picked up for shoplifting jewelry, perfume, and cloth- ing. Carol believed that their motivation was, to “look fine for the boys.” One of Carol's girls, who had been arrested for selling drugs, admitted to Carol that she had started selling because she wanted nice clothing; her boyfriend did not like the way she dressed. Carol attacked this explanation, faulting the boyfriend for making the girl feel she had to be attractive. These POs had a common line about the male/female relationships characteristic of inner-city communities, “I've seen a million of them,” Carol said, “I know exactly what they're like.” In her view, these relationships were essentially economic exchanges. “It's like a business deal,” she theorized. “You've got the guy who sells drugs. He’s got the cash, the good things in life. But he needs the image, sexy girls on each arm. So he gives my girls the cash and buys them nice things. And, of course, they give him sex when he wants.” As Rose, another PO, once said after returning from a home visit, “I saw that girl laying there, all burnt out with that man next to her, and I wanted to shake her. Give her the energy to break free from him.” In this way, these POs perceived a commu- nity in which men had the economic control and the ability to convince women they could. take care of them. Yet this was a lie, accord- ing to the POs: Women always got the short end of the stick. “The guy has the control here,” Carol argued. “My girls are just ob- jects for him. But the fools buy into it. They think the finer they look, the more their homeboys will love them.” Problems arose when girls engaged in illegal activities to stand by their men, At this juncture they “lost their strength,” and the system stepped in. Hence, like many state actors responsible for regulating the lives of “unorthodox” young women, these POs connected their girls’ delinquency to their sexuality (Nathan- son 1991; Solinger 1992). But they did not do so in the traditional way, by deeming them delinquent for transgressing sexual norms or rules of domesticity (Cain 1989; Lees 1989; Rains 1971). Instead they faulted their girls’ overinvestment in men for its ten- dency to make them weak, malleable, and ul- timately delinquent. It was this cycle of maleTHE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE, 765 dependency and delinquency that Carol Jack- son tried to undercut in her work. Overall I observed four components of this socialization process—strategies that Carol used to break this cycle. First she tried to make her girls admit that they relied too much on men, Usually this began with Carol asking her girls about their boyfriends. Most. of them responded by discussing what their boyfriends did for them. Lasondra listed all of the material objects her homeboy had bought her; Donna described how her boy- friend protected her; Jamika told stories about what Ricardo gave her sexually, how good he was in bed. Yet I never saw Carol accept their portrayals of these relationships. Rather, she countered by asking them if they loved their homeboys enough to do what these boys wanted or to listen to whatever they said. If the girl said yes—which most of them eventually did, with minor qualifica- tions—Carol moved on to her next strategy. At this juncture she forced them to ac- knowledge the short-lived nature of hetero- sexual relationships. Did they think their homies would always be there? Men aren't like that, she warned. They come and go as they please. “And where you gonna be? *Cause you know you ain't gonna be with them.” One of Carol’s favorite tactics here was to point out that her girls were on proba- tion because of men’s inability to care for them; if their men were protecting them, they were not doing it very effectively. Usually Carol coupled this strategy with attempts to make her girls feel strong themselves. In her words, she tried to give them “self-esteem.” These POs loved this term. To them it meant exhibiting strength and perseverance, or, as supervisor Don said, acting “feisty.” Ironi- cally, fostering self-esteem often entailed praising girls for lying or manipulating people. POs saw this behavior as evidence that their girls were bright and assertive. One of Carol’s clients, Shavon, had been arrested for stabbing a boy at school. She admitted to Carol that she had lied to the authorities about her relationship with the boy to receive a lesser sentence. Carol loved this story and applauded Shavon for manipulating the sys tem successfully. At other times, promoting self-esteem was more difficult. Keisha, for instance, in one of her meetings with Carol, ripped off her shirt to display a tattoo on her chest. It read “Emilio,” the name of an old boyfriend, Infuriated, Carol yelled: “Come on, girl, you'd be better than that. I'm teachin’ you better. You ain't no wall to be graffitied on. What's next, you gonna tattoo his name on your brain?” When Carol wasn’t getting anywhere with either of these strategies, she employed a third method—coercion. If a girl was par- ticularly recalcitrant or too deeply en- trenched in a relationship, Carol raised the prospect of jail. Generally this remained a threat, something she mentioned when they “lost their senses,” but she did send a few of her girls to Juvie to “cool out.” In one case, Carol was worried about Donna’s attachment to her gang-member boyfriend, Candy. One day Carol discovered that Donna had been arrested for a fight in which Candy was in- volved. Furious, she sent Donna to Juvie un- til the day after Candy's trial. By the time Donna came out of Juvie, he was on his way into jail. In the case of Tyneshia, a girl who was arrested for selling drugs to buy a dress for her boyfriend's prom, Carol responded by sending her to Juvie until the day after the prom. She believed this would solve the problem: The guy would find another girl and forget Tyneshia. Overall, Carol saved coercive strategies for extreme cases. A fourth, more common ap- proach was to present her girls with alterna- tives to their homeboys. In addition to fos- tering self-reliance, Carol steered her girls toward their mothers and female kin. She tried to make them acknowledge and utilize what Collins (1991) called the “other moth- ers” surrounding them in their communities. According to Carol, this was the hardest part of her work. Because adolescent girls see their mothers as enemies, it was a struggle to recast them as allies. This was her main ob- jective with Nieka, a young woman sur- rounded by men. The only woman in Nieka’s life was her father’s wife, whom she hated, so Carol set up regular meetings between the women and acted as a mediator. Again, in the case of Jamika’s pregnancy, Jamika decided to have the baby but refused to tell her mother. Carol could not convince her other- wise; finally she called Jamika’s mother and told her to talk to her daughter. She made weekly interventions to make sure they were communicating. Then, Karrina, a young766 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW woman who claimed that she “hated all women’s guts,” refused to go on a Depart- ment-sponsored summer retreat for girls be- cause, as she put it, “I ain’t gonna be stuck with all them girls.” In response, Carol called a Big Sisters program and had an “other mother” assigned to Karrina. As part of her probation, Karrina had to meet regularly with this woman, In sum, Carol’s agenda was to break her girls’ dependency on men and to strengthen their self-esteem and their ties to female kin. Her approach was rooted largely in the ter- rain of her work, Carol’s girls were deeply embedded in their inner-city communities. If Carol was to protect them and shield them from the system, her only option was to deal with these communities—to tie her girls into trustworthy survival networks and to keep them out of relationships that “pulled them down.” Because she believed that her girls’ relations to men fell into the latter category, she set out to draw them away from their homeboys. Rather than socializing them to be dependent (Chesney-Lind 1992) or polic- ing them with images of heterosexual cou- pling (Cain 1989; Lees 1989), Carol tried to convince them that the heterosexual social contract was not viable. In socialist feminist terms, instead of institutionalizing “private” patriarchy, she sought to undermine it In this way Carol’s message could be read as potentially liberating, as an attempt to overcome harmful stereotypes about her cli- ents and relations of domination. Her girls, however, saw nothing emancipatory about her agenda. To them her message sounded threatening and dangerous. As a result, it set into motion acts of resistance—acts that ulti- mately reinforced exactly what Carol wanted to undercut. “My Man Won’t Do Me Like That” Carol’s meetings with her girls rarely went smoothly. The fact that she had to employ three or four strategies to deliver her message was itself indicative of the resistance she met. Her girls did not simply “see the light” during their talks; instead they often sent messages back to Carol. A common idea that Theard Carol’s girls articulate, implicitly and explicitly, was that she was no longer in touch with the community. I first observed this message relayed to Carol in a meeting with Botswana, who was “wanted” by a drug dealer in her neighborhood. She deliberately was arrested so she could hide from him. Af- ter being released from Juvie, she took up with a gang member. In response, Carol be- gan with her “mother thing.” Botswana laughed, telling Carol that she “didn’t get it.” What could her mama do when the dealer came looking for her? Was her mama as strong as the machine gun he would be wielding? The message to Carol was clear: Her advice was not viable. What’s more, it was potentially dangerous. Other girls attempted to communicate similar messages to Carol. Many of them spent their time, with Carol educating her about their communities. When Carol em- ployed her socialization strategies, her girls often countered by listing how many of their friends had been killed recently, as if they were throwing danger in Carol’s face to indi- cate that her agenda was not feasible. When Carol was sick one afternoon and called me in to cover for her, two girls articulated this idea to me. When I reached the office, both girls were waiting. I took them out for milkshakes and told them this would count as a meeting, LaToya and Reeba didn’t know each other, but they immediately began to talk about Carol and how “messed up” she was. They liked her but thought she was “out of touch.” As Reeba said, “She’s thinkin’ of an old way, like my grandmother. Like the community 20 years ago.” LaToya agreed, adding that Carol was originally from Texas and didn’t know what “went down in this town.” Sometimes it was cool to have your homegirls back you up, but you also needed a man. “I like my man ‘cause he gives me money and hooks me up,” LaToya revealed. “Man, if Carol gives me the money, then maybe I'd listen.” In addition to sounding out of touch, Carol’s message was threatening to her girls for another reason: On all of the main hierar- chies of power and privilege, Carol’s girls were at the bottom. All were young and poor, and had little formal schooling. Most were women of color. As Barbara Smith (1982) notes, heterosexuality is “usually the only privilege that black women have. None of us have racial or sexual privilege, almost none of us have class privilege. (MJaintainingTHE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE 167 ‘straightness’ is our last resort” (p. 171). Collins (1991) corroborates this point, argu- ing that many Black women fear stigmatiza- tion on this axis and hence accentuate theii heterosexuality. By calling into question the viability of the heterosexual social contract, Carol therefore was attacking her girls on their one axis of power, robbing them of their one source of privilege. As a result, her girls resisted. Much as Rains (1971) describes how African Ameri- can unwed mothers contested the “expert” discourse used to explain their pregnancies, the girls under Carol’s supervision appraised and then rejected her definition of their needs. One way of doing this was to reaffirm the advantages they received from those re- lations that Carol tried to undermine. I never saw a woman present her homeboy as troubled or problematic; when she was in Carol’s office, he was her knight in shining armor. For Donna, Candy was all good. He was her protector, the only one who watched out for her. To Jennifer, who came in with a new piece of diamond jewelry every month, her boyfriend was “the man” because he gave her “all the good stuff” Jamika told Carol about all of her sexual escapades. As Carol fidgeted and begged Jamika to refrain from the details, Jamika grew increasingly explicit about what Ricardo did for het, where and how they did the “wild thing.” In a group meeting, Jamika even gave Carol some ad- vice of her own: “Girl, you should try the wild thing sometime. It might lighten you up.” Carol ignored the comment, as the other girls laughed hysterically. Sometimes Carol’s girls did more than talk about their homeboys. Often their boyfriends escorted them to the office. Usually the young men sat in the waiting room while the girls met with Carol, but frequently the girls brought them in, In some cases they did this to show Carol that she couldn't stop them from being together. Tyneshia, whom Carol sent to Juvie to miss her boytriend’s prom, came to her next appointment with Mike at her side. She didn’t say anything about the prom or Mike’s presence; he simply sat there as a silent symbol of her resistance. In other cases, girls brought boyfriends to Carol to prove that they were not as bad as she thought. Jamika brought in Ricardo, the sex star, to show Carol that he wasn’t like all the rest. It didn’t work; Carol screamed at him and accused him of taking advantage of Jamika. Meanwhile Jamika sat silent, play- ing with Ricardo’s hair. Carol repeatedly told her to stop and said she was “acting a fool.” Jamika refused, suggesting that Carol touch his hair too Carol’s girls also used their femininity as a form of protest by (literally) holding it up in Carol's face. When a discussion grew heated, they brought out mirrors and applied makeup, which they knew infuriated Carol. Others started braiding or combing their hair. One young woman, Shirika, always sprayed perfume around Carol's office when she en- tered, telling her that the office needed to be “freshened up.” Even more common were those girls who called into question Carol's own femininity. In front of Carol, they sug- gested that she change her hairstyle, makeup, or clothing: “James bought me this lipstick,” Lasondra once announced, “but it would look better on you.” Yet behind Carol’s back, they often made fun of her appearance. “Look at that hair,” I once heard a girl whisper to an- other. “Ain’t nothing worse than that.” Many girls used Carol's appearance to dismiss her ideas about their homeboys; maybe the het- erosexual contract would work for her too if she looked better. One day, when I was walk- ing Donna out of the office after a discussion about Candy, she turned to me and remarked, ‘Carol hates men. It’s ‘cause she’s so fat Men do that shit to her, No one likes her.” But she would be all right as long as she kept looking fine. Many of Carol's girls took a similar line about their mothers. They believed they could not gain support from these relation- ships because their mothers were jealous of “all I got.” Group meetings regularly turned into complaint sessions about mothers. Some girls proclaimed that their mothers envied them; they wanted to be young again and “look fine.” In explaining how her mother used Juvenile Hall to control her at home, LaToya claimed that her mother punished her because “she’s an old hag, ain’t got nothin’ left, and is pissed off.” Another girl, Shavon, described how her mother tried to sleep with her man: “Now, Carol Jackson, what do you say about that?” Carol sat silently in disbe- lief. Still, her girls’ message was important: Even their mothers realized the value of768 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW sexual attractiveness, and this divided rather than united them. Once again Carol was ac- cused of being “out of touch,” an “old-timer.” This point brings us back to the control that Carol’s girls regarded her as exerting over them and how it informed their re tance. They did not agree with Carol’s image of their community. The relationships that Carol interpreted as threats, her girls viewed as assets. What Carol believed to be frivo- lous femininity and dangerous dependence on men, her girls considered to be economic and physical necessities. Carol's messages of independence thus came across as threaten- ing. As a result, her girls resisted and empha- sized all the more what they “had”—by high- lighting their femininity and reasserting their heterosexual bonds and the possibilities within them. When these girls left Carol’s office with their homeboys at their side and wearing even more makeup than when they came in, they had learned precisely what Carol tried to make them unlearn, Through their resistance, they reinforced exactly what Carol fought so hard to undermine. In this way, Carol’s control and her girls’ resistance were connected. Together they formed a “pattern,” an interactive process through which the young women were so- cialized. The contours of this pattern were not determined by an abstract patriarchal conspiracy or male plot. Instead they were shaped by contrasting images of and posi- tions in the urban context; they were gov- cerned by conflicting understandings of the surrounding inner-city community and of ap- propriate survival strategies. Once this con- text changed, as I discovered at Alliance, so too did the institutional pattern of control and contestation. UNDERCUTTING AND REINFORCING PUBLIC PATRIARCHY It is lunchtime at Alliance. As Debra takes out a jar of baby food to feed her son, she is immediately stopped by Liz, the house man- ager. “You know the rule. Here at Alliance we grind our table food for the babies. When you become independent and pay for your- self, you can decide these things.” Debra counters that she is paying for herself with her AFDC check. “AFDC is not your money,” Liz retorts, “and when the government pays, it decides.” Frustrated, Debra puts back the baby food, replying, “Well, that’s just fine cause my baby ain't hungry anyway.” The institutional setting at Alliance dif- fered from that of the Probation Department in a number of important ways, Alliance was a minimum-security facility whose wards were restricted from coming and going as they pleased. They spent most of their days within the confines of the home; even their school was located in the basement. Their parents and their babies’ fathers could visit only twice a month. No one else was allowed in the facility. The girls were forbidden to make phone calls or to receive more than two incoming calls a month. Their contact with the surrounding community therefore was quite limited; they did not have sustained re- lations with anyone outside the home. Three primary groups were present at Alliance: the rls, their babies, and the state. All of these girls were official wards of the court and re- ceived AFDC. Hence, in this setting, their main relationships were with their babies and with the state. It was precisely these relations that the Alliance staff sought to transform in their interactions with these young women. Taking the Bull by the Horns The institutional context at Alliance gave rise to its own set of gendered messages and norms. Unlike Carol Jackson, the Alliance staff was not concerned about the girls’ de- pendency on men. These young women were not in the same kind of relationships as were Carol's girls. Their men had disappeared; ei- ther they had left the girls or were them- selves incarcerated. The staff believed that these men had already proved themselves unreliable. Instead the Alliance staff viewed the girls as relying too heavily on govern- ment institutions. They thought their girls turned too readily to the “impersonal pyra- mid of men” for support. They worried most that these girls were tangled in the web of the system, which produced its own “cycle of dependency.” The staff often said how “tragic” it was for adolescent girls to be de- pendent on the government, and staff mem- bers frequently employed the “trope of the welfare mother” to instill fear in them (Irvine 1994). “I'll tell you,” remarked Charlene, an African American counselor, “if you girlsTHE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE 769 don’t stop actin’ a fool, you're gonna be wel- fare mothers forever.” Thus Alliance set out to disentangle its girls from the state’s web. Like Carol Jack- son, the staff deployed numerous tactics to accomplish this. One way was to present the young women with abstract arguments about the government’s limitations. Denise, the Anglo house director, never gave the girls their AFDC checks directly or told them where the money went. When they asked her, she told the girls that she did not want them to become accustomed to “being taken care of by the government.” To provide the girls with a lesson on this point, Rachel Brennan, the schoolteacher, held a special two-week social studies class on the concept of “lim- ited government.” She was tired of the girls’ constant assertions of their rights and what the government owed them. She wanted to show them how important it was to keep the government out of their lives, how this was a hard-fought “American right.” As she lec- tured, “The government doesn’t owe you much, and that’s good sometimes.” The staff members not only lectured the girls about the limits of the government, but also relayed their message by continually trying to instill initiative and independence in the girls. These two “house themes” per- meated the workings of the facility. The pro- gram at Alliance was structured to encourage both attributes: The girls moved up a series of “steps” when they did anything that the staff considered important in preparing them to lead independent lives upon release. Dur- ing my time at Alliance, girls moved up the steps when they found childcare, took the GED exam, enrolled in evening courses at a nearby beauty school, and went on job inter- views. Rachel, the teacher, created her own. program, called “Brennan Bucks,” to pto- mote initiative. Each day she gave the girls fake money if they followed the school rules. Every Friday the girls used their “Bucks” to buy cheap goods, which Rachel purchased for them. In explaining the program, Rachel said she wanted them to learn to respond to “material incentives just like the rest of us in the normal world.” Although these programs illustrate the staff’s attempts to promote initiative, the staff did this mainly through the organiza- tion of everyday life. To an outsider myself, life at Alliance was fairly chaotic. Nobody ever seemed to be in charge. Al- though two staff members were always on duty, they usually worked in the back office, uninvolved in the girls’ activities, As long as the girls remained in the facility, they could do more or less as they pleased. I never saw a staff member force the girls to attend school or house meetings. According to the director, this lack of centralized control was intended to foster independence: Because no one told the girls what to do, they had to figure out what was best on their own, They had to choose to do the right thing, of their own volition. One of the girls, Debra, stated this situation clearly during the lecture on limited government. Rachel was looking for an example of a dictatorship and suggested Alliance. Debra disagreed: “We got all these people saying different stuff and telling us to decide. There ain’t no one in control here. It’s no dictatorship. It's anarchy.” When the staff evaluated the girls, they used independence and initiative as criteria. Maria, the superstar of the house, was ap- plauded for “getting her act together.” In preparation for her release she began to look for a job, found childcare for her son, went back on the birth control pill, and made ar- rangements to take her GED. On the other hand, the “problem” girls were those whom the staff considered lazy or aloof. For ex- ample, the staff had sent Nikita to Juvenile Hall for a “cool-out” period and held a meet- ing to evaluate her. One staff member noted that Nikita was tough and “pissed off.” The others agreed but believed that the real prob- lem was her laziness and passivity. As they discussed her, Nikita called from Juvie to put in a few words on her own behalf. She prom- ised that she would start “working the pro- gram” if they took her back. She didn’t want to give up her baby, and she knew she had to work for this. The staff was impressed by the call and by her ability to “take the bull by the horns.” Within minutes they decided to accept her back. This account leads to the final component of Alliance’s socialization for indepen- dence—the babies. In addition to the incen- tive programs and the organization of every- day life, the staff tried to break the “cycle of institutional dependency” by manipulating the girls’ relationships with their children.77 They frequently told the girls that it was im- possible to be a good mother while relying on state institutions for support. Charlene made this argument explicitly in a house meeting devoted to Rachel's resignation. The girls were distressed about Rachel's depar- ture and saw it as further proof that “no one in the world cares about us and that’s why we are so fucked up.” Infuriated, Charlene yelled: “You are women. You have babies. Babies must be cared for. Women care for others, Until you learn this, you'll be doin’ a lot of crying in your lives.” At Alliance, the girls had to earn mother- hood. They did so by exhibiting the initiative and independence that Alliance sought to fos- ter in them, In this way the staff adhered to what Nathanson (1991:159) called a “redefi- nition of female adolescence” by presenting this time in the girls’ lives as a preparatory period for self-sufficiency. The battle over childcare was an example, When I arrived at Alliance, the babies came to the classroom with the girls. Problems arose when Rachel sensed that the girls worked less when the babies were around. She tried to alter this situation with her Brennan Bucks program, rewarding the girls materially for placing education before reproduction. It was unsuc- cessful. Finally she demanded that the babies be removed from the classroom. Furious, the girls refused altogether to work. Then Rachel went on strike, Eventually the director gave in and provided childcare. Rachel claimed that this was the girls’ punishment; because they refused to alter their priorities, they were reprimanded with forced childcare. In short, Alliance’s aim was to undercut the girls’ dependency on institutions, Like Carol Jackson’s expectations for her girls, the staff's agenda was shaped by the institu- tional setting. This battleground, however, was an enclosed, minimum-security facility. These young women were mothers, official wards of the court, and AFDC recipients. They were connected more closely to state institutions, and less to individual men Therefore their potential for institutional re- nce was greater. This was precisely what wortied the staff members and informed their agenda. This concern prompted them to or- ganize the facility, to create miniprograms, and to utilize the babies to foster initiative In doing so, they warned these “manless” AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, young women of the risks involved in replac- ing their fathers/homeboys with an “imper- sonal pyramid of men” (Burnstyn 1983:64). Hence Alliance's agenda could be viewed as potentially empowering. It could be inter- preted as an attempt to socialize the girls against the currents of public patriarchy, of female dependence on men as a collective embodied in the state (Boris and Bardaglio 1983; Brown 1981). Once again, however, the girls saw it oth- erwise. Alliance’s attempt to undercut their institutional reliance set into motion its own resistance—a resistance that also taught the girls, in the end, precisely what Alliance wanted them to unlearn Bring Back Those Men in Suits The girls at Alliance were quite aware of the message that the staff was sending them, but they saw nothing emancipatory about it. From my first day at the home, it was clear that they viewed themselves in an “us versus them’ relationship with Alliance. They spoke in these terms. They found the house themes oppressive—or, as Mildred put it, “all their talk of bein’ self full"—and they used every possible chance to relay this to the staff. Maria, for example, was awaiting her release. ‘One week before her parole hearing, the staff members confronted her; they had discovered that she had made phone calls from the front office. In theory Maria had broken the phone rule, although in practice everyone knew that the phone rule was flexible. This time, how- ever, the staff enforced the rule rigidly. They told Maria that she could spend six more ‘months at Alliance or take her chances before the parole board. She did neither: The night before her original release date, she escaped with her baby through a basement window, and never was found. The other girls saw this as poetic justice and immediately made the connection between her escape and the house theme of initiative. They used the incident to relay messages to the staff. As Tonya said to Rachel, “Look at that, Maria really ‘took the bull by the horns’ didn’t she?” As Debra re- marked to Liz, “There was no laziness last night at Alliance! She sure did learn good from Alliance.” Just like Carol's girls, the Alliance girls viewed the staff's agenda as not viable and‘THE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE, ™ undesirable. To understand why, one must at- tend to who these girls were. First and fore- most, they were teen mothers—young women with small dependent children. They were also poor and uneducated. Most were women of color. Therefore their ability to “make it on their own” was limited at best. Alliance's continual proclamations that they should do so were quite threatening. In Tonya’s words, Alliance made it a “crime” to ask for help, and this was “all messed up.” As Lakisha said, “It’s like they don’t know what's up. The talk is OK for them but not for us. They aren't with us.” Debra observed, “Ya know, it’s easy for Rachel to say we can do it on our own. She gots all her degrees. She don’t need no help and says we don’t either.” Furthermore, it was not surprising that the girls were angered by the staffs desire to steer them away from a reliance on the state. All of them had family problems and repeat- edly had been cast out of their homes. Hence these survival networks were not an option for most of them. Moreover, the het- erosexual bonds that Carol's girls defended so militantly were problematic for these girls, They were at a disadvantage in the “heterosexual marketplace” that Carol Jack- son described as characteristic of the inner city. They had babies. They were mothers. They carried more baggage than others when they entered this marketplace. Thus it was harder for them to maneuver into the kinds of relationships that Carol’s girls en- tered and exited. Many told stories of being left by their homeboys when they became pregnant. They still dreamed about these men (many, like Tonya, continued to doodle mottoes like “Big Ken, little Kenny, and Tonya—a family forever”), but basically they were without men. It may be that these were Carol’s girls in a few years; they were Carol's girls once the men had disappeared. Thus they did not embrace Alliance's de- mand that they break their institutional de- pendence and “free” themselves from AFDC. Instead they were prompted to resist. Un- like Carol's girls, they did not protest by ap- propriating men or their femininity. Such re- sources were not available in the Alliance ‘environment. These girls had at their disposal other state institutions and their babies. These were the two sites of control. Not by chance, they were the sites upon which the girls mo- bilized their resistance to the staff. First, they used welfare. AFDC checks were a major source of conflict at Alliance. The staff withheld them to ensure that the girls did not grow accustomed to being cared for by the government. For the same reason, the girls were preoccupied with the checks. At the beginning of each month, fights erupted when they asked for accounts of the money. In doing so, they asserted that it was their money. They also regulated the staff by making them account for every penny. The staff never did so, and thus infuriated the girls. In one case, when the staff denied Tonya a new baby blanket, Tonya called the welfare office to report a stolen check. She asked the social worker to come to Alliance and investigate. Apparently when the social worker arrived, she took the staff by surprise. Tonya demanded that the woman receive an account of her checks. The social worker un- comfortably agreed to do so, to the outrage of the staff. The girls also used welfare in a more symbolic way. When they grew angry at the staff, they spoke of how they planned to be on welfare for the rest of their lives. In ef- fect, they appropriated the politically loaded “trope of the welfare mother” to protest. For instance, Rachel spent a great deal of time persuading the girls to take the GED, but the girls did not think she was preparing them well enough for the test. Thus whenever she raised the subject, they told her they didn't need to take it because AFDC would care for them. To annoy her, Tonya always sang “I'm on welfare and it’s gonna take care of me forever” to the tune of a popular rap song. The leading example of such appt priation was the girls’ Welfare Club, which originated in a house meeting at which the girls were accused of being too dependent. In defiance, Tonya started singing her wel- fare song. Debra interjected, reminding the others that they were in the same predica- ment; they should form a club, a Welfare Club. At first it was a joke, but then it mate- rialized, They held secret meetings. Prob- ably the girls did not talk about welfare at the meetings; the name was the important thing. It was a sign of their resistance, which clearly was scripted by the form of control exerted over them.772 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW The girls also used CYA, another state in- stitution, to resist. The staff feared CYA be- cause of its power to close down the home, and the girls played on this fear. When the staff did something the girls did not like, they threatened to call CYA. Maria was the only girl who followed through with this threat. After her escape from Alliance, she called CYA to report a series of rule viola- tions. The girls were thrilled when four CYA officers arrived the next day; all were men in suits. The girls met with them pri- vately to air their complaints. After the CYA men left, the girls refused to reveal to the nervous staff what they had told the men. The legacy of the Men in Suits lived on at Alliance. When the girls were angry, they said “I'll call the Men in Suits if you don’t watch it,” or “Those Men in Suits liked us, I’m gonna ask them to come back.” Their message to the staff was clear: Sometimes Men in Suits can help. In effect, the girls were learning how to utilize state institu- tions for their own ends—not what Alliance wanted to teach them. In addition, the girls called on the County Rules and Regulations Department to come to their rescue. One morning, this department called the staff. A girl in the home had made an anonymous call, reporting a series of li- censing violations, and they were sending an investigator to check the facility. During the ensuing cleaning frenzy, Mildred secretly ad- mitted to me that she had called. She was seven months pregnant and angry that the staff made her do chores: “They say all this shit about being self full. Forget it, it’s slave labor.” When the investigator arrived, she met alone with the girls and followed them around the home, listening to their com- plaints. The staff was furious, the girls were thrilled. Later, at the collective meeting, the official scolded the staff for making the girls do chores; it was forced labor and hence ille- gal. The girls looked on, smiling trium- phantly. After the meeting Nikita whispered to me: “We done told Alliance today, didn’t we?” Indeed, they had done so, in at least two ways. They told the staff that the way they ran the facility was “uncool” and, more important, that they could mobilize other state forces to come to their aid. Finally, just as the staff appropriated the babies to relay their message, the girls mo- bilized their babies to fight the staff. They used their babies to reassert a definition of themselves as mothers above all else, thereby inverting the staff’s ordering of their priorities. “I can’t do that, my baby needs me” was the most common line I heard. In saying this, the girls proclaimed that the staff's demands were secondary to those of their babies, especially when the demand pertained to proving they were “self full.” This scenario was played out most of- ten in the classroom. One way in which Rachel tried to foster initiative in the girls was to give them an assignment and then leave the room. She claimed that this pro- vided them with the chance to “do it on their own.” The girls knew that these were tests, moments when they had to demon- strate that their priorities were in order. Without fail, they turned to their babies at these times. When Rachel returned, they told her they had not worked because “Kenny was crying” or “Chris needed a bottle.” Yet the deeper message was their contempt for the house theme of initiative. The girls communicated this message through the babies, just as the staff sent its message to them. Hence, at Alliance, forms of control were connected to forms of resistance. Yet the pattern at Alliance was quite different from that involving Carol and her girls. The con- text was not the same; this facility and its relationship to the surrounding community were different. This context produced its own distinct gender regime, which centered around state dependency and reliance. Yet despite these differences, the outcomes of the two regimes were strikingly similar. Like Carol’s girls, the Alliance girls evalu- ated the agenda and found it threatening. In response, they also emphasized what they had: their ability to mobilize Men in Suits, the welfare office, and their babies. In the end, they utilized exactly what Alliance tried to discourage; they embraced precisely what Alliance wanted to undermine. This was made clear in my last interaction with the girls on the day of my departure. I asked them what they planned to do, once re- leased. Tonya, Lakisha, and Mildred each said they wanted to have two more babies. Mildred said that babies made her feel “somethin’ special.” Tonya planned to con-‘THE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE 773 tinue the Welfare Club on the outside. “I’m on welfare and it’s gonna take care of me forever,” she sang, checking to see if Rachel was listening. Mildred agreed, laughing They had learned well. CONCLUSION The conceptualization of the state and its re- lation to women, as presented in this ethnog- raphy, differs in important ways from pre- vailing macro-level feminist theories of the state. First, by moving to the level of state practice, I reveal how the state is a differen- tiated body composed of multiple institu- tional contexts. The particular “arm” of the state examined here, the juvenile justice sys- tem, is characterized by a dualism in which two distinct apparatuses operate: a coercive apparatus governed by punishment and force, and a permissive apparatus governed by dis- cipline and rules. In this way, the forms of control exerted over clients vary by appara- tus. They also oppose one another. The Pro- bation Department is not only different from Juvenile Hall but is in conflict with it; Alli- ance is not merely an alternative to CYA but stands in opposition to it. Moreover, a dual- ism exists within this larger dualism. Differ- ent forms of control characterize even the “alternative” apparatus. On the one side is Carol Jackson with her attacks on homeboys and “private” patriarchy; on the other, Al ance with its battles against institutional de- pendence and “public” patriarchy. These du- alisms problematize prevailing conceptions of the state as a homogeneous, singular “structure.” They suggest that it may be more fruitful to conceive of the state as fragmented and layered, with various sites of control and resistance. Second, by shifting the feminist focus to state practice, I complicate classic models of the state’s gender regime. The ethno- graphic data presented here call into ques- tion the socialist feminist understanding of the state as an entity with a uniform, mascu- line agenda to impose on women. My analy- sis unearthed multiple agendas for women, and demonstrated how they are institution- ally constituted and contested by female cli- ents, These state actors’ agendas are shaped by the institutional terrains on which they work—terrains that provide them with par- ticular visions of what endangers women For probation officers, that vision includes men and homeboys; for the Alliance staff, it encompasses state institutions, These then inform their agendas for their clients. They prompt probation officers to attack “private” patriarchy by demanding independence from men, and the staff of the group home to attack “public” patriarchy by insisting on independence from state bodies. Moreover, this is not imposed on female clients in a “top down” fashion; the girls are active agents. They evaluate these messages and fight back by appropriating and inverting them. Regulation and resistance are closely connected; together they constitute patterns. In this way, the girls’ socialization is a ne- gotiated process, the product of institution- ally fashioned modes of control and contes- tation. ‘Atthe same time, the patterns of regulation and resistance captured here diverge from those described in recent feminist scholarship on the state. In an attempt to restore agency to feminist state theory, these scholars high- light the unintended effects of the state’s gen- der regime and the interactive quality of women’s relations with that regime (Gordon 1988, 1990; Morgen 1990; Piven 1990). Overall the patterns of interaction articulated in their work consist of a state that tries to advance male dominance as women under- mine it—a state that attempts to reproduce female dependence while women use state re- sources to organize or gain power in the home. Yet the patterns I discovered in this study are the reverse: State actors try to un- dercut “patriarchal” social relations, while female clients defend those relations. Al- though female clients are strategic actors in my analysis, they strategize to salvage their “dependent” relations with the state. This di- vergence should not be read as suggesting that feminist theory take these patterns as more characteristic of the state’s relation to women. Rather, it suggests that we should become more attuned to the many possible forms of these interactions, and less fixed in our notions of the state’s interests in women or (for that matter) women’s interests in the state. Finally, I propose here that the state be conceptualized as interactive in yet another sense—as an institution that itself is situated74 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW in a larger social context. The patterns of control and resistance outlined in this study were not examined in isolation from the larger inner-city community. These patterns are deeply embedded in and responsive to that surrounding community; both control and resistance are shaped by the urban con- text. Carol Jackson's evaluation of the inner city and what endangered her girls within it led to her preoccupation with homeboys and other mothers. Alliance’s understanding of this community and what threatened its girls there gave rise to its focus on welfare and state dependency. On the other side, Carol’s girls’ understandings of their communities and what was empowering in them produced their defense of femininity and heterosexual- ity. Likewise, the material realities of Alliance's girls’ lives generated their insis tence on the usefulness of Men in Suits and babies. These patterns of control and res tance are propelled by conflicting views of the community and of appropriate survival strategies within it. Only by uncovering and contextualizing these different positions can one understand their interactions within these institutions. In this way, the feminist conceptualization of the state that I have pro- posed here would work on multiple levels and would allow us to examine interactions among state apparatuses, between state ac- tors and female clients, and between state in- stitutions and the communities surrounding them Lynne Haney is a Ph.D. candidate in the Depart- ‘ment of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted empirical research ‘on gender and the state in the United States and in Eastern Europe. Her dissertation examines the gender regimes of three successive Hungarian welfare systems from the inception of state social- ism to the present. Her publications include "But We Are Still Mothers: Gender and the Construc- tion of Need in Postsocialist Hungary,” in Eth- nographies of Transition (edited by M. Burawoy and K. Verdery, forthcoming) and “From Proud Worker to Good Mother: Gender, the State, and Regime Change in Hungary” (Frontiers, 1994, vol. 14, pp. 113-50). Appendix. Power, Identity, and Intervention in the Field: The Limits of Reflexivity This ethnography is based on fieldwork I conducted from February to November 1992 in a juvenile Pro- bation Department and in Alliance, a group home for Incarcerated teen mothers. My decision to research these state agencies was motivated by theory. Be- ‘cause the criminal justice system intervenes directly people’s lives to transform “deviant” women into ‘acceptable” women, it was an ideal context for ex- mining the state's gender regime. I chose to work in the juvenile arm of this system because I believed it would provide a clearer view of this socialization process; I predicted that the state's articulation and imposition of gender norms would be most evident when applied to young women, Within the juvenile system, I selected the Probation Department and Al- liance on the basis of several criteria. Because these agencies had distinct organizational structures, they ‘enabled me to examine whether the institutional set- ting affected the gender messages relayed to female clients. At the same time, the agencies were located, in the same “alternative” juvenile justice apparatus, and both took a long-term, rehabilitative approach to clients, These similarities and differences made them perfect comparative cases for my theoretical interests. I began my research in the Probation Department by conducting interviews with the head of the divi- sion, the Department supervisor, and two probation officers. In these interviews I discovered that Carol Jackson was responsible for the female clientele; she dealt with the great majority of girls on probation and gave lectures on how to approach female clients. ‘Thus I decided to work with Carol as her assistant. My duties were twofold: 1 organized Department events and assisted Carol with her caseload. The first type of work put me in contact with other POs, allowing me to compare their approach with Carol's and to ensure that my findings were generalizable. ‘The second type of work placed me in contact with Carol's clients. I began by sitting in on their meet- ings and simply observing how they interacted. Wi time I became closer to the clients, cornering them before and after appointments and taking them to a nearby restaurant. By the end of the nine months, I had met nearly all of Carol's clients and had ob- setved hundreds of meetings between her and these young women, At Alliance I conducted initial interviews with those in charge of the facility, including the direc- tor, the house manager, the head counselor, and the teacher. After these interviews, I began to work as an academic tutor for the young women. From the onset, I was immersed in the everyday life of the home. In the morning I attended the girls’ classes and assisted them with their schoolwork. In the af- ternoon I “hung out” with them in the living room of the home. Once a week I accompanied them on trips to parks, libraries, and shops. I also maintainedTHE STATE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE 718 contact with the eight staff members, talking to them about the home and their positions there. By the end of my stay, I was attending house and staff meet- ings, and thus gained a sense of the full range of re- lations in the home. The most common methodological questions raised by the sociologists and feminist scholars who have commented on this ethnography revolved around two issues, both related to reflexivity. First, some questioned why I, the ethnographer, seem to be absent from the text. They wanted to know how my own social background affected me in the field, and thus encouraged me to situate my knowledge claims socially. Second, others suggested that I ex- amine how my research subjects viewed the work They wondered whether my interpretations meshed with these women's, and hence urged me to allow them to “gaze back” at the ethnographic product. Both of these calls for increased reflexivity must be understood in relation to developments in femi- nist methodology. Early feminist methodological work was premised on the notion of a “woman's standpoint”—the assumption that if we elicited our social inquiries from the actualities of women’s lives and employed more closely connected research prac- tices, the androcentric bias of much traditional so- cial science would be overcome (Hartsock 1987; Smith 1987). This assumption subsequently was problematized by what Harding (1991) called the “fall of Universal Woman""—that is, the recognition that women are situated on multiple axes which in- tersect to unite and divide us. This led (0 a rethink. ing of “woman's standpoint” and to the development of mixed, flexible, and partial perspectives (Collins 1991; Haraway 1991; Sandoval 1991), Many femi- nist scholars then suggested that we “socially situ ate” our knowledge claims by locating the positions, from which we speak (Fonow and Cook 1991; Rein- harz 1992; Rose 1994), This rethinking also spaw- ned discussions of the relationship between power and knowledge: how the power embedded in the re- search process may be located in the “knower’s” po- sition, not simply in the knower’s gender (Stacey 1988). As a result, feminist scholars began to call for increased dialogue between the researcher and the researched, to be achieved by exchanging re~ search products and sharing interpretive power (Har ding 1991), In this context, the feminist move toward greater reflexivity is quite understandable. In the abstract, it also seems to be a promising way of addressing the limitations of early feminist methodological work. As | moved to the level of practice, however, nu- merous problems surfaced. I found it almost impos: sible to situate my knowledge claims socially be. cause I occupied so many positions in the research, Moreover, my recognition of the relationship be- tween power and knowledge ultimately convinced me of the danger involved in returning the text to those I studied. From my earliest interactions with these women, our differences were apparent. In our first meeting, Carol Jackson spoke almost entirely about inner-city life, using the “we” to refer only to herself, her girls, and the community. She referred continually to the academic “ivory tower” and how it was “out of touch.” It was obvious that no matter what I did, she ‘would associate me with this tower. At Alliance, the initial dividing lines were even sharper. On my first day, the girls ignored me; they spoke to each other in rap and refused to respond to me. I was devastat- ed when, at the end of the day, I overheard them dis- cussing how I tipped the balance of power in the staff's favor: “They gots more of them than we got of us now,” as Lakisha remarked. It would be naive to think that I ever transcended these divisions, and it would be easy for me to ana- lyze how these “locations” shaped my work. Such an analysis would be too simplistic, however; throughout the fieldwork, these divisions intersect- ed with others to complicate the picture. With Car- ol, age was also an important social location. Be- cause I was only slightly older than her clients, I was, often subjected to her counseling. Whenever I told her a story she disapproved of, she yelled, “Girl, haven't you learned anything from me?” Thus, al- though I was connected to the ivory tower, I was also just a “girl.” At the same time, age allied me with her clients; they often turned to me for genera- tional support in their battles with Carol. At other times it seemed that race was the most important shaping force, as on the day when Carol and I inter- viewed an African American girl at Juvie, who fix- ated on me and glared at me angrily. I felt that I was becoming whiter and whiter as each minute passed. At other times, my class background was at the cen- ter. My mother was herself a teen mother, who struggled for much of my childhood. Carol always drew on this fact, telling me that it was why I could “see so much” and “understand. My position was even more uncertain at Alliance. There I engaged in a balancing act, moving continu- ally between “them” and “us.” Many staff members were well educated, with graduate training; some were also self-proclaimed “radical feminists.” Our ability to connect on these planes placed the facility in a new light for me. Other axes were central with the girls, although they, too, were multiple and changing. Race and class seemed very often to be determinant. The girls frequently spoke in rap, re- ferring to people and places of which I was igno- rant. Thus my lens was partial. It was also contextu- al, and grew cloudier when we went for walks in the neighborhood. In the home, however, the dynamics of the facility and the ethos of autonomy colored our positions. Because I never pressured the girls to be “self full,” I was more “in”—or, as Nikita once said, “one of the only bitches in this place who gives a shit about us.” Also, when the babies were around, my interest in them and my maternal yearnings made776 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW me an “insider” with the girls. In short, I never knew clearly how my “ong line of adjectives” affected me in the field. My position ‘was quite situational and variable. As Thorne (1993) argues, identity is not a static phenomenon. It chang- es with context; some contexts draw out certain as- pects of our “selves” and mute others. Because of this flexibility, I found it difficult to locate myself socially in my work. It was also nearly impossible to determine how these locations affected my analy- sis. AS a woman who had had negative experiences with the male staff at Juvenile Hall, was I more sen- sitive to the divisions in the system? Maybe. As the daughter of a teenage mother, was I more attuned to the girls’ resistances? Maybe. As a well-educated woman, did I identify with the Alliance staff and underestimate their control? Maybe. As a White ‘woman, have I repressed cultural stereotypes about the sexuality of women of color and hence have fix- ated on this aspect of their relations with the state? I hope not. All of this is to say that socially situating, ‘our knowledge claims is not always feasible, or even particularly useful, in practice. In my work, it would have entailed presenting a still life of continually shifting relations, encountered different problems with the second kind of reflexivity: returning my text to the women I studied to elicit their reflections on us. Here I had to consider the interpersonal and social power that my text could wield over these women, and how it might disrupt their lives further. With Carol Jack- son, I was concerned with the potentially hurtful consequences of the text. Carol was quite insecure about her weight, and reading about her girls’ mock- ery could have hurt her. Moreover, Carol takes great pride in her work. She has numerous family prob- lems and, to lessen her feeling of failure, assures herself that she does well by her “girls.” And she does so; her commitment to these young women de- mands respect. Yet I wondered whether she would find this respect in the text, buried beneath the de- scriptions of mocking resistance. Exposing her to such mockery then felt like a power move, even if I had the intention of sharing the power of represen- tation, ‘At Alliance I was concerned about the social pow- er of my text, particularly for the girls. These young. women revealed many secrets to me and contributed ‘great deal to my analysis. Yet their information could have come back to harm them. It might have caused them immediate trouble for calling in the Men in Suits and forming the Welfare Club. In the long run, it might have taught the staff how to con- trol them better. Although I am sure the girls con- sidered this possibility before revealing anything to me, I analyzed their experience in ways not known to them, My theorizing then had strategic potential for the staff. Handing it over, even in the name of, reflexivity, seemed unjustifiable. My attempt (0 be intellectually democratic might have had unintend- ed consequences; I was not willing to take the risk In the end, for all of these reasons, a move to- ward greater “reflexivity” seemed neither feasible nor desirable in my fieldwork. Yet these reserva- tions do not apply to all research and should not be read as a dismissal of the feminist conception of re- flexivity. Rather, they suggest that reflexivity be un- derstood in relation to specific research settings. My research was unique in that I worked with diverse groups of women who were allied and divided in complex ways. They differed even in their under- standings of these alliances and divisions; their def- initions of “us” and “them” varied. These dynamics appealed to my interests as a feminist researcher in complicated ways. My commitment to “listening to women’s voices” placed me on all sides—on the side of the probation officers, the staff of the group home, and the young women. This situation in- creased my awareness of the shifting nature of my ‘own identity, and of the social and interpersonal power of my text. These complications might not have surfaced had I interacted with only one of these “sides,” or had I worked in a field where “us” and “them” were demarcated more clearly. Accord- ingly, rather than holding out reflexivity as the ulti- mate goal, I suggest that it be conceptualized more contextually. 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