On his book Overthrowing the Queen: Telling Stories of Welfare in America
Cover Interview of August 05, 2020
The wide angle
The idea for this book started at a cocktail party. It was
April 2011, just over a year after Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As
ACA continued to be tweaked, conversations about healthcare remained common and
heated. I was prepared for arguments against universal healthcare, but I was
not prepared to hear a story I thought had died out in the 1980s about “welfare
queens” buying steaks for their dogs while wearing fur coats and driving
Cadillacs. And yet here I was, almost forty years later, hearing the same
story, this time used to deny the poor affordable healthcare.
Up until this point, my research had focused primarily on
sacred narratives: the creation stories and prophecies of the Mississippi Band
of Choctaw Indians, the stories of personal revelation among Latter-day Saints.
Hearing this story, I realized that stories of the American Dream and The
Welfare Queen operated similarly: as foundational stories to explain the world.
Overthrowing the Queen is situated within the
contested area of perception and reality that narrative so often negotiates. It
is not difficult to show that the stories of outrageous fraud are
representative of neither the majority, nor even a significant minority of aid
recipients. Why then do we continue to tell them? Answers lie not only in our
political system and our inability to see structural inequity, but in the
nature of stories and storytelling.
Narrative is not value-neutral. Stories demand
complications, climaxes, and resolution. They require protagonists and
antagonists. The asks narrators to position themselves in relation to the
actions and actors in their stories. And they ask us to do this in culturally specific
ways, shaping our experiences to fit the narrative traditions we have grown up
with. It is a self-perpetuating cycle that operates powerfully but often invisibly.
I approach these stories primarily as a folklorist,
attending to theories about narrative construction and transmission that help
answer questions about why some stories stick with us and get retold again and
again while others fall on deaf ears. In asking these questions, however, I
draw heavily on research in anthropology, communications, rhetoric, psychology,
and sociology.
While the book is very much about the stories people tell
about welfare, it also serves as a case study to consider larger questions
about the nature of narrative, storytelling, and legend, particularly within
everyday discourse. For examples, for decades scholars have approached legend
in terms of truth. It is doubt, however, that defines the legend. A
doubt-centered approach to legend goes a long way to explaining how stories can
open up discourse for debate. Similarly, a performance-centered approach to
narrative helps us move beyond simple textual analysis to consider the role
that public perception and stigma have on the stories we choose to tell and how
we tell them. Further, structural analysis reveals a host of narrative types
that have been under-theorized, particularly generalized experience narratives
that allow people to recount memorable events as habitual, widespread
experiences.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
The idea for this book started at a cocktail party. It was April 2011, just over a year after Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As ACA continued to be tweaked, conversations about healthcare remained common and heated. I was prepared for arguments against universal healthcare, but I was not prepared to hear a story I thought had died out in the 1980s about “welfare queens” buying steaks for their dogs while wearing fur coats and driving Cadillacs. And yet here I was, almost forty years later, hearing the same story, this time used to deny the poor affordable healthcare.
Up until this point, my research had focused primarily on sacred narratives: the creation stories and prophecies of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, the stories of personal revelation among Latter-day Saints. Hearing this story, I realized that stories of the American Dream and The Welfare Queen operated similarly: as foundational stories to explain the world.
Overthrowing the Queen is situated within the contested area of perception and reality that narrative so often negotiates. It is not difficult to show that the stories of outrageous fraud are representative of neither the majority, nor even a significant minority of aid recipients. Why then do we continue to tell them? Answers lie not only in our political system and our inability to see structural inequity, but in the nature of stories and storytelling.
Narrative is not value-neutral. Stories demand complications, climaxes, and resolution. They require protagonists and antagonists. The asks narrators to position themselves in relation to the actions and actors in their stories. And they ask us to do this in culturally specific ways, shaping our experiences to fit the narrative traditions we have grown up with. It is a self-perpetuating cycle that operates powerfully but often invisibly.
I approach these stories primarily as a folklorist, attending to theories about narrative construction and transmission that help answer questions about why some stories stick with us and get retold again and again while others fall on deaf ears. In asking these questions, however, I draw heavily on research in anthropology, communications, rhetoric, psychology, and sociology.
While the book is very much about the stories people tell about welfare, it also serves as a case study to consider larger questions about the nature of narrative, storytelling, and legend, particularly within everyday discourse. For examples, for decades scholars have approached legend in terms of truth. It is doubt, however, that defines the legend. A doubt-centered approach to legend goes a long way to explaining how stories can open up discourse for debate. Similarly, a performance-centered approach to narrative helps us move beyond simple textual analysis to consider the role that public perception and stigma have on the stories we choose to tell and how we tell them. Further, structural analysis reveals a host of narrative types that have been under-theorized, particularly generalized experience narratives that allow people to recount memorable events as habitual, widespread experiences.