210115 SE M8: Gender, welfare, state: feminist perspectives on a tense relationship (2025W)

The welfare state is commonly associated with social security and social benefits aimed at promoting the general well-being of citizens. In contrast to such normative ideas, critical political and social scientists have highlighted the contradictory and ambivalent role of the welfare state in reproducing and securing, but also in potentially mitigating social inequalities along the social categories of gender, race, and class.

Feminist activists and scholars have similarly maintained a political-strategic skepticism toward the welfare state. On the one hand, they critically note that the welfare state, through its policies, institutions, and discourses, constructs women as “dependent” on wage-earning men, thereby further normalizing and institutionalizing patriarchal divisions of labor and gender relations. On the other hand, the state continues to be seen as one central addressee of feminist politics and demands for protection from gender-based violence and gender equality. The fact that women make up a significant share of welfare recipients and are employed by the state in large numbers, often for reproductive tasks such as childcare and healthcare, has further added to feminists' interest in the welfare state.

The course departs from this historical tension and analyzes — historically, empirically, and conceptually — the welfare state from a gender-critical political science perspective. It deals with the following questions:

In what context did the welfare state emerge in the Global North? How can its historical and structural relationship to patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and colonialism, but also to democracy and equality, be described?
How do welfare state policies affect women? What differences can be observed along the social categories of class and race?
How can the neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state and its consequences for women and other marginalized groups be described? What new or changed meanings do terms such as “welfare,” “social assistance,” and “social assistance recipient” take on in this context?
What potential does the welfare state have to provide answers to the intertwined, multiple (economic, socio-reproductive, ecological, and humanitarian) crises and old-new social trends (e.g., militarization and authoritarianism)? Where are its limits, and to what extent does it itself trigger or accelerate crises?
How can the welfare state be conceptualized in feminist-materialist, state-theoretical, and hegemony-critical terms? To what extent can such a conceptualization of the welfare state help to empirically capture and politically challenge social conditions of exploitation and oppression?
To what extent are the welfare state and social policy currently being reinterpreted by right-wing populist parties? (Keyword: welfare chauvinism)
Is a feminist and anti-racist welfare state possible?

The method of the course is thorough and critical engagement (i.e., reading, understanding, reproducing, discussing) with all required readings and the completion of various assignments (see below).