Articulations of Health and Poverty Among Women on WIC

Abstract

With the global financial meltdown, the crisis of poverty has deepened in communities across the United States. This essay reports results from a culture-centered project on fostering spaces for listening to the voices of the poor in CrossRoads County, Indiana. It highlights the intersections of health and poverty as they emerge from the narratives of mothers utilizing the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Depression, humiliation, and inaccessibility to health care and healthy living outline the struggles of women as they negotiate their access to health. The articulations of agency are situated around competing cultural narratives that, on the one hand, draw on the threads of individual responsibility which resonate through mainstream discourses of poverty in the United States and, on the other hand, interrogate the structural erasure of the basic capacities of health.

Notes

¹ The North refers to the centers of wealth, modernity, and economic growth in the material flows of global power, referring to democratic capitalist economies that are classified in the development framework as developed countries. In contrast, the South refers to the underdeveloped and developing countries within the development framework. The North–South divide also reiterates a differential in the distribution of power and material resources in the global economy.