The policy panoptic of ‘mutual obligations’

Abstract

Australian Government policies of ‘mutual obligations‘ are based on the UK’s ‘Third Way’ and the ‘Workfare’ policies of the US. The discussion here is pertinent to the range of welfare reform initiatives adopted by Western governments over recent times. In this paper, I focus on the ‘mutual obligations‘ aspects of the Australian welfare reform agenda as Foucauldian ‘technologies’. A feminist and poststructuralist stance is adopted in outlining some developing theoretical arguments about the ways that Australian welfare reform initiatives position working class young women. I begin by discussing the ‘gaze’ and the ways the gaze is brought to bear on contemporary working class young women in Australia. In the second section, I discuss the panoptic mechanism and the specific features of the mechanism that correlate with Australian welfare reform initiatives containing mutual obligations. Thirdly, I discuss Foucauldian ‘technologies of the self’, ‘technologies of domination’2 and ‘governmentality’, focusing on how the policy panoptic of mutual obligations constructs particular subject locations for the contemporary hybrid subject3. My objective here in the initial stages of this project is to describe some of the theoretical resources I am using to think about mutual obligations policies.