Foucault's genealogy is applied to the analysis of welfare-to-work policy and media representations of female-headed families. Discourses of personal responsibility in the history of welfare services and current media representations are analyzed and connected to ideologies of economic citizenship and freedom for female-headed families. A present truth of female-headed families is constructed: female-headed, living in poverty, utilizing welfare services, destructive to the social order and majority African-American. The history of female-headed families and welfare is a development of a knowledge system about single-parent families. This knowledge system is produced by cultural institutions that impose particular meanings on female-headed families as a strategy for controlling poor populations and expunging undeserving poor from social services. Disciplinary mechanisms, both moral and economic, have been transformed to primarily economic mechanisms of self-sufficiency and individual responsibility. Economic mechanisms of control articulated with freedom, citizenship and financial stability have allowed for the emergence of a normative single-parent family. The normative single-parent family is white, female-headed, middle-class and self-sufficient. Analysis of the articulation of welfare-to-work policies post 1996 reform and representations of female-headed families in television and film between 1992 and 2002 is produced in this work. The consequences of welfare-to-work and representations of normative female-headed family are articulated and produce a low-wage labor pool that benefits industry and reproduces the marginalization of single-parent families on welfare.

American adolescents watch an average of 3.5 hours of television and movies everyday; many attend more than one movie a month. Adolescents as a group watch more movies than any other group of the population, yet little research has been done on what is shown in teen movies. Adolescence is a time when values, beliefs, and opinions are formed and the media has been found to be a place that adolescents find information that can influence the construction of these identities. While there has been a vast amount of research looking at the family as portrayed on television shows, there has been little research done on film families. More specifically, there has not been an examination of the family as seen in movies targeted towards the teen audience. Through the use of a content analysis, this thesis reviews three decades of families as depicted in teen films, focusing specifically on five areas: family structure, ethnicity, occupation and children, socio-economic status, and parental depictions. This thesis includes a sample of the 90 top-grossing teen movies made during the 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s (2000-2007) and includes a total of 139 different families. Results indicate that the typical family as depicted in a teen movie, is a middle-class, Caucasian, dual or single-parent family with one or two children; dad is a working professional and mom stays at home. The parents are adequate in their parenting skills and are authoritative in their parenting style. The results of this thesis are compared to findings of past studies regarding television families and against U.S. census data. The implications of the results of this thesis are discussed through the lens of cultivation theory.