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This chapter explores the parental experiences of 21 mothers of young and/or adult children who have been diagnosed with developmental disabilities (DD). Specific attention is paid to mothers’ reflections on marginalization, stress, and resiliency. Intersectionality of marginalization was explored with a select number of participants who identified with minority racial groups, with the LGBTQ community, and/or as a single or young mother. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews and analyzed using the constant comparative method. Eighteen mothers reported experiencing elevated levels of stress specifically related to challenges associated with DD; the need for greater investments of time and money was emphasized. However, nearly every participant highlighted stories of resilience and acclimation to these challenges associated with raising a child with DD. Thirteen mothers overtly discussed experiences of discrimination and marginalization. Some of these scenarios included being stared at or criticized in public, being excluded from social events, and facing discrimination within school settings. Select participants from marginalized backgrounds (being as a young parent, or as Black, single, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender) provided insight into how layers of marginalization negatively impacted their parental experiences. These personal accounts provide additional evidence that mothers of children with DD experience courtesy stigma. In addition, they provide a holistic illustration of motherhood experiences that does not center on only negative or positive aspects. Finally, the reports of mothers who identified with multiple marginalized identities strengthen the call for additional empirical focus on intersectionality as it concerns mothers of children with DD.

Transgender people experience significant health and healthcare disparities in comparison to cisgender people. Limited access to quality, trans-competent healthcare in the USA is a central social determinant of these inequities. In this chapter, we expand on the burgeoning literature on accountability structures and transgender healthcare through an analysis of individual interviews with cisgender medical providers about their and their colleagues’ capacity to provide trans-competent healthcare. First, we find that providers report unfamiliarity and uncertainty concerning transgender people, their healthcare needs, and related issues. Although providers regard such ignorance as a structural problem within medical education and practice, the solutions they proffer rely on the benevolence and personal initiative of individual providers to seek out trans-specific information and training. This upholds the boundaries between what is considered “normal” (i.e., cisgender centered) healthcare and trans-competent healthcare. Second, we find that cisgender medical providers who want to provide quality healthcare to transgender people engage in emotion work that prioritizes the comfort and ignorance of their cisgender colleagues and inhibits institutional change. In sum, we argue that, regardless of their intentions, cisgender providers engage in practices that maintain healthcare as a cisnormative accountability structure and, in turn, contribute to the persistence of transgender health and healthcare disparities.

Current data suggest that the homeschooling community is a diverse and growing social movement, varying demographically in terms of race, religion, socioeconomic status, and political beliefs. However, with over 68% of the homeschooling population being non-Hispanic White – a group not accustomed to systemic oppression and racial marginalization – the homeschooling narrative reflected in research is often skewed by the socioeconomic status, political power, and cultural interests of White, two-parent, middle-class homeschooling households. Amidst increasingly amiable responses toward homeschooling, Black families of varying socioeconomic backgrounds have shown interest in becoming home educators. Included in this chapter are their lesser-told accounts – narratives from the primary homeschooling parent – Black mothers. Relying on 20 in-depth interviews, this study utilizes the theoretical frames of systemic gendered racism, intersectionality, and the coding procedures of grounded theory methods to analyze the narratives of Black homeschooling mothers. Overlooking the experiences and concerns of marginally represented homeschooling families such as Black homeschoolers can haphazardly reproduce social inequalities and/or fracture the homeschooling movement along stratified categories. Findings underscore homeschooling as a classed and gendered process and draw attention to the specific racialized boundaries and indignities that obstruct Black mothers’ educational and parenting goals. The author explains how Black women navigate systemic marginalization while homeschooling.

In the United States, welfare-to-work workers are under scrutiny from everyone and must defend the program if they want to defend themselves as good workers and good people. I build on past research that has examined how workers manage their emotions to cope with dilemmas in their jobs in a number of settings including hospitals, nursing homes, restaurants, and airplanes.

In this chapter, I draw on data from an in-depth case study of a rural North Carolina (USA) welfare office using data primarily from observations and interviews with 19 welfare-to-work workers.

Within this highly constrained and contradictory work environment, workers recreate and redefine themselves as good workers and good people while simultaneously punishing program participants. To achieve this difficult task, workers manage their emotions through two key strategies, using institutionalized rhetoric and tough love paternalism, to justify their actions toward participants.

I add to the existing literature by examining how welfare-to-work workers cope with the emotional and moral dilemmas of their jobs.