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45 J. Soc. & Soc. Welfare 196 (2018)
Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and out on the Silver Screen

handle is hein.journals/jrlsasw45 and id is 788 raw text is: 196 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare neglected by traditional quantitative research. This spurs us toward higher valuing of qualitative study and rethinking the need for balance in quantitative assessment and service quality. Zhong Xin Nanjing University of Finance and Economics Stephen Pimpare, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen. Oxford University Press (2017), 342 pages, $35 (hardcover). Representations of poverty in the film industry step into the limelight in Stephen Pimpare's new book, Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens. I was excited to review this book, as I have a background in Film Studies in addition to my formal social work training. The suspension of disbelief is the practice of setting aside one's critical faculties to participate in escapism through fiction. Here, Pimpare calls on the reader to critical- ly investigate representations of poverty in film from the silent era to our modern times, in order to analyze how the selected films reflect social welfare policy and advocacy at the time of a film's production. Pimpare demonstrates that there are identifi- able tropes and stock characters within the genre of films about poverty, while highlighting that, in the real world, most of the poor in the United States are the working poor. Pimpare takes the position that the effect of these portrayals is more important than their intent, as the overwhelming ma- jority of filmmakers and writers do not have direct experience with poverty. Therefore, while the representations of the poor in film matter because they are influential, they all too often perpetuate stereotypes about poverty based on ignorance. This book is important because it conditions the viewer to look past the common reliance on an individual character's behavior to explain their poverty. We are educated on how social welfare policy often systematically reproduces poverty and how film plays its part both in disguising this fact and perpetuating the myths. The reader comes away more sensitive to how audiences

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