Discussions of personal responsibility are central to conservative U.S. efforts to restructure welfare and restrict the use of public safety net programs. These discourses rely on a neoliberal framing of responsibility as individual liability. In this thesis, I use the tools of discourse analysis to examine how responsibility for poverty is discussed within public and political discourses. In particular, I examine discourses and counter-discourses around Tennessee Senate Bill 132, a 2013 proposal to make families' welfare benefits contingent on children's academic performances. I argue that responses presented in opposition to this proposal rely on the same narrow conceptions of responsibility that are deployed by the bill's supporters. While these opposing discourses ultimately blame different parties, their parallel attempts to identify blameworthy individuals show how the liability model privileges individual responses of surveillance and punishment over structural analyses. This limited framework of responsibility is further reinforced by affective investment and sedimented attitudes about gender and race. I present a material and structural account of poverty in Tennessee as an alternative to these discourses.