ABSTRACT
Within a series of what might be termed ‘traditional’ functionalist approaches to the relationship between law and the family the institution of marriage has been understood to be central to ideas of social stability and cohesion (Eekelaar 1984, 1978). Recently, however, and from a broad range of very different perspectives, the position has emerged within the social sciences in which the idea of the heterosexual family has itself surfaced as a contested terrain, a site of competing discourses. This chapter1 seeks to explore the discursive construction of the heterosexual family ‘in crisis’. It does so, specifically, via an engagement with what I shall argue has been the reconceptualisation of fatherhood which has taken place within recent family law policy in Britain. What follows is, in a sense, about the unspoken ‘heterosexuality’ of fatherhood itself. It seeks to unpack assumptions about the relationship between male heterosexuality and fatherhood which, I shall suggest, have not simply been contained within but have been central to the debates which are presently taking place around the meaning of the ‘changing family’ and shifting ‘gender relations’ between women and men. In order to move beyond the dominant paradigms through which family change has been conceptualised by reference to ideas of ‘collapsing’, ‘reforming’ or ‘reconstituted’ families, this chapter seeks to engage with the complex-and under-researched-nature of the mutual constitution of heterosexuality, marriage and fatherhood within a range of discourses concerned with constituting the inside/outside of the boundaries of ‘family’. In so doing it seeks to challenge the ways in which a particular male subject has historically been encoded as, simultaneously, both ‘masculine’ and ‘heterosexual’. As the model of heterosexuality which this masculine subject has come to signify has become, I shall argue, increasingly problematic within recent debates, so too has the concept of fatherhood itself emerged as emblematic of some broader concerns, anxieties and tensions around the idea of the social at the end of the twentieth century.
