ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the correlative implications of the concept of father ‘absence’ for the mother who either elects to parent with another woman or who chooses or is forced to parent alone. It deals with unearthing the various ways in which mothers who are perceived as wilfully keeping the father from the child are constructed and responded to within social, political and legal discourse. The chapter highlights how social and legal discourses differentiate the treatment meted out to lone mothers on the basis of their construction as either deserving or undeserving of reasonable legal and social support. It demonstrates that the law responds to women who are constructed as renouncing the norm of heterosexuality by rendering their families as outside the socially acceptable and legally endorsed family form. Women who are constituted as wilfully rejecting the father and all the traditional trappings associated with that status are represented in both social and legal discourses in a derogatory manner.
