ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to contribute to these debates by considering how an embedding of gender neutrality and ideal of egalitarianism in law has played a key role ‘in the creation of a new set of norms for fatherhood’ within the context of shifting understandings of fathers’ rights and responsibilities around post-separation parenting. Drawing on a rather different literature from that which has informed much of the discussion to date, I shall suggest that the present political and policy debate around fathers’ rights has been marked by profound contradictions and tensions. On closer examination, these reflect a deep-seated cultural uncertainty about the nature of contemporary fathering itself. The structure of the argument is as follows. First, I will briefly ground this
discussion of fathers’ rights in the context of a broader, and multi-layered, ‘fragmentation’ of fatherhood in law. This theme is discussed in more detail in the book Fragmenting Fatherhood: A Socio-Legal Study and it is explored here in specific relation to these debates around separated fathers.7 Second,
Quarterly, 2005, vol 17, p 511; J.E. Crowley, ‘Adopting “equality tools” from the toolboxes of their predecessors: the fathers’ rights movement in the United States’, in R. Collier and S. Sheldon, ibid. For A. Diduck and F. Kaganas, Family Law, Gender and the State: Text, Cases and Materials (2nd edn, Oxford: Hart 2006), the ‘fathers’ rights campaigns [do] appear to have had the effect of galvanising the government and the courts into action against mothers whom they see as obstructive’, p 561.
