ABSTRACT
I traced in chapter 1 the emergence of work that has brought into the socio-legal gaze the plurality and contingency of discourses which speak of men and masculinities across diverse institutional and cultural contexts pertaining to law. Building on this approach, I argued against an essentialist conceptualisation of the ‘masculinity of law’, an idea that has served to erase much of the complexity and heterogeneity of the personal lives of women and men. Related to this, I questioned readings of men, law and gender that pass over the complex and double-edged nature of legal regulation itself. In this chapter, and in chapter 7, I consider in more detail a topic that has become a focal point for much contemporary political and policy debate around law and gender – fatherhood. The question of how the gender of men is conceptualised has a particular
bearing on the relationship between law and men’s parenting in two significant respects. First, fatherhood is a topic central both to the interdisciplinary literature on men and masculinities discussed in chapter 1 and the study of masculinity as it has developed within the discipline of law. Fatherhood has become a key site for interrogation of the conceptual basis of masculinity and with it, following my argument in chapter 1, consideration of the place of law in relation to the reproduction of gender relations. Fatherhood has also become the subject of a now voluminous literature in its own right.2 Second, the theme of
1 M. Fineman, The Autonomy Myth, New York: The New Press, 2004, p 195. 2 B. Featherstone, Contemporary Fathering: Theory, Policy and Practice, Cambridge: Policy Press, 2009; E. Dermott, Intimate Fatherhood: A Sociological Analysis, London: Routledge, 2008; D. Lupton and L. Barclay, Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and Experiences, London: Sage, 1997; B. Hobson (ed), Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of
fatherhood and law, which I explore in more detail in chapter 7, has been central to contemporary debates about the politics of law and gender. Law has had a particular significance in high-profile public and political conversations that have interlinked questions about men’s rights and responsibilities to concerns about changing families, crime and social order.3 What fathers do (and what they don’t do) has been seen as a causal factor in a range of social problems and, for some, what is at stake in these contestations is no less than the future of the ‘family’ and, indeed, society.4 What this literature has tended not to address, however, I have argued elsewhere,5 with Sally Sheldon, is the representation of law itself within readings of men and gender, nor has it explained how a mutually constituted crisis around fatherhood and masculinities has drawn on problematic assumptions about the nature of law and legal regulation. I shall return to these issues below. I argue in this chapter that the reframing of the relationship between law
and gender resulting from the rise of formal equality agendas and gender neutrality, discussed in chapter 1, has been a key feature of a reconstruction of fatherhood as a social problem and object of intervention for law.6 The emergence of a policy agenda around ‘engaging fathers’, detailed below, is set against the backdrop of an intensification of social concern about the scope of fathers’ legal responsibilities and rights. How to promote ongoing, positive and ‘healthy’ relationships between men and children is, of course, a subject with a long and well-documented history.7 In recent years, however, the question has become a ubiquitous feature of diverse cultural texts, raising issues about how law regulates family practices. In relation to married and
3 R. Collier, Masculinities, Crime and Criminology, London: Sage, 1998, ch 5. 4 Centre for Social Justice, The Family Law Review Interim Report, London: Centre for Social Justice, 2008. ‘The Decline of Marriage Harms the whole nation’, Editorial, Daily Telegraph, 18 November 2008. Contrast, in the United States, D. Blakenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, New York: Basic Books, 1995. Cf R. R. Daniels (ed), Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998.
