Challenging Motherhood(s)

Julie Wallbank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317904519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

2nd and 3rd year core modules/courses on Family Policy and Comparative Social Policy. Also Women's Studies - 2nd and 3rd year core component of social policy. Challenging Motherhood examines contemporary social and legal constructions of motherhood in the context of a more general discussion of the future of families in Western and British society. The text looks at the ways in which Motherhood has come to be scrutinised and challenged according to a particular set of Western ideals as to what motherhood could and should entail.

Chapter 1

Theorizing mothers: a Foucauldian approach

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Everybody’s Mother

Of course,

everybody’s mother always and

so on …

Always never

loved you enough

or too smothering much.

Of course you were the Only One, your

mother

a machine

that shat out siblings, listen

everybody’s mother

was the original Frigidaire Icequeen clunking out

the hardstuff in nuggets, mirror

silvers and ice-splinters that’d stick

in your heart

Absolutely everyone’s mother

was artistic when she was young.

Everyone’s mother

was a perfumed presence with pearls, remote

white shoulders when she

bent over in her ball dress

to kiss you in your crib.

Everybody’s mother slept with the butcher

for sausages to stuff you with.

Everyone’s mother mythologised herself. You got mixed up

between dragon’s teeth and blackmarket stockings.

Naturally

she failed to give you

Positive Feelings

about your own sorry

sprouting body (it was a bloody shame)

but she did

sit up all night sewing sequins

on your carnival costume

so you would have a good time

and she spat

on the corner of her hanky and scraped

at your mouth with, sour lace till you squirmed

so you would look smart

And where

was your father all this time?

Away

at the war, or

in his office, or anyway conspicuous for his

Absence, so

what if your mother did

float around above you

big as a barrage balloon

blocking out the light?

Nobody’s mother can’t not never do nothing right.

(Lochhead 1984)

Liz Lochhead’s poem is used here to describe the ambivalent position of lone mothers in contemporary discourses on the lone mother headed household generally and on the politically hot issue of child support more specifically. On the one hand, lone mothers are constructed in recent social, legal and political debates as being unable to raise children adequately alone yet on the other hand when a relationship ends it is still expected that women will provide children with their day-to-day care. Moreover, they also become obliged to provide for their children in a financial sense if the estranged father refuses to do so and when the state demonstrates a reluctance to provide. Lochhead’s poem reflects the manner in which mothers generally are simultaneously vilified and revered. In many of the popular discourses on lone motherhood, particularly during the early 1990s, lone mothers are denied any reverence, the emphasis being upon the constructed failings of the lone mother. During the first years of the 1990s, lone mothers were subjected to a great deal of vilification in the press coverage of the post-separation family, the Child Support Act 1991 and in debates about ‘the family’ and lone motherhood more generally. In social and legal discourse, lone mothers were often constructed as the scourge of society for their alleged drain on public resources and for the alleged threat that they posed to the nuclear family, traditional masculine roles therein and to society as a whole. Political debates about lone motherhood, the post-separation family, non-residential fathers and the issue of child support were generated during a time in which ‘the hegemony of the theory of the underclass … is one of the triumphs of the New Right’ (Campbell 1993: 306). According to Campbell, the underclass theorists provided a name for all the people who disrupted Britain in the 1990s. Lone mothers or ‘single’ mothers (as popularly known) were regarded as part of the underclass. Lone mothers were held responsible for the decline in the traditional nuclear family. Women were seen as engineering the expulsion of fathers from the home for the sake of their own independence, even though their independence from men was likely to mean their living in impoverished conditions.¹ However, like Lochhead’s ‘Mother’, the lone mother of contemporary discourse is relied upon to fulfil all her children’s needs in the face of the non-presence of the father.

Political debates about the financial maintenance of children in the post-separation context constructed child support as a problem that was desperately in need of resolution. The government used statistical information to establish the extent of the problem of the growing number of lone mothers who were dependent upon the state for support. Statistics were also used to tell a ‘truth’ about the extent of the phenomenon that fathers were failing to provide for their children after the end of an adult relationship. The family was targeted as the best means of solving the ‘problem’. The first Child Support Act 1991, implemented in April 1993, was introduced in order to make more fathers pay for the financial maintenance of their children than had been the case under the previous system. The Act established a public body, the Child Support Agency, to enforce the legislation. I examine the socio-political context in which child support legislation was introduced, and I also consider the then Conservative government’s alleged intended trajectories for the Act as outlined in the original White Paper (HMSO 1990). I argue that one aim was given priority both in the legislation and in the enactment of the new law over and above the government’s other stated aims. That overriding aim was to reduce social security expenditure and to make fathers pay. I will show that the desired attainment of this single objective determined how lone mothers and non-residential fathers were constructed in social, political and legal discourse during the early 1990s.

For example, the then Conservative government stressed that there was a ‘public interest’ in ensuring that fathers remain financially responsible for their children. Within the discourse of a public interest, the taxpaying two-parent family was used as an example of being more deserving of public support than the lone mother headed household. I will show how lone parent families have been constructed and indeed continue to be constructed as being deviant units and not real families at all, and that as such they are constructed as less deserving than their two-parent counterparts. While the Child Support Act was predominantly concerned with ensuring that the financial link between fathers and their children is maintained in the post-separation context, it also, along with a variety of other social and legal discourses, established normative guidelines of appropriate maternal and paternal behaviour in the post-separation context.

Like Lochhead’s ‘absent’ father, non-residential fathers of contemporary discourses on child support were similarly constructed as ‘absent’ and also therefore as problematic. Using a number of legal contexts, I will show that legal discourse draws upon the knowledge of other discourses in order to promote the idea that father presence and participation is good for the family and for society as a whole. I will demonstrate that because of the widespread acceptance that the family and society benefits from father participation lone mothers are expected to ensure that they incorporate a father into their children’s lives. In Chapter 4, I focus on the context of child support and show how much of the press coverage constructed non-residential fathers as feckless and as distant and uninvolved in family life. The perceived disconnection of men from the realm of the familial is rendered problematic within a number of discourses, including those of the academic disciplines of sociology, criminology, men’s studies and gender studies. I show how these discourses are used by law in order to ensure as far as is possible the continuing connection between fathers and their children, even in situations that have the potential to threaten the well-being of the child involved.

Additionally, I argue that due to the way that fathers’ rights arguments have gained prominence in recent years, not any father will do. That is to say, providing a child with a social father does not mean that the biological father is rendered redundant. Chapter 3 focuses upon the issue of paternal contact in the post-separation context. Through an analysis of Court of Appeal decisions I show how judges are strongly influenced by the perceived desirability of continuing parent/child relations. The law is concerned to return the father back to the family and to place him inside rather than marginal or Other to the familial realm. Lone mothers who are viewed as wilfully renouncing biological fathers can expect to meet with a good deal of social and legal disapprobation.

I also demonstrate how mothers are defined through an articulation of their children’s needs. Moreover, I argue that in debates about what children need there is no accompanying discussion of the needs of the mother. A lone mother’s needs become occluded by the needs of her children. The story of the post-separation family is also told through data collected from nine interviews with lone mothers. I am concerned with giving a voice to at least some of the lone mothers who have been constituted in the mainstream discourses, for their own knowledge and experiences have largely been marginalized or disqualified by those discourses that have constructed their subjectivities. I aim to show how lone mothers make sense of and negotiate their lives within and through the network of power relations as disseminated through discourse.

Foucault’s theory of discourse

According to Foucault, the modern subject is constituted by culturally and historically specific discourses. Discourse is defined as the ‘manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body’ and which are disseminated throughout the population (Foucault 1980: 93).

Discourses are extremely potent and they function by producing certain truths. To use an example taken from this project, it has been posited that children suffer psychological damage as a result of a lack of paternal contact. This statement, generated by a psychological framework, effectively lays down a scientific claim to know that the child who suffers paternal deprivation may turn out to be a damaged individual. The postulation that harm will be suffered by the child through paternal lack effectively places the child and her or his family in the network of power generated by that discourse as the family is constructed as a site of potential problems.

Discourse therefore establishes a set of rules that may or may not be adhered to by individuals. Families may or may not choose to ensure ongoing paternal contact, but in the event that the child is constructed as damaged in some way the family that does not ensure paternal contact will be seen as falling outside the normative framework laid down by the psychological discourse. The family may then be treated as in need of some form of psychological or social modification. Discourses transmit and produce both power and truth, and as Foucault says: ‘We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth’ (ibid.).

With respect to the issue of truth, Foucault’s analysis is not concerned with uncovering that which is propounded as true; rather it is concerned with examining the manner in which the power/knowledge formulation operates at the level of the micro-social in order to produce regimes of truth. Foucault denounces the adoption of the grand theory of modernity in favour of small-scale studies that focus upon how power is experienced and exercised in specific situations. He asserts that modern power must be construed as ‘capillary’ and that it has to be analysed at the lowest extremities of social life in everyday social practices (ibid.: 96). Foucault’s own studies focused upon how power is exercised in the apparatuses of surveillance in prisons, in the medicalization of sexuality and of madness and criminality. Foucault has also stated that he is not interested in identifying who is responsible for the wielding of power against repressed groups. In fact, he goes so far as to say that no one person or group holds power over another. Instead, he is interested in the effects of power and knowledge that discourses ensure and what makes the use of these discourses necessary.

Foucault and normalization

In defining the Foucauldian concept of discourse, it is necessary to consider the related concept of normalization. Much of Foucault’s work was taken up with the operation of power through normalizing practices and techniques. He argued that modern forms of government increasingly operate on the basis of the management of the population through normalizing techniques rather than through coercion. He suggested that the new domains of knowledge, for example in the fields of psychology and sociology, set down normative rules that came to supplant the rule of the law in regulating human behaviour. However, Carol Smart has challenged the extent to which this has occurred (1989: 8).

Normalization operates by setting up a norm to which individuals must conform. Individuals are measured and judged according to how closely they conform to the desired norm. The effect of the normalizing judgement is to establish a standard of behaviour towards which everyone is encouraged. Any individual behaviour that falls outside what has been defined and valued as normal is marginalized and is perceived as in need of modification.

Consequently, normalizing power imposes a homogeneous standard of behaviour to which each individual is directed. According to this formulation, normalizing judgement is simultaneously individualistic and homogeneous as it seeks to make individuals conform to the acceptable standard of behaviour. It is a form of ‘perpetual penality… it traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions, compares, differentiates, hierarchises, homogenises, excludes. In short, it normalises’ (Foucault 1977: 183). Conformity to the norm is the goal, and non-conformity will be sanctioned. In their attempts to attain the norm, individuals self-regulate according to prevailing normative practices. Thus, the dominant forms of subjectivity are maintained through the individual’s self-surveillance and self-discipline. Using this conception, power is exercised by a gaze; it is

an inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising his surveillance over, and against himself.

(Foucault 1980: 155)

As Caroline Ramazonoglu has noted, feminists have found these ideas useful in revealing the social pressures on women not only to submit to discipline but also to conform to norms by producing their own docile bodies (1993: 22).² Many other contemporary writers have developed a Foucauldian approach in order to demonstrate how the ‘psy’ professions (psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology, etc.) have come to prevail in the regulation of family life in the West.³

This book makes use of Foucault in the sense that it seeks to reveal and examine the ways in which lone mothers and non-residential fathers have been constructed in discourses about the issues concerning the post-separation family, lone mothers, non-residential fathers, child support and of mothering and fathering more generally. I am particularly concerned with identifying the subject position that the relevant discourses have constituted for lone mothers as they have received much greater disapprobation than have non-residential fathers. I will also examine how that subject position is discursively located in power relations as compared with other categories – for example the two-parent household and the non-residential father and also in respect of the general category of maternity.

I will demonstrate that the lone mother headed household is constructed as lacking in comparison with its two-parent counterpart. More specifically, I will show that in cases where the lone mother is represented as wilfully rejecting the traditional family form or as failing to subscribe to legally or socially acceptable behavioural norms, she will at the same time be placed outside the boundaries of appropriate standards of maternal behaviour. I am also concerned to show how mothers live, make sense of and negotiate within and through the network of discursive power relations. The final chapter is dedicated to an analysis of data gathered from a series of interviews with lone mothers where participants tell the stories of their lives as lone mothers.

In order to develop the analysis, I rely upon Foucault’s notion of ‘apparatus’. In ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ (1980: 194), he describes the ‘apparatus of sexuality’ as

a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid.

This book is therefore concerned with examining the system of relations that might be established between the heterogeneous elements that constitute the post-separation family, the specific problem of child support and ‘the family’, fatherhood and lone motherhood more generally. The elements that feature most highly in this project are political discourse, legal discourse, the discourses of the academy and the popular discourses of the media, most notably press discourses.

I argue that the good mother is constructed and defined through a discourse of her children’s needs. The discourses about child support specifically and families more generally have identified the child’s need for a father. The mother’s caring role is articulated in terms of her meeting the needs of her children. When the lone mother fails to ensure that the child’s need for a father is furnished, she is placed outside the realm of good mothering. I will attend to this issue in Chapters 2 and 3. While the mother has needs and desires of her own, these are not explicitly attended to in the discourses that construct her maternal role. I will discuss this point at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Theorizing mothers: a Foucauldian approach
• Chapter 2 Dissident mothers
• Chapter 3 Mothers know best? Not in this court
• Chapter 4 Fathers as ‘victims’: mounting a challenge to mothers
• Chapter 5 ‘For the sake of the children’: occluding maternal desire
• Beyond conclusion: some notes for the future
• Bibliography
• Index