4th November 2009
Title: Fathers' Rights, Personal Life and Masculinities: Rethinking the Debate
Professor Richard Collier, Newcastle Law School
Professor Richard Collier
Abstract:
Drawing on the forthcoming book Men, Law and Gender: Essays on The `Man´ of Law (Routledge, 2009) and a recently completed study of fathers´ rights groups, this paper reconsiders the development of fathers´ rights politics within the legal arena, seeking to trace a way through the often highly polarised debates in this area. The paper will argue that studies of fathers´ rights and law reform have much to gain from incorporating a more complex and multi-layered account of the interconnected nature of the personal lives of women, children and men. In the context of significant shifts in the messages law sends about the `good father´, and within parenting cultures, the paper tracks changes within fathers´ rights activism to shifting ideas about masculinities and emotion, rationality and intimacy, and about the male body in public/private spaces. The concept of hegemonic masculinity, the paper suggests, has significant limitations in seeking to understand the nature of these changes. Rather, the heightened politicisation of fatherhood in the legal arena reflects, it will be argued, broader cultural shifts around fatherhood, relationality and connectedness and the complex and contradictory nature of a reconfiguration of gender relations that has profoundly reshaped debates about men´s parenting and law. Set against a framework of gender neutrality and formal equality, and of a wider policy agenda that has sought to `engage fathers´ in families over the past decade, the greater prominence of fathers´ rights politics can be understood as one aspect of a complex renegotiation of men´s role as parents that has occurred in the light of a rethinking of paternal responsibility in law.
Venue: ICOSS, (Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences), 219 Portobello Sheffield S1 4DP
Room: The Conference Room
Time: 5.00pm
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