Collier+&+Sheldon

__“Fragmenting Fatherhood: A Socio-Legal Study”__ by Collier & Sheldon Brief Summary: Assesses the place of fatherhood within society and law.
 * The place of fathers/fatherhood within the analysis of law & families has often been marginalized
 * New concepts and categories have emerged through which we can analyze the legal regulation of fatherhood

Place of fatherhood in early accounts of law & families:
 * Functionalist lens à family is central to socialisation and consumption. Mothers and fathers have distinct roles. Law mechanism for enforcing social norms.
 * Political and conceptual limits
 * Problematic notion of “sexed” and “gendered” – “assumptions about normative nature of paternal/familial masculinity… and what constitutes ‘good’ fatherhood”.
 * Reductionist model – out of step with social and demographic changes, equity and diversity
 * Emphasis on division between public/private spheres à “fusing of beliefs about fatherhood and heterosexual masculinity”. Understand men through public, rather than private sphere. Divide is central to liberal legal thought, but interconnections between the spheres exist.
 * Raises questions about how and to what extent state should intervene in family life, whether personal morality should be concern of the law…
 * Questions about gendered nature of public/private divide arose
 * In past 20 years, challenge to idea that family is an unregulated private sphere à raised complexity of fatherhood, and risks of making assumptions about fatherhood based on dominant cultural codes
 * Earlier work: father = patriarchal embodiment of male authority. Law seen as reflection of relative power of men and women.
 * Feminism and Post-Structuralism questioned the “power of law” that underscored family relations. Look beyond marriage and divorce at other laws that affected and constituted ideas about families within legal framework. ‘Family Law’ grew to encompass new topics.

Law & Fatherhood
 * “Private” family sphere actually shaped by external structures and power
 * Phases of engagement with fathers/fatherhood
 * Early feminist work: masculine culture of law, masculine social and legal institutions problematic for women. Fatherhood was distant, disengaged but still visible.
 * mid/late 1980s: Recognition of negation of diverse positionality within women’s lives, and within men (not a homogeneous group). Opening to complexity and diversity of men’s experiences as fathers, diverse institutional and cultural contexts. “There is… no ‘one’ fatherhood in law”.

Fatherhood as social problem
 * Fatherhood sometimes targeted as a particular social experience, role of law in constructing family policy
 * Object of legal intervention – law promulgates ideas about “good” fatherhood
 * Family practices are forces in social construction of ideas about men, women, families. Distinguish between fathering practices vs. cultures of fatherhood. Room for diversity in practices.
 * Shifting cultural representations of fatherhood – expressed in legal texts (cases, statutes, legal arguments) and in practices. Tensions between law and practice: law does not always reflect reality. “Diverse social practices play a role in constitution of fathers as distinctively gendered ‘familial’ subjects”
 * Question idea that social changes are progressive