Gender and ASB

1. Gender and ASB Helen Carr University of Kent

2. Why consider gender in an analysis of ASB? • ASB is frequently discussed in an atheoretical and ahistorical way • Theory provides an opportunity to examine ASB • However there is a tendency for theory to be totalising, to seek to explain everything • Governmentality in particular can depoliticise government activities

3. to focus on practices (in particular race, class and gender) which ‘divide populations in order that they might be subject to different kinds of knowledge and different relations of power…so that some can be governed by freedom, others by obligation and sanction, and still others by sovereign force and coercion’ (Dean 2007:14 - 15);

4. Significance of gender • Chunn and Gavigan • welfare law is principally (and ideologically) concerned with the lives and issues of poor women, especially lone parent mothers. • Gender is about more than wanting more share of the cake for women • Three appeals to gender in ASB • Women as victims • Women’s role as mothers • Women’s role in social management

5. Compelling motherhood • Hunter and Nixon’s work uncovering disproportionate impact on women headed households of ASB possession proceedings • ‘I have to say that I find her protests are not persuasive. At a time when her son was getting into deeper trouble at the school, and his offending was deteriorating, and he was video’d…scrawling graffiti on the wall, her attention was elsewhere… [S]he conceived a child in the summer of 1999.. And will have been at the very least, visibly pregnant to her son, who might be forgiven for thinking that her attention, if not her affection, was elsewhere’ • Inappropriate fecundity and sexualised fear of the ‘other’

6. Manchester v Higgins – the indifferent mother • Belief in her child’s story ‘self-evidently preposterous’ • Wholly inadequate parenting skills • Lack of supervision of an 11 year old child ‘remarkable’ • Belle indifference • Failure to apologise • Significant failure of personal responsibility - ‘Abject motherhood’

7. Respectable mothering? • ‘Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishment both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all’ Butler • Moat House v Hartless • Concerned father • Supervised children • Hope for the future

8. Mum’s Army • Take a Break magazine • 1.2 million readers, ‘serving readers either patronised or ignored by the metropolitan elite – you know, the housewife in Wigan • Performs gender • Kitchen Table Tycoon • Women’s Orgasm Liberation campaign • Mums on drugs

9. Motherhood in Mum’s Army • Down’s Bride’s Mother Says why we Back Mum’s Army • ASB petition to be handed to PM on Mother’s Day ‘The handover will be made by 12 year old Donna Stocker, who witnessed the bullying of her mother Debra even as she was dying of breast cancer’

10. Motherhood and death • Constant intertwining of death and asb • Moral repugnance • Essential insecurity of social life • Mum’s army • People have got away with murder for too long • Death of civil society is the risk which justifies a response which eliminates the ‘other’