The gendered offer of personal solutions

Following the residualising process described by Jamrozik and Nocella (1998) and the individualising mechanisms of masculinism outlined by Nicholas and Agius (2018), this chapter examines the dynamics of personal child support approaches. Such personal accounts exist in less well-developed systems where there are few administrative resources available to women, and within highly developed systems that have evolved to reframe child support as an individualised endeavour. Examples of these latter systems include such countries as Australia, Canada, the UK and Sweden, which have more fully realised child support as an individualised, neoliberal project. However, despite presenting private child support arrangements as the ‘conclusion’ of Jamrozik and Nocella's (1998) residualising process, this chapter positions the conversion of child support into a personal issue as returning to a prechild support policy state of affairs, and the situation that exists in many less technically developed systems existing in Asia, southern Europe and South America. Rather than contending that these arrangements are the inevitable result of neoliberal processes, I draw on Nicholas and Agius's (2018) account to foreground gender as a key explanatory mechanism for how child support has unfolded across contexts. By locating individualised child support action within Risman's (2004) account of gender as a social structure, the chapter notes which social hierarchies are preserved by the re-privatisation of child support and which are eroded by the personalisation of post-separation financial management. Nicholas and Agius (2018, p. 10) chart the logics, assumptions and effects of masculinism, which they pose as a ‘broader logic … internalised and operationalised by both women and men, as well as institutions, structures, and discourses, which inheres the subordination of women and other non-dominant groups to the masculine norm’. The authors illustrate how patriarchal structures are reproduced by masculinist logics that operate at individual, interpersonal, policy and international levels. Drawing on their framework, here I analyse child support policy as illustrating these same logics. I argue that the administration of child support serves to manage contestations over the gender roles of breadwinners and caregivers, but in diverse ways that are more or less explicit. First, I argue that the many points in legal or administrative processes where women fall out of ‘leaky’ child support systems, or are prevented from entering them, are sites where the idea of child support is being rejected.

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