While the theme of equality runs through family law, it is almost paradoxical that, at the same time, the families to which this principle is applied retain their normative, status-based traditionalism. As Stychin and Bottomley and Wong point out, they are still dyadic and (usually) sexual relationships. They are economically selfsufficient and are said to be entered into by choice. And so, while there has been a movement in family law to extend the notion of ‘family’ beyond its traditional limits, same-sex relationship recognition was achieved in part because these relationships were argued to be ‘the same’ as marriage relationships, and unmarried or unregistered cohabitation soon may be attributed with some legal rights and obligations partly for the same reason.[90] The extension of the notion of the marriage-like ‘family’, to stabilise and discipline relationships, has been a recurrent theme in much feminist work on family law[91] and is considered here by Bottomley and Wong and by Stychin in the context of adult relationships.[92]
Jones also demonstrates that, while family status may be extended to same-sex parents, law has not conceded a name for those parents; parenthood remains framed through a hetero-normative lens. And with the advent of new medical technologies, the question ‘who are the parents?’ has become ever more complex. Jackson argues that cell nuclear replacement, which takes genetic parenthood beyond the union of female and male gametes, requires us to rethink the exclusivity of ‘one mother/one father’ taking the familialisation project into entirely new territory.
Notwithstanding these difficulties with parenthood, the familialisation of society — that is, the ever-increasing range of relationships that are captured within the regulatory net — continues apace, and because the net retains its traditional contours, familialisation has profound and gendered consequences. It can be seen as a part of New Labour’s neo-liberal modernisation project, which includes a re-ordering of the ways in which responsibility not only is exercised, but is felt or conceived. In this project, one’s responsibility to society, usually called the taxpayer, and even one’s responsibility to self is increasingly framed within the discourse of family. Familialisation thus affects one’s economic and social responsibilities as much as it does one’s personal ones.
In Canada, Judy Fudge and Brenda Cossman say that there is a whole new set of assumptions about the role of government and the rights of citizens:
In the new political and social order, governments are no longer responsible for the social welfare of their citizens but only for helping those citizens to help themselves. The social citizen is giving way to the market citizen who (quoting Brodie, 1996) ‘recognizes the limits and liabilities of state provision and embraces her obligation to become more self-reliant’. This new market citizen recognizes and takes responsibility for her own risk and that of her family.[93]
Within this frame, old certainties become re-ordered. Formerly social or political problems become recast as private, family problems, solvable by individual family members. Child poverty, for example, could be solved if non-resident parents simply acted responsibly and paid their child support.[94] Unemployment can be solved by reframing the ‘good’ of employment less as a social one than as a matter of the welfare of one’s child,[95] which adds a new perspective to Mumford’s work on child tax credits as a means of encouraging mothers into low-paid work. The problems of youth crime and disaffected youth generally can be solved if parents accept appropriate parenting training, are employed outside the home and take responsibility for their children’s criminal, anti-social and truanting behaviour.[96] Myriad social problems, it seems, can be solved by people simply taking their family responsibilities seriously. But, as we have seen, a disproportionate burden for meeting these privatised social responsibilities lies upon women as carers and workers. Piper notes both the privatisation and the gender of these responsibilities in the context of juvenile justice. In remarking upon the elision of civil/family justice with criminal/youth justice, she recognises a policy trend to support or discipline the family ‘as a means of strengthening the moral basis for an ordered society’,[97] and that ‘more children are being drawn into an increasingly important system in which the risk of offending normally takes priority over the risk of harm, or the latter risk is subsumed into the former’.[98] She also notes that 80 per cent of offenders are males and 80 per cent of parents sanctioned with parenting orders are mothers. Fathers do not seem to play a significant role.
Familialisation thus can be argued to be an important means of diverting responsibility for the welfare of society and its members from the state to individual families. It is also a means by which the state can deflect responsibility for the economic well-being of individual citizens.
It is the family, not the state or the market, that assumes responsibility for both the inevitable dependent — the child or other biologically or developmentally dependent person — and the derivative dependent — the caretaker. The institution of the family operates structurally and ideologically to free markets from considering or accommodating dependency. The state is cast as a default institution, providing minimal, grudging and stigmatized assistance should families fail.[99]
And so, as the economic and social consequences of care and dependency are increasingly privatised, we see a shift in the balance of responsibility for the costs of social reproduction from the state to the ‘family’ and its individual members.[100] The implications of this shift for dependants, usually women and the children they care for, are serious because it is happening at the same time as the welfare state is being dismantled and the other concurrent structural changes which would assist them in assuming responsibility, such as job security and child care, lag far behind.[101] Familial ideology is powerful, and its implications are great for women in the current climate of privatisation.