Manufacturing egalitarian injustice: A discursive analysis of the rhetorical strategies used in fathers’ rights websites in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Egalitarianism and the Fathers’ Rights Movement

The fathers’ rights movement was announced as a worldwide phenomenon in the literature during the 1990s (Bertoia & Drakich, 1993; Jaffe & Crooks, 2004; Kaye & Tolmie, 1998a). At the time, Aotearoa/New Zealand was experiencing a substantial shift towards legislation and policy that enabled the criminal and family justice systems to intervene in domestic matters that had formerly been understood as private, even if they involved violence. Responding initially to an apparent judicial preference for mothers to have custody of children, the fathers’ rights movement grew alongside, and in resistance to, the battered women’s movement. While pivotal in achieving changes to justice and family court systems, the battered women’s movement has been distinguished from the feminism of the time on the grounds that it did not involve the same kind of radical critique of heterosexism and the family (Shepard & Pence, 1999). Nonetheless, according to some researchers, the fathers’ rights movement often blamed feminists, and women in general, for a new form of men’s victimisation based on their loss of privileges (Adams & Coltrane, 2007; Flood, 2010; Kaye & Tolmie, 1998a, 1998b). Gregory and Milner (2011) argue that by 2010, these claims of the fathers’ rights movement to men’s victimisation by the women’s movement had reshaped policies to prioritise shared custody of children following divorce. For Smart (2006), the movement sought to ‘refashion and reposition fatherhood in the legal and cultural imaginary’ (p. 123).

In New Zealand, right-wing political parties adapted their policies in response to the lobbying of fathers’ rights groups. This response was exemplified by the New Zealand ACT Party’s Shared Parenting Bill, intended to require ‘equal child support’ from the separated mother and father. The ACT Party also challenged the then New Zealand Labour Government for weakening marriage and marginalising fathers (Newman, 2004). By 2004, two judges had broken judicial standards of independence and impartiality by asserting disenfranchisement of fathers while blaming mothers for spitefully using protection orders against fathers in domestic violence cases (see Davis, 2004; Doogue, 2004). Consequently, the Family Court in Aotearoa/New Zealand currently privileges outcomes that enable fathers to have an ongoing relationship with their children. Mothers and fathers are legally bound to continue negotiating and cooperating to ensure opportunities for continued fathering (Elizabeth, Gavey, & Tolmie, 2012a). Justo, Lucas, Salizzo, and McCartney (2009) attributed similar changes in Family Law in Queensland to the lobbying of ‘groups advocating for men’s interests’ (p. 35) and Flood (1999, 2003, 2004, 2010) writes extensively on the influence of the fathers’ rights movement in Australia. Researchers such as Smart (2004) drew attention to the similarity of strategies used by fathers’ rights groups in the UK and those in Australia and New Zealand.

The persuasiveness of fathers’ rights groups’ rhetoric has been attributed to its discursive appropriation of the strategies used by liberal feminism in the 1960s and 1970s (Williams & Williams, 1995). Liberal feminist campaigners constructed the discourse of ‘equal rights’ and ‘gender-neutrality’, in the socio-political environment of post-World War II civil rights movements, to seek redress for discrimination against women. In a broader social context of ‘rabid anti-feminist backlash’ (DeKeseredy, 2011, p. 301), the fathers’ rights movement involves counter-discourse that transforms liberal feminist strategies to condemn feminism specifically and women generally. Wharton (2012) analyses this strategy as the appropriation of discursive capital that damages the group from which it is appropriated. Thus gender equality has served to advance claims of bias, favouring women, when legal sanctions are instituted to protect women from men’s violence (Girard, 2008), and has promoted fathers’ rights to such an extent that children’s experiences of custody arrangements have been marginalised (Smart, 2004).

Despite its rhetorical engagement with egalitarianism, fathers’ rights discourse demands the reinstatement of patriarchal social relations within families (Dragiewicz, 2011). For instance, in a quantitative content analysis of around 300 fathers’ rights groups’ websites, Rosen, Dragiewicz, and Gibbs (2009) identified three factors that were central to the groups’ rhetoric: representing domestic violence allegations as false, promoting presumptive joint custody and decreasing child support, and portraying women as perpetrators of domestic abuse. Our study seeks to extend the recent attention to the persuasive texts of the fathers’ rights movement through an analysis of the discursive tactics used by the movement in Aotearoa.

Our theoretical approach is informed by poststructuralist theories that situate discourse in an intimate relationship with power and knowledge (Foucault, 1980, 1990). The discursive constitution of knowledge is context-dependent and saturated with disciplinary power that enables the inclusion, exclusion or marginalisation of specific meanings, subject positions and agents of discourse (Foucault, 1977, 1980, 1990). From this perspective, language is a political activity, our knowledge and sense-making processes are bounded in time and space and are perpetually fluid, tentative, unfinished and contestable.

Attention to language in the gendering of social power relations is frequently an analytical strategy engaged by feminist poststructuralists. For instance, Dragiewicz (2011) engages poststructuralist discourse theory ‘to examine the arguments … antifeminist men’s groups make in efforts to undermine the laws and resources abused women use’ (p. 4) and link them to a wider movement of backlash against feminism. Elizabeth et al. (2012a, p. 243) identify the logics operating in the practice of custody law, and how these logics govern gender. In practice, men’s and women’s positioning in custody law enables ‘men as fathers … to engage in nonreciprocal exercises of power that have negative effects on the everyday lives of mothers and children’ (Elizabeth et al., 2012a, p. 243). Differential positioning of men and women is produced through the logic of durability that assumes that ongoing relationships with both parents are in the best interests of the child; the logic of present and future temporality that focuses attention away from the past and towards the future and the logic of gender neutrality that positions both fathers and mothers as interchangeable parents.

The logic of gender neutrality is a central concern of our analysis. We are informed by Khader’s (2008) reading of Irigaray’s critique of equality claims; the claims that appear to be appropriated by fathers’ rights rhetoric from the discourse of egalitarian feminism. Khader identifies a two-way danger in egalitarianism: the interpolation of a gender-neutral subject who privileges the masculine, even in the construction of ‘women’s equality’; and the reproduction of ‘existing symbolic repertoires’ (Khader, 2008, p. 48) that have constituted patriarchal social relations. The interpolation of gender-neutral subjects participates in and reproduces the logic of ‘the same’ by posing a moral universal (such as ‘human’ rights) which presupposes that sex is insignificant. In doing so, it paradoxically elides the historically patriarchal relationships though which the ‘human’ – in the West – is saturated with masculinism and simultaneously implies that these relationships are unbalanced.

Khader (2008) analysed two legal cases; both involved arguing that evidence of an unequal distribution of rights between men and women can be found in reproductive differences. These arguments depend on construing as unjust the situation in which women can choose whether to bear children, though men cannot even choose whether to financially support them. Even though in one case the plaintiff was claiming the right to disown a child, and in the other the right to control reproduction, both cases presuppose a notion of reproductive freedom as a universal right to which mothers and fathers are equally entitled. The fathers’ rights rhetoric supporting these cases was analysed to show how these strategies treat ‘the experiences of men and women as interchangeable’ (Khader, 2008, p. 54). Her analysis demonstrates the dangerous side of equality claims where:

Appeals to gender equality risk perpetuating women’s subjugation, because they analogize women’s and men’s experiences and because they often do so without questioning deeply patriarchal representations of women. (Khader, 2008, p. 69)

The ‘deeply patriarchal representations’ to which Khader refers are phallocentric: systems of representations that reiterate women’s sexual difference in three forms when women are represented as men’s opposites or negatives, their complements or as the same as men. ‘In all three cases, women are seen as variations or versions of masculinity – either through negation, identity or unification into a greater whole’ (Grosz, 1989, p. xx).

Such representations constitute a patriarchal moral order when they are engaged in positioning women through discourses that privilege men as the standard to which women are compared. The asymmetry of this discursive relationship threatens to reproduce relations of gendered domination and subordination through egalitarian discourse. This is its dangerous side.

Our study did not set out to document a multiplicity of readings that are possible in relation to the diverse meanings of fathers’ rights. Nor did we attempt to locate alternative interpretations that challenge the analysis of fathers’ rights discourse as appropriating the strategies of liberal feminism. Such analyses could be undertaken from other standpoints or to address other research questions. With feminist analyses and critiques as our starting place, we focus our study on how texts of fathers’ rights discourse reproduce phallocentric systems of representation while they simultaneously appropriate egalitarianism in the context of gendered struggles over rights within the nuclear family.

Research strategy

Our research strategy is embedded in our assumption that discursive activity is in constant flux and has a multiplicity of meaning and we understand that this research is tentative, locally situated and bounded by the geopolitical conditions of ‘our time’. ¹ Given these assumptions, Robbie searched the Internet for New Zealand texts advocating fathers’ rights. Internet sites provide a safe public site for accessing the discursive activity of the movement. We considered them safe because they did not expose participants or researchers to the potentials for harm involved in face-to-face data collection on a subject of significant political conflict. In terms of accessibility, Internet sites have provided new opportunities for social science researchers and also raised new issues about how the ethics of harvesting Internet data relates to traditional concerns with consent, privacy and confidentiality (Wilkinson & Thelwall, 2011). Public communication issues, including those related to gender, have commonly been investigated without raising ethical concerns when the harvested text does not involve personal information intended for private communication. At the heart of many concerns about the ethics of Internet research is a distinction between private and public that is not clearly defined for Internet sites that are designed for private interactions but might still be publically accessible, such as chat rooms or online communities (Hookway, 2008). The sites we chose address political interests and are intended to influence a wide audience, so their status as public is clearer than might be the case if the sites were intended for private communication.

We are also primarily concerned with the rhetorical strategies engaged in the texts as discursive products, not the individual perspectives of particular men who support the fathers’ rights movement. When research involves public documents for textual analysis, it is not regarded as research with human subjects (Wilkinson & Thelwall, 2011), and traditional issues of consent, privacy and confidentiality do not apply. In the context of public debate over women’s and fathers’ rights, our selection of data from fathers’ rights sites is not intrusive, nor is the data treated as representing the perspectives of specific men whose privacy or confidentiality is at risk through our Internet harvesting.

Robbie focused on identifying sites where advocacy for fathers was produced on the grounds that men were victimised by legislation, policies and practices that were biased in favour of women. Sites that advocated for fathers to engage in supportive networks for each other’s and their families’ benefit did not meet these criteria and were excluded. Through this purposive sampling process, Robbie located three websites claiming to represent a fathers’ rights organisation: Masculinist Evolution New Zealand (MENZ), the New Zealand Equality Education Foundation (NZEEF) and the Union of Fathers (UOF). He also identified a fourth website, not attributed to a specific organisation, and referred to here as Gender Pages (GP). Further searches identified six mirror sites that improved access to the original NZEEF site, but there were no other original sites advocating for fathers’ rights. Texts from the four websites became the dataset for analysis. In three cases, it was possible to include all text from the site for analysis. In one case, GP, the available text was extensive, so it was sampled by identifying and including all materials relevant to three issues that were prioritised on the site: economics, gender roles and family violence.

While there are multiple approaches to analysing discourse, we were primarily informed by feminist poststructuralism (Gavey, 1989) and Parker’s (2005) work on the theoretical conceptualisation of the multivocality of language, semiotic action, resistance to power and discursive processes of social inclusion and exclusion. As critical discourse analysis would anticipate, our procedure is shaped and moulded specifically for this research situation.

In practice, our analysis involved two stages. In the first stage, text from the four websites was thematically analysed to enable us to identify various discursive constructions of men, women, fathers, mothers and children. Four themes were identified and named for the discursive acts that constructed subjects and objects: Demonising women, controlling economics, owning property and transferring power. Two key discursive paradoxes were also identified: Masculinism was posited as the complement of feminism while simultaneously promoting ideals of masculine hegemony, and women were constructed as both ‘just as’ guilty of violence as men, and as ‘more guilty’ than men. Extracts from the four sites that most succinctly exemplified the construction of objects and subjects within these themes and paradoxes were selected as text for the second stage of analysis. In this stage, we focused on the way in which egalitarianism was engaged tactically to reproduce phallocentric representations of women. We identified constructions that constituted, excluded or included particular kinds of subjects, resisted legal sanctions of feminist discourse and produced contradictions. Through this ‘double reading’ process, we built up a negotiated account of the fathers’ rights texts and refined the discursive themes as appropriating egalitarianism, quantifying logic, demonising women and paradoxes of egalitarian discourse. In the following sections, we discuss these themes and their implications for women’s positioning within discursive struggles over rights within the nuclear family.

Appropriating egalitarianism

It is not equitable simply to present the demands of those claiming to be advocating for women. Equity requires consideration of all groups. (GP)

Initially, we identified egalitarian discourse explicitly and implicitly engaged to constitute the sexes as ideally equal – under the law and in their social rights, responsibilities and obligations. The opening pages of the MENZ website show an example of explicit engagement of egalitarianism in the introduction to the organisation’s guiding philosophy: masculinism. The construct of masculinism corresponds to that of feminism.

A belief that equality between the sexes requires the recognition and redress of prejudice and discrimination against men as well as women … a complementary, not oppositional perspective to feminism … does not believe that males should dominate the world, but rather, males and females should work together to make the world a better place. (MENZ)

A cursory read might construct these texts as simply supporting sexual equality. This general notion of equality recognises prejudice and discrimination as distressing men and women equally. Masculinism evokes an ideal of complementarity as harmonious balance that should be equally available to men and women, so the world is not male-dominated. Yet, the rhetorical strength of the claim to equality draws on totalising discourse that universalises oppression. Totalising discourse works to create foundational metanarratives premised on the assumption that a complete and immutable truth can be articulated without any surplus or excess (Peters, 2006). Totalising egalitarianism embodies a moral ideal of equality that encompasses the world: leaving no-one and nothing aside. It characteristically evokes enlightenment humanism through which all (democratic) subjects aspire to universal rights that speak the truth of their common heritage and their human entitlements.

The constitution of prejudice and discrimination against men as well as women is also premised on enlightenment humanism, which in this case universalises experiences of distressing social sanctions so that men’s and women’s experiences can be transposed. The text could open up the possibility of questioning (masculinist) universals by suggesting that men (in general) have suffered, not only benefited, through patriarchal moral orders. We readily recognise the complicity of patriarchal discourse in the constitution of hegemonic ideals of race, class, sexuality and masculinity that have constrained and divided men (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005), with at least distressing, and too frequently, lethal consequences.

However, the comparison of discrimination and prejudice against women and men subverts this potential. Men and women are constituted as the same, at least in as much as both are afflicted by social sanction and entitled to status as victims of social injustice. Their shared position is emphasised with reference to their liberation movements as complementary rather than oppositional. By evoking a subject position in which both men and women aspire to redress unjust social sanctions, the text interpolates a gender-neutral subject. Simultaneously, it is apparent that when men and women occupy this position, they do so through complementarity. The figure of woman is represented as the same as man, as well as his complement: two of the three figures of phallocentrism that return egalitarianism to the service of patriarchal social order.

The text constitutes ‘sexual equality’ as a complete moral order encompassing the world and humanity by ignoring histories of egalitarianism as organised political struggles particular to post-enlightenment democratic ideals, and organised around concepts of rights granted legislatively and socially. The fragmentary specifics of historically constituted embodied social processes and the lived intersections of various geopolitical locations, political economies, sexually engendered social responsibilities, racially constituted social hierarchies (and so on) are obscured – written over by valorising one humanity to the exclusion of multiple particular subjectivities.

In another example of explicit engagement with egalitarian discourse, the (MENZ) website explains that now we have enabled women to have equal access (with men) to the workforce, our attention should turn to creating equal access (for men) to reproductive opportunities:

Just as the last third of the twentieth century was about creating equal opportunity for women as workers, so the first third of the twenty-first century will be about creating equal opportunity for men as parents. Neither goal will be achieved until both goals are achieved. (MENZ)

Despite considerable research suggesting that an ‘ideal’ state of equal opportunity to work is mythological (see, for example, Eikhof, 2012), the premise of the fathers’ rights movement conceptualises the unequal situations of mothers and fathers in relation to children as an injustice like the injustice of gendered constraints on access to employment. The recognisable existing symbolic repertoire here is the well-rehearsed division of the world into public and private ‘spheres’: workplace and home. These two spheres are implicitly equated, though their boundaries are assumed and maintained.

The demarcation of the private sphere also locates the boundary of domestic and ‘stranger’ violence and produces the form, meaning and effects of violence for women at home (Young, 1990). These boundaries restrict women’s movements and their access to the benefits of equal opportunities in the workplace, among which are the financial means to cross the border between staying and leaving home (Warrington, 2001).

Reproductive injustice is often fabricated when the state intervenes to end an intimate heterosexual relationship and awards custody of children to mothers: a situation that reverses the traditional legal rights of fathers to sole custody and has only sometimes, contingently, occurred within Family Courts in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The lynchpin is the powerful but unwritten orthodoxy in New Zealand that favors mothers getting possession and control of the children after divorce (ie preferential sole maternal custody). (MENZ)

Nonetheless, reproductive inequality is conceptualised as a disadvantage to men who do not have women’s opportunities for maternity (nor their maternal rights and responsibilities). The claim to inequality relies on the ideal of gender-neutral subjects, ‘worker’ and ‘parent’, to whom both men and women aspire.

One of the consequences of these gender-neutral aspirations is the possibility of bias and imbalance if the Family Court prioritises maternal custody.

It is a great shame that Family Court cases can’t be made public to show the gender bias that exists and the need for a more balanced approach. (GP)

As it turns out, to address this inequality, and restore ‘balance’, it is necessary for the judiciary to prioritise the return of fathers’ rights in custody disputes.

Family Court is systematically undermining children’s relationships with their fathers. (GP)

In this case, the argument is predicated by assuming that Family Court not only prioritises maternal custody but also destabilises children’s relationships with their fathers. Private reproductive rights are asserted here: injustice takes the form of an intrusion that the Court makes into a father’s relationship with his child. Institutional forms of public interest in the welfare of children, in this case represented by family law, are thus constituted as disadvantages to fathers. Along with presumptive reproductive inequality, the Family Court apparently disadvantages men through institutional scrutiny of private/family relationships.

Historically, patriarchal western families were constituted as ‘private’ domains where women bore the responsibility for care and the right to material support while men bore the responsibility to provide and the right to authority over the family. The notion that public interest in children’s welfare undermines the paternal relationship evokes the patriarchal tradition of privacy at home, along with differential positions for women and men. The patriarchal value of privacy is supported by idealising the home as a metaphor for conventional marriage and families. Consequently, the association of privacy and home legitimates violence to govern and confirm women’s subordination through social power relations that also legitimate the state’s interest in the home (Nicolson, 1992; Ramazanoglu, 1992). Even where the differences of women’s and men’s positioning at home are idealised as complementary, and benefitting children, they reproduce phallocratic positioning that authorises fathers’ patriarchal rights.

In the next example, the decisions of the Family Court as disadvantaging men split the right to authority from the responsibility to provide material support so that the right is lost while the responsibility is compelled.

The father is unlikely to have any effective say in family decisions, but will be compelled to work and pay to support the family anyway. (GP)

In this case, there is no reference to egalitarian discourse constituting gender-neutral subjects who are each entitled to the same reproductive rights, aspire to be both ‘worker’ and ‘parent’, and are responsible for care and material support while sharing authority in decisions about both domains: an ideal where both men and women nurture and provide. Instead, there are fathers’ rights to a voice in family decisions. Here, the ‘balance’ needed to redress the biases of the Family Court has little to do with equal rights or gender-neutral subject positions, and is more strongly associated with the authority of men’s voices.

Fathers’ traditional responsibilities for material support of the family are constituted somewhat differently in men’s rights arguments claiming that legal bias produces a material inequity between fathers and mothers. For material wealth and financial security, the ideal of gender-neutral subjects, each entitled to ‘work’ and ‘parent’, underlies the claim of financial disadvantages to men.

[The Child Support Act in New Zealand] has won the approval of the women’s/mothers lobby and the anguish of the family/men’s/father’s lobby. This is because the Act transfers huge financial advantage to custodial parents (who are almost always mothers). (MENZ)

The claim that financial advantage is transferred to one parent when the law sanctions financial support for children is premised on another egalitarian ideal: equal distribution of financial resources. The disadvantage to men when women have custody of children and child support payments is consequent on the unequal distribution of financial resources between mother and father. Responsibility for supporting children is constituted as a financial advantage for mothers. This construction elides any question about children’s material support needs; so the purpose of the Child Support Act is not explicitly referenced.

The text evokes disadvantage from an ideal of equally well-resourced parents; fathers and mothers are expected to bear unequal costs of raising children when they no longer combine their resources to support the family.

[Custody litigations] are therefore expensive and stressful, taking a toll of fathers’ health and pockets. Once the mothers in these cases are awarded custody, many fathers are left with little or no income after making child support payments and covering the costs of their access or parenting time. (GP)

This example, too, creates an injustice to men’s/father’s financial well-being when costs are unevenly distributed. Losses are compounded when women are supported by the law, or by each other, to meet the needs of children in situations where safety is a priority.

If she goes to a Women’s Refuge a team of workers may turn up when you are away with vans and trailers and strip the house of furniture. (MENZ)

Refuges are central to immediate advocacy response services for women who are victimised at home. They enable their clients to receive support quickly and advocates can proactively engage women with services. This relieves their clients of responsibility for seeking help at a time when they are emotionally, and often physically, distressed (Coombes, Morgan, Blake, & McGray, 2009). In Aotearoa/New Zealand, systems advocacy has forged strong relationships between refuges and police in some regions (though not universally), and legal changes have ensured that the criminal justice system takes account of women’s views of the impact of a crime at sentencing. Regardless of whether the criminal justice system is involved, refuges offer safety evaluations and help develop specific safety plans. Collecting goods from a home while their client’s partner is not present can be a crucial safety strategy for some women – and their advocates. We expect it is unnecessary to point out that if the woman is living in a refuge, and taking the furniture, then she is not safe in her home.

Within contemporary literature, there are powerful connections drawn between the fathers’ rights movement, legal interventions into post-separation custody disputes and the risks of such ‘disputes’ for the safety of women and children (Crowley, 2009; Harrison, 2008). Flood argues that:

The fathers’ rights movement has exacerbated our culture’s systematic silencing and blaming of victims of violence and stymied community and government efforts to respond effectively to the victims and perpetrators of violence. (2010, p. 342)

Refuges are a result of women’s rights activism – yet not activism focused on gaining equal access to employment or legal rights for women as aspirants of gender-neutral subjectivity. In the case of refuge activism, and the movement lobbying for legislative change that recognises and condemns violence at home, the focus is on safety: not a claim to a universal (equal) right to safety for all, but a specific call for communities to share and also challenge the traditionally patriarchal responsibility that women bear for provoking and ameliorating intimate abuse. From this perspective, the claim that fathers suffer a financial disadvantage when mothers are supported to meet the needs of their children marginalises women’s safety concerns and simultaneously stakes claims for the egalitarian distribution of material resources. As Elizabeth, Gavey, and Tolmie (2011) argue, marginalising women’s concerns for safety consequently exposes children to risk of harm.

The inequality claims staked through fathers’ rights texts serve as discursive techniques of an activism resistant to legal and social transformation of traditionally patriarchal rights and responsibilities. Inequality posing as a failure of gender neutrality (say, when the Family Court prioritises maternal custody or grants child support to custodial mothers) explicitly evokes egalitarian ideals even while constituting thoroughly gendered subjects who are easily recognisable through the deeply patriarchal representations of their sexed rights and responsibilities.

Quantifying logic

Egalitarian discourse is not always explicitly engaged in the fathers’ rights texts that we analysed. Egalitarianism was subtly evident when comparing women and men’s perpetration of physical violence. For instance, in the following extract, women are positioned as culpable for violent acts in the same way as men.

The man who received a knife to the throat last night in Greymouth shows that women are just as guilty as men as perpetrators of domestic violence. (MENZ)

In this case, the similarity between women and men emerges from the premise that violence committed in an intimate relationship is a de-contextualised act perpetrated by subjects who are equally sanctioned within a moral order that abhors bodily assault. The discrete act of a ‘knife to the throat’ is constructed as singular and without regard for the specific circumstances or the meanings of the act for victim and perpetrator. In relation to intimate partner violence, feminist and critical theorists have widely critiqued the reduction of violence to de-contextualized acts, or discrete events that are evaluated as equivalent (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998; Lindhorst & Tajima, 2008; McHugh, Livingston, & Ford, 2005). Such reductionism ignores the meaning of violence in women’s and men’s lives. The complexity of intimate partner violence is also related to historical and cultural locations, including structures of racism, class and gendered oppression (Burman & Chantler, 2005; Lindhorst & Tajima, 2008) that produce and constrain meaning. Multiple complexities, meanings and intersections between social structures and personal acts are elided within a reductionist moral order where all subjects aspire to a universal position. At the same time, violence is made indistinguishable from physical assault. Reduction of all violence to bodily matters reiterates a certain quantitative logic: discrete events and particular acts are bounded so as to lend themselves to measurement. The conflation of violence and physical assault enables specific forms of evidence that can be counted: injuries, hospital admissions and murders.

This reductionist quantifying logic reproduces existing symbolic repertoires through which women’s accounts of domestic violence are trivialised and marginalised. In many women’s stories, violence exceeds discrete physical acts. Bodily assaults are both physical and sexual, and they erupt from within patterns of controlling emotional, spiritual and financial abuse perpetrated in a variety of forms on an everyday basis. Such violence is gendered and multiple, contextualised by differential access to physical, emotional and discursive resources including property, responsibilities for family, gendered emotional aspirations and social expectations.

Routinely, those advocating for an end to men’s intimate violence against women and children draw attention to the ways in which violence is constructed so that bodily assault is privileged (e.g. Dutton & Goodman, 2005; Pence & Paymar, 1986). It is more easily recognised as evidence of violation within the justice system and weighted with credibility in social relationships. Even those legal and social discourses that explicitly acknowledge gendered violence usually constitute bodily assault as more serious than emotional, spiritual or financial domestic terror. In this sense, and for good reason, seriousness implicates death. Yet, it does so while unnecessarily marginalising moments of fear, enforced solitude and intimidation as less serious. It also ignores the continuity of experiences identified by Elizabeth, Gavey, and Tolmie (2012b) among women involved in custody disputes, indicating that those with violent and non-violent histories in their pre-separation relationships were subject to similar gendered power tactics in the context of Family Court. It seems that the most lethal violence is cast as singularly reprehensible while potently distressing forms of dominance are normalised and more carelessly excused.

Alongside the quantifying logic that enables the reduction of all violence to assault, there is the moral assessment of the particular guilty woman as representative of women in general and the questionable claim that women (in general) are as lethal as men (in general) in their acts of intimate violence. It is certainly the case that particular women kill intimate others – partners, children and siblings (e.g. Banwell, 2010; Coombes & Morgan, 2004). Yet, the notion that these particular cases, and those of women who physically assault their partners, are evidence of women’s similar guilt for the perpetration of domestic violence rests on the quantitative logic involved in measuring women’s and men’s violent acts.

Numerous studies of partner violence report surveys which indicate either that women are as violent as men, or that women are more violent than men … New Zealand data showing women to have higher perpetration rates and lower victimisation rates can be found in (Magdol et al., 1997). (GP)

Characteristically, the quantitative logic at work here de-contextualises even the study that apparently provides its evidence. Magdol et al. (1997) acknowledge that they could not draw conclusions about the consequences of violence and how these consequences differed for women and men because they did not collect and analyse data on the extent of coercive control and intimidation associated with their measures of violent acts. They also used the Conflict Tactics Scale, a psychometric assessment tool for partner violence that has been variously critiqued for its problematic decontextualised categorisation of violent acts (see, for example, DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998).

Through comparing men and women, these texts reproduce the idea of sexual equality in the form of a gender-neutral subject: a subject with capacity for lethal assault on an(other) intimate body. Simultaneously, the discursive strategies for constituting violence – reducing all forms of violence to physical assault; decontextualising violent events and assessing women’s moral culpability through quantifying their acts of physical violence are recognisable symbolic repertoires that privilege masculine values. In this way, at least, egalitarian discourse conspires to reassert the status of woman as subject of patriarchal moral orders.

As egalitarianism opens the possibility that women are as lethally dangerous as men, it creates the space where women are possibly even ‘worse’ than men.

Contrary to popular myth, most of them [children] are not abandoned by their fathers; over 70% of divorces in New Zealand are initiated by wives, not husbands. (GP)

This construction depends on the similarity between women divorcing their husbands and men abandoning their children: as if the man is just as entitled to a relationship with the child’s mother as the child is entitled to a relationship with the father. By conflating the rights of children with those of men, women are excluded from talk of rights, and simultaneously burdened with responsibility for supporting children as well as their fathers. Interestingly, at the same time, the quantitative logic asserting ‘more’ on the women’s side is also missing context: no explanation of why husbands are abandoned; no account of agreements made, negotiations undertaken, or understandings reached between wives and husbands before the formal divorce process. Effectively, the husband, and father, is positioned as a victim suffering at the hands of a reprehensible wife whose credibility as a mother is highly questionable.

It was not difficult to find examples of fathers being positioned as victims and women as ‘even worse’ than men. These positions were realised in texts that evoked a return of mythical patriarchal images of woman: figures of malicious liars, hostile harridans and greedy, selfish killers.

Demonising women

Feminists have long critiqued and analysed figures of monstrous mothers as images of patriarchal cultural heritage. For instance, Braidotti (1996) traces how maternal imagination was attributed with the power to kill or deform babies in the womb as far back as the 1500s in Europe. Creed (1993: 1) claims, ‘all cultures have stories of the monstrous feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject’. The primacy of maternity in constituting woman foregrounds the importance of sexual difference in the deeply patriarchal images that Khader (2008) has identified as complicit with the dangerous side of equality claims. Since maternity is at the heart of woman’s sexual difference (from man), it is unsurprising that egalitarian discourse was rarely explicit throughout this theme. Although male–female comparisons were sometimes engaged in constituting women as monstrous, women were characterised mostly as distinctive from men.

These texts characterised mother, wife, or woman partner, sometimes women in general and feminists in particular, as morally reprehensible: evil, uncaring, vindictive and violent. They also shaped images of bias in favour of women as institutionalised in post-feminist society.

Men: Creatures who sacrifice themselves in battle for their women and for their children; Women: Creatures who sacrifice their men’s unborn children for the sake of their own lifestyle. (NZEEF)

This is an example in which men and women are compared to establish their difference. The sacrifices of death made by soldier-men and mother-women are equated and by implication the murder of enemies is compared with the termination of pregnancy. The man’s claim on his unborn child is simultaneously a claim to legitimate patriarchal authority in the family and a claim to control of the maternal body for the sake of his property. The woman’s difference is marked twice; by her body that hosts the unborn child she sacrifices and by her motives for sacrifice. She is constituted as a creature that breaches the norm of maternal self-sacrifice, and suffers a deficit of care: An unnatural mother. Most notoriously, unnatural mothers commit maternal filicide, though they are not the only women who kill.

Murdering good men and then destroying their reputations by claiming domestic violence is evil. (NZEEF)

We have interpreted this strategy as evoking the circumstances of a controversial defence in cases where women kill their partners: the defence of battered wives syndrome. It has qualified legal standing in some states of the USA, but none in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It refers to a phenomenon first identified by Lenore Walker (1979) in which the relentless terror of years, lived under the control and threats of violence, are interpreted by a battered woman as threatening her life. So, she kills in the (mistaken) belief that she is defending herself. There are other dimensions to the syndrome, including a kind of learned helplessness that means she cannot think of ways to escape his control and a generalised anxiety rather than more rationally, specifically focused fear of him and his threats. The syndrome is not accepted as a legitimate mental disorder. Inasmuch as egalitarianism operates in this case at all, it operates through the assumption that a moral or just act of killing is the act of one who kills for the proper reasons: as a sacrifice made in the name of defence. This ‘one’ who is morally defensible is also a man, and it is women’s differences that set them apart and opens the possibility for them to become unnatural mothers and murderers.

In this example, too, there is an assumption of a universal moral order, and in Khader’s (2008) terms, it is masculinist: Evil is evidenced when good men are murdered and their reputations destroyed. This example also evokes, without explicitly asserting, that the ‘claim’ of domestic violence that destroys good men’s reputations, posthumously, is a lie. There were many examples that posited women as liars, especially in relation to the Family and Criminal Courts.

My ex-partner abducts the children and makes malicious and false allegations to family court. (MENZ)

Filling court rooms around the world with false rape, child molestation and domestic violence charges against innocent men is just sick. (NZEEF)

In these examples, the image of the court is shaped as one inclined to hear false allegations and thus complicit with the malice of women in producing a sickening bias in their favour. Here too is a universal moral order: one in which women’s telling of their experience is judged as ‘false’, ‘malicious’ or ‘lying’ without regard for the possibility of gendered differences in experience, interpretation, perspective or access to normative/masculinist discourses of familial rights and responsibilities. It would seem that when the court does recognise her interpretation of violence or threat of violence – to her children or to herself – there is a bias and an imbalance that constitutes an injustice to men. If this is the case, then justice demands that maternal obligations and responsibilities are subjugated to the patriarchal rights of fathers to custody and authority. Women’s differences in access to maternal discourse are fractured when justice is constituted through the dominance of a universal masculinist moral order: On the one side, good mothers protect their children, and on the other, they are responsible for complying with their husband’s authority.

These examples assert the inequality of a justice system that favours women when their differences (in experience, in social position, in access to discourse or safety or material support) are taken into account. At the same time, women’s differences are marked by the unnatural, the deficient and the morally corrupt. Mothers are attributed with implacable hostility in many cases (Harrison, 2008). Considerable attention has been given to challenging the construction of mothers as ‘alienating’ their children from fathers when they do not support post-separation contact (Elizabeth, Gavey, & Tolmie, 2010; Harrison, 2008; Jaffe, Johnston, Crooks, & Bala, 2008). Psychological deficits and malice towards fathers are so often attributed to mothers who do not privilege paternal contact, that ‘the good post-separation mother is evaluated almost solely in terms of her willingness to support father contact’ (Elizabeth et al., 2012b, p. 462). The texts that we identified as strategically demonising women serve to discredit, marginalise and trivialise women’s accounts of violence, abuse and the normative tactics of power that they experience in custody ‘disputes’ post-separation.

Paradoxes of egalitarian discourse

In the fathers’ rights website texts we have read, we identified egalitarian discourse engaged explicitly and implicitly to constitute the sexes as ideally equal – under the law and in their social rights, responsibilities and obligations. Sometimes, their equality was staked in their shared aspiration to redress social injustice; positioning woman as both the same as man and his complement. Sometimes, equality was staked through women and men’s entitlements to reproductive rights or their aspirations to be both parents and workers. Yet, the injustice of reproductive inequality was evoked to conceptualise women’s maternal rights and responsibilities as opportunities that had yet to be made available to men. This strategy resonates with Khader’s (2008) conflating inequality with injustice: inequality in reproductive rights becomes an economic disadvantage to men when the courts assume maternal custody is appropriate. Fathers’ rights, it turns out, are entitlements to voice in family decisions, especially decisions about children and property. For injustice and disadvantage to be redressed, it is necessary for these rights to be restored.

We also read texts where equality was staked in comparing women and men’s perpetration of physical violence. Sometimes, quantifying logic reduces all violence to assault, or morally assesses a particular guilty woman as representative of women generally. Sometimes, violent events are de-contextualised to ensure that their measurement is gender-neutral. The reductionist, de-contextualising logic of quantification trivialises and marginalises women’s accounts of domestic violence. Women’s responsibilities, it turns out, do not involve a voice in the protection of themselves and their children. Even so, women carry a burden of care that is normatively attributed to maternity, and is inclusive of their children’s fathers.

Egalitarian stakes in the perpetration of violence and the injustice of unequal access to reproduction are critical to the constitution of custodial and material disadvantage to fathers’ rights when the Courts intervene in familial relationships to protect women and children. Paradoxically, those stakes move between assumptions of gender neutrality and androcentric constructions of woman’s specificity as the ‘other’ of man, they pierce the legitimacy of women’s, mothers’ and children’s accounts of their familial relationships and denounce women’s activism as if it were injustice:

The important thing is to take [the courts] out of the hands of man-hating feminists who have created a huge, money-spinning, family-destroying industry out of them. (NZEEF)

In these examples, the discursive tactics of the fathers’ rights movement appropriates egalitarianism as it reproduces phallocentric positioning of women in the service of resisting feminist discourse, and advocating for an end to feminist influence within the justice system.

Fathers’ responsibilities: Pro-feminist responsiveness to contemporary fatherhood

Fathers’ rights discourse frequently enough constructs feminists as man-hating destroyers of families. We are well aware of the critical importance of men’s support for feminist egalitarian projects related to family life, and projects for stopping violence against women. In these projects, and for the sake of a distinction that seems to us to matter significantly, men’s profeminist discourse might be regarded as Fathers’ Responsibility discourse. Collier (Collier, 2009) draws attention to the specificity of men’s gendered experiences, ‘as fluid and contradictory within particular, situated contexts’ and notes how recently the complexities of masculinities have been of interest to researchers (p. 123). We are living through shifting conceptualisations of masculinity, law and intimacy that cannot be simply represented. The fathers’ rights movement has worked as a form of protest against feminism, and fatherhood has been re-constituted publically in dichotomous forms that position men as either entitled to traditional paternal rights or committed to new forms of responsibility as fathers. However, Collier advocates for a more nuanced approach that focuses particularly on men’s emotional experiences as crucial in understanding masculinities’ social movements.

Positioned as profeminist, Robbie’s experience of being exposed to the texts of the fathers’ rights websites was distressing, and he had to take frequent breaks away from the analysis of material. Although sometimes the texts appeared superficial, absurd and silly, at other times they manifested as bitter, destructive and demoralising. He could not imagine what it would have been like for a woman conducting the study if she had previously been involved in a child custody dispute or was exposed to domestic violence. Responsibility perhaps also entails recognising that how the other might feel is beyond imagination.

Discourses of fathers’ responsibilities are not necessarily unproblematic from our feminist perspectives. Further analyses of how discourses construct the ‘best interests of the child’, ‘compromise’, ‘partnership’ or ‘emotional distancing’ are crucial to understanding how the rhetorical strategies available to constitute rights and responsibilities in families, support or challenge phallocentric positioning of women. We still need to address questions of how masculinities are transforming, (perhaps sometimes) into new forms of masculinism when it comes to assuming gender-neutral subjects aspiring to equality within a universal moral order. And when it comes to the relationship between feminism, the state, and the courts, there are still questions to be asked about authority and representation: about who is held accountable for which responsibilities – maternal, paternal and parental, and how those responsibilities represent disciplined positions within gendered power relationships.

Our study analysed rhetoric of fathers’ rights discourse to extend the recent attention given to the political persuasiveness of the fathers’ rights movement. This movement challenges and counters changes to justice and family court systems intended to intervene in domestic matters to protect women and children better from intimate partner and family violence. In particular, we focused on the appropriation of egalitarianism to reinstate men’s traditional, patriarchal rights within the family. We have demonstrated some of the specific dangers of egalitarianism in the context of an approach to political activity that includes our language, knowledge and sense-making processes. In doing so, we have opened up opportunities for further debate about engaging a logic of gender neutrality that excludes the historically specific representations of men, women, masculinity, maternity, rights and responsibilities that have subjugated women’s and children’s interests to those of patriarchal authority.