The Discursive Production of Fatherhood in Public Policy

• In Event: Discursive Institutionalist Approaches to APD: Ideas, Identities, Institutions

Abstract

Recent scholarship in American Political Development highlights the importance of the family as a site of state-building. Scholars have identified the role of the family in party politics, the importance of marriage in determining citizenship, and the politics of motherhood in the evolution of the welfare state. However, the ideological production of “the family” goes largely untheorized. Fatherhood, more specifically the state’s disparate treatment of fathers along lines of race and class, has largely evaded this recent work, as well. In order to address this lacuna, this paper examines a key moment in federal fatherhood policy, the creation of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE). Through a close reading of congressional testimony, I explore the discursive production of fatherhood in child support policy.
The paper applies a discursive institutionalist framework to a study of the establishment of the OCSE. Debates about the need for federal child support enforcement underscored competing conceptions of how men should behave within families and how the state should support them in that role. As a result, attending to the way political actors spoke about fatherhood in this moment highlights disagreements about the nature of fatherhood and fathers’ relationship with the state. Most importantly, this analysis reveals who counts as a father in the first place. Rather than merely providing men with the tools they need to be good fathers, I contend, these policies created new iterations of American fatherhood.

By highlighting this discursive production, this paper pushes scholars of American Political Development to recognize how state action conditions family relationships. Rather than import sociological categories of family life into political analysis, I argue, political scientists should attend to the production of meaning that results from policymaking.

Author

• H. Howell Williams, Western Connecticut State University