Kristin Natalier

Cities and Consumption Spaces

The authors explore the sociospatial relationship that exists between where households reside and consumption spaces: places specially built or redeveloped for people who visit to buy and consume within these locations the fun goods and services on sale. Consumption spaces are categorized here according to the opportunities they provide for stimulating the senses, and focusing empirically on the Australian city of Brisbane, they were found to be disproportionately concentrated in a community ringing the central business district. This community contained about one-quarter of the metropolitan area’s 1.5 million residents, and it was characterized by nontraditional households, high socioeconomic status, and a significant ethnic presence.

`I'm not his Wife' Doing Gender and doing Housework in the Absence of Women

Share households composed solely of men are a site in which masculine identities in the home are disembedded from marital ideologies. This allows us to unravel the connections between housework, power and what it means to be a man. The study finds that the domestic labour practices of men who reside with their peers reflect those traditionally associated with husband-hood, although the bases for these interactions, and the associated play of power, differ in the absence of a wife. It is evident that gender continues to be an important organizing principle of domestic labour outside marital homes.

`It's Not Just About the Money': Non-resident Fathers' Perspectives on Paying Child Support

This article explores the question ‘Why do fathers resist paying child support?’ through interviews with 26 separated or divorced non-residential fathers in Australia. Drawing on Zelizer’s typology we argue that the men in this study attempt to define child support as a gift — a payment that emphasizes the power and beneficence of the payer and the obligation of the receiver — but struggle to do so in legal and bureaucratic structures that position its receipt as an entitlement. The tension between child support as a gift and child support as entitlement is informed by gendered power over money, a key element of fathering in traditional and non-traditional family structures.The payment and non-payment of child support is used to reinforce the economic dimensions of fathering identities and define family relationships in remarkably traditional ways.

Constructing health consumers: Private health insurance discourses in Australia and the United Kingdom

Abstract Significant transformations of the health care services sector over the past three decades have seen an increasing reliance on the private provision of health care services mediated through private health insurance. In countries such as Australia and the UK, private health insurance is promoted as providing a greater choice for individuals and easing the burden on the public system. While these claims, the policy contexts and the decision-making processes of individual consumers have attracted some sociological attention, little has been said about the role of private insurers. In this article we present a comparative analysis of the websites of private health insurers in Australia and the UK. Our analysis highlights adoption by private health insurers of neoliberal discourses of choice and individual responsibility, partnership and healthy lifestyles. In these respects, similarities between the discourses over-ride national differences which might otherwise be expected given their contrasting health care traditions and contexts.

Housing Pathways of Young People Who Have Left Out-of-Home State Care

Abstract As a group, young people leaving care experience multiple forms of disadvantage, including high rates of homelessness and insecure housing. Researchers have described the associated housing and life trajectories in terms of pathways but few have explicitly referenced the metaphor to the interrelationship of structure and agency that is core to Clapham’s housing pathways approach. In this paper we draw on semi-structured interviews with 77 young people who have left state care in the last five years. We identify two distinct pathways young people travel when they leave care: a smooth and a volatile pathway. Young people on both pathways face similar structural disadvantages but are differentiated in terms of their experiences in care, their ability to plan and control their transition into independent living, the degree to which supportive social networks are available and the constraints they face accessing and maintaining housing. We argue social networks are a particularly important element of the housing pathways of young care leavers, shaping, and being shaped by, their socio-economic position and engagement with institutions. They may offer important material and emotional resources that can support appropriate housing but they can also promote housing instability and entrench disadvantage.

The implications of child support for housing after relationship dissolution

Abstract In this article we investigate the associations between the payment and receipt of child support and housing circumstances of both resident and non-resident parents. We do so by analysing data from Wave 4 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. The final analytic sample comprised 1,043 separated parents (637 resident parents, 406 non-resident parents). Our findings indicate that for resident parents the receipt of child support payments above

Separated Parents Reproducing and Undoing Gender Through Defining Legitimate Uses of Child Support

75 per week was significantly associated with better housing circumstances. By contrast, the payment of child support was not significantly related to housing outcomes for non-resident parents. Overall, our results suggest that resident parents in receipt of child support, particularly above the median amount, live with their children in better housing circumstances than resident parents receiving little or no child support. While this finding makes intuitive sense – money matters – the way in which child support appears to be differentially related to the housing circumstances of resident and non-resident parents warrants further investigation.

Means and ends. Why child support money is not used to meet housing costs

The use of child support is a politically and personally contested issue and a policy challenge across developed countries. This offers an opportunity to identify family practices and relationships through which hegemonic masculinity and socially valued femininities are reproduced and challenged. We present data from interviews with 28 fathers and 30 mothers to argue that when people discuss how child support is or should be spent, they are managing gendered parenting identities. Most fathers defined child support as “special money.” This position buttresses the hegemonic masculine characteristics of authority and breadwinning, discursively de-genders the care of children, and challenges mothers’ conformity to feminine and good mothering ideals. A minority of fathers presented an alternative definition of child support and fathering that underplayed the relevance of money and values mothers’ and fathers’ care and financial contributions. Mothers’ accounts of using child support emphasized their financial authority and child-centered consumption in ways that both challenge and reproduce socially valued femininity. We conclude that definitions of how child support should be used reproduce relationships of dominance and subordination that constitute the gender order.

Selective hearing: The gendered construction and reception of Inquiry evidence

In Australia, as in other jurisdictions, recent legislation and policy addressing child support was introduced as a response to child poverty in single-parent families. However, there has been very little research conducted on the question of how child support money is used by sole parents. This paper extends current knowledge by exploring how— and indeed, if—child support money is a useful resource in meeting the housing needs of the children of separated parents. The study reports on the findings arising out of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 33 parents who received child support money. The impact of child support is often limited by three factors: the amounts paid, the circumstances of its payment (and in particular, unreliable payments), and the values guiding its allocation. The paper argues that ultimately, the benefits of child support are constrained because it is a privatised response to gendered, structural inequalities in housing, care and income following separation and divorce.

No Home Away from Home: A Qualitative Study of Care Leavers' Perceptions and Experiences of ‘Home’

In this paper we present a case study of the gendering of evidence in family policy reform. We examine the characterisation of data as legitimate or illegitimate in a recent Australian Inquiry into child support and custody issues. Using critical discourse analysis, we examine how Inquiry committee members interpreted personal anecdotes and social scientific data presented by witnesses. Data were characterised as legitimate when confirming an existing stock story of fathers’ disadvantage in an unfair child support system; these data were treated as evidence of a widespread social problem. Data that challenged the stock story were rejected as offering an inappropriate basis for policy reform. We conclude that in these reforms, the type of data, be it social scientific or anecdotal, was not as important as its alignment with a priori understandings of the nature of the world and the policy problems to be solved.