Vivienne Elizabeth

Managing money, managing coupledom : a critical examination of cohabitants' money management practices

This article focuses on the use of independent money management by a small number of cohabitants living in New Zealand. This style of money management seems to be popular with cohabitants and is likely to become increasingly significant as the number of couples who cohabit continues to grow in Western countries such as New Zealand. Yet it has received sparse attention within the literature on domestic monies. This literature has noted that money management practices operate either to diminish or to exacerbate inequalities between women and men, most noticeably in the realm of decision-making and personal spending money. Independent money management is pursued in order to achieve equality and autonomy, thereby overcoming some of the difficulties identified in other forms of money management. However, it is argued that equality and autonomy exist in tension with each other. In certain relational settings, adherence to the goal of autonomy leads to the emergence of inequalities and the continued exercise of power within heterosexual relationships.

‘The spirit of research has changed’: reverberations from researcher identities in managerial times

Five poetic transcriptions lie at the heart of this article. We intend that they will convey something of what it means and feels like to be an academic researcher in neoliberal universities such that we begin to notice this condition and its effects more acutely. Our poetic texts began their existence as fast-written prose responses to the question: ‘If you say to yourself, “I am a researcher”, how do you feel, what do you think about and what associations do you make?’ In this article, we foreground an exploration of the poetic mode of representing research data through example and exegesis. We argue this kind of interpretive work is effective because it strikes a different kind of relationship between empirical data and reader, one that encourages ‘reverberation’ – a resounding way of noticing that draws upon our bodily and emotional reactions to a text as well as our intellectual ones. Hence, a methodology of poetic transcriptions may be especially capable of evoking for the reader some of the problematic, although variable, effects of the Anglo-Western neoliberal – or ‘managerialist’ – university on the hearts and minds of its beleaguered academic subjects.

COHABITATION, MARRIAGE, AND THE UNRULY CONSEQUENCES OF DIFFERENCE

This article is based on interviews with a small number of cohabitants who are critical of conventional marriage. It examines some of the ways in which the distinction between heterosexual cohabitation and marriage is rendered in the New Zealand context. Culturally available distinctions, like that between cohabitation and marriage, are used in the production of resistant counterdiscourses. However, difference can be rewritten as deviance and in this form is central to the exercise of disciplinary power. Contextual shifts in the assertion of a cohabitational self and a marital self contribute to the blurring of the distinction, further exposing the dilemmas of resistance based on difference.

“…He’s Just Swapped His Fists for the System” The Governance of Gender through Custody Law

In this article, we investigate the state’s role in the reproduction of relations of male dominance between separated parents through custody law. We argue that three “logics” shape the current operation of family law—durability, gender neutrality and present/future temporality—such that custody law is not simply a mechanism of dispute resolution between parents; it is also a vehicle for the differential production, positioning, and regulation of mothers and fathers as postseparation parents. Drawing on interviews with 21 mothers, we show that the outcome of the state’s governance of gender through custody law for women in dispute over care and contact arrangements is that nonresident fathers are able to engage in nonreciprocal exercises of power over resident mothers. The consequence for resident mothers is that nonresident fathers are able to legitimately use the law to threaten and coerce mothers, and to protect their interests and rights at the expense of mothers’ needs for and rights to security and autonomy.

The gendered dynamics of power in disputes over the postseparation care of children

A dichotomized picture of postseparation parents has emerged in family law that juxtaposes violent relationships with those that are “normal.” Domestic violence scholars and advocates have played a role in reproducing this picture in their quest to secure protection for women and children. Although sympathetic, we argue this construction generates a number of problems: in particular, it obscures the gender power dynamics in relationships where women have not experienced violence. Interviews with separated mothers in dispute over contact arrangements reveal that there are significant continuities in the gender power dynamics they experience, despite differences in their exposure to male partner violence.

II. To Marry, or not to Marry: That is the Question

It is conceivable, if not particularly likely, that I will go home after work tonight and ‘pop the question’ to my partner.1 I have done so in the past and no doubt I will do it again, at some point in the future, as we engage in an erratic dialogue about the pros and cons of getting married. Until that fateful day when we both say ‘I do’ at the same time – a day that may or may not arrive – the marital question seems destined to occupy a place in our consciousness, albeit sporadically, if only because living together is typically constructed as a ‘trial marriage’, a step on the way to the denouement of the romantic script, and not a dénouement in and of itself. What makes it possible for me, someone whose feminism even at the youthful age of nine or ten was informed by a resistance to domesticity, to contemplate such a proposition? Ten years ago, as I was working on my doctoral research into cohabitees’ reasons for resisting the conventions of heterosexual marriage, the notion that I might seriously contemplate getting married was unimaginable. I openly disavowed marriage as a patriarchal institution that, in producing gendered identities and gendered practices, sustained hierarchical relations between women and men. My oppositional stance on marriage suited my partner of that time well; although he shared my lack of enthusiasm for marriage, his disinclination was motivated more by a desire to be unconventional. He, along with other friends I had then, would undoubtedly find my willingness to even entertain the possibility of marriage deeply perplexing. So what has changed over the past decade? Well for starters, I have a new partner with whom I have been pleasurably cohabitating for some time now. In many ways ours is a relatively conventional relationship. We live alone in a shared residence, have merged our finances and acquired joint property, and we also tend to socialize together; but we do not have children, nor do we intend to become parents in the future. Like many other modern (childless) couples we

A ‘brave thing to do’ or a normative practice? Marriage after long-term cohabitation

For decades, sociologists have debated whether widespread cohabitation among opposite-sex and same-sex couples indicates the transformation of relationships or simply a new pathway to marriage. If it is the latter, what does this transition mean to couples who decide to marry? Using an interpretive framework, the article investigates why cohabiting couples legalise their relationships when there seem to be few legal or social advantages, and how they solemnise and celebrate this transition. Drawing on New Zealand interviews with celebrants and long-term cohabitants who have decided to legalise, we found widespread concern about traditional marriage and a desire to develop individualised pathways for couple relationships. Nevertheless, our participants eventually decided to make a public commitment and to celebrate their ‘successful’ relationships with family and friends. Furthermore, we found that wedding practices continue to be influenced by social pressures and cultural representations, and many couples incorporate traditional practices symbolising patriarchy and heterosexuality regardless of personal beliefs or sexual orientation. Although cohabitation rates are rising, our study concludes that weddings have retained much of their symbolic value as a cultural ideal, but have increasingly become subject to personalisation, as if to signify that couples are indeed the authors of their own biographies of love.

Tying the knot: The impact of formalization after long-term cohabitation

Abstract Most couples in English-speaking countries now cohabit before marriage, and some marry after living together for years, buying a house and having children. Although marriage offers few additional legal rights, especially for different-sex couples, it seems to have retained its symbolic value. Based on interviews with participants in different-sex and same-sex relationships in New Zealand, we explore whether or not getting married was perceived to make a difference. The paper is organized by participants’ responses: Marriage made a notable difference to their relationship, it altered their identity, it changed how others responded to them, or it made no difference. For many participants, marriage’ represented a stronger commitment, the legitimation of their relationship, and the promise of a more secure environment for children. This research provides insights into the nature of intimate relationships in insecure times marked by a rise in individualism and secularization, the commercialization of weddings, and separation/divorce.

When a Mother Strikes too Close to the Bone

This article contains an account of the authors childhood experiences of her mothers use of harsh corporal punishment. These childhood experiences, as well as other aspects of the authors family life, are largely conveyed to the reader through a combination of autoethnographic poems and prose. Through these writings the author reflects on the haunting power of childhood experiences of harsh corporal punishment.

Erica’s Story: A Poetic Representation of Loss and Struggle

Several years ago one of the authors sat down in the kitchen of an ordinary Auckland home to hear the story of Erica, a woman who was disputing the care and contact arrangements for her small children with her ex-husband, Jason. Hers was one of 21 stories that we (VE, NG & JT) collected as part of our research into women’s experiences of dealing with disputes over post-separation parenting arrangements through legal or quasi-legal processes. However, Erica’s story was radically different from the others in one significant respect: she had lost the day-to day care of her children and was struggling to become a resident mother again. Laced with the pain of unjust loss, Erica’s story cries out for the kind of representation envisaged by Pelias’ methodology of the heart – ‘scholarship that fosters connections, opens spaces for dialogue, heals’ (2004, p 2). As Pelias and others (for example, Laurel Richardson 1999, 2000, 2002 have suggested, poetic representations are eminently suitable for such scholarship because poetic texts work at the level of our minds as well as our hearts; a poem asks us to respond with feeling. In this chapter, we explore the significance of poetry for the social sciences through poetic representations of the stories of Erica. We contend that poetry and other new representational formats have an important role to play in enabling audiences of our research to hear with their hearts and to be moved.