Governing the Divorcée: Gender and Sexuality in State-Mandated Parenting Classes

Abstract

600 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Moon Charania and Wendy Simonds Governing the Divorcée: Gender and Sexuality in State-Mandated Parenting Classes Welcome to the court approved Positive Parenting Through Divorce course. We make completing the mandatory parenting divorce class fast and easy. Whether you are court mandated or you simply want the best up-to-date information about how to keep your kids healthy and safe throughout the divorce process, our divorce class online covers a wide range of topics including effective co-parenting strategies, handling finances, general legal issues, the impact of divorce on children, new relationships and blended family issues, abuse and domestic violence issues, and much more. It also contains many helpful resources for parents to ensure the health and wellbeing of their children. —Positive Parenting through Divorce The idea that divorce is a negative and traumatic event is part of US cultural consciousness. However, alongside this notion is the parallel logic that divorce is an inevitable part of modern life and must be dealt with by psycho-social-legal services that best serve the interest of divorcing couples and their children. Perhaps the most obvious example of this simultaneous scrutiny and services directed at divorcing parents is the rise of state-mandated parenting classes for divorcing couples .1 In the Reagan-Bush era (1981–1992), heightened anxiety about both the demise of marriage and the rise of divorce created state policy 1. The epigraph is from the introduction to a court-approved parenting class, Positive Parenting through Divorce, http://www.postiveparentingthrough divorce.com (accessed August 15, 2018). Moon Charania and Wendy Simonds 601 mandating court-approved parenting classes for divorcing couples—a requirement for the final dissolution of marriage. As a form of “governmentality ”—a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state—these courses are designed to produce apologetic, Foucauldian citizens whose social, sexual, emotional, and intimate behavior becomes regulated.2 We build on Foucault’s theorization by looking at the ways state and capital came to position divorcing parents as citizen-subjects that need regulation and discipline. The resulting parenting seminars deploy specific forms of knowledge in order to legitimate the normativity of hetero-marriage, perpetuate the notion that children of divorcing parents are at risk, and promote neoliberal concepts of self-improvement and empowerment. We argue that these policies and courses attempt to regulate parental conduct, thought, and emotion, prescribing and proscribing attitudes and behaviors in order to shape divorcing couples into redeemable, responsible parents. These courses raise important questions about the relationship between the state and the citizen. Is state interference in a divorce and divorced parenting benevolent and/or necessary? Can these courses be seen as empowering or beneficial when they are designed to maintain state authority and are rooted in conventional ideas about gender, sexuality , marriage, and divorce? What forms of power and hegemonic socialization are mapped out in the courses, under the guise of parent-empowerment , children’s emotional health, and desirable citizenship? RESEARCH CONTEXT The authors each became interested in these seminars when we were mandated by the state of Georgia to take versions of this course at different times (Simonds in 2005 and Charania in 2009).3 We each took a four-hour, in-person class. Both of our classes were run by social worker/ psychologist woman/man pairs and included audiences of over one hundred “students,” most of whom were people of color (perhaps because we both attended classes in metropolitan areas). Simonds attended a 2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Pantheon Books, 1977). 3. Simonds was never legally married, and even though common law marriage was abolished in Georgia in 1997, she was still required to get legally divorced in 2005. 602 Moon Charania and Wendy Simonds course that was held in a courtroom in downtown Atlanta; Charania attended a class in a nondescript room with foldout chairs lined up classroom style in a courthouse in downtown Decatur (a metropolitan area in Atlanta). In both classes, police officers were stationed at the entrance to the classrooms to ensure that parents didn’t leave or behave disruptively . The effect was to...