Abstract
Austrian family law stands out in Europe because, in Austria, fault-based divorce is still legally valid. In these divorces, the suing partner attempts to prove in court that the other partner is at fault for the breakdown of the marriage. Thus, proving in court that a relationship is deficient in order to obtain a divorce is a common family transition practice in Austria. In this contribution, I seek to identify the practices that are associated with fault divorce proceedings and look at how these practices are related to normative and legal ideas of marriage. Based on a qualitative multiple case study, I analysed 17 fault divorce lawsuits filed by heterosexual couples in the 2014–2016 period. To do so, I used situational analysis, trans-sequential analysis, and an analytical framework that was developed within the research project. The spouses’ involvement in the proceedings relied on two main approaches: First, the divorce was justified by an event that was disruptive enough to ‘keep things short’. These narratives were related to the divorce grounds explicitly mentioned in family law. Second, the divorce was justified through narratives of a ‘normal’ marriage that became a ‘bad’ marriage over time. These narratives relied upon characterisations of the other spouse as deficient. These deficiencies were related to normative expectations associated with particular life stages and gendered life course trajectories and mirrored the nuclear family ideal.
Highlights
I focus on the practices of subjectification, such as the addressing or representation of the partners and their marriage, that are used by couples to obtain a fault divorce in the 21st century, and how these practices are related to normative and legal ideas of marriage within a particular life stage
A fault divorce is a family transition that is undertaken through interconnected individual practices that are characterised by an arrangement of practices of subjectification (Wanka et al 2020) of the partners and the marriage
I analysed the narratives that were generated about the marriage and the partners to obtain a fault divorce in the 21st century, and the extent to which these narratives were related to normative and legal ideas about marriage within a particular life stage, and to divorce as a gendered life course transition
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The relationship patterns and perceptions of divorce in Western societies have changed (Raley and Sweeney 2020; Perelli-Harris and Lyons-Amos 2015; Amato 2010), and these changes are reflected in family law Whereas just a few decades ago, a divorce was seen as a disruptive event that was the fault of individual partners, and the last phase in the evolution of a family, there has been a shift in the social and scientific perspectives on divorce, starting in the early
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