Emotion and evidence in child support reform processes

TL;DRAbstract

The expression of anger, sadness and love are evident in political debates and individual negotiations over mothering, fathering and financially supporting children when parenting apart, but legal and policy processes translate emotions into a technical language of calculating and distributing the costs of a child. In academic work, too, child support is most commonly studied as an economic transfer. Child support has yet to be fully analysed as an expression and constitutive element of how it feels to be parenting and paying for a child post-separation and how these feelings may be expressed and used in gendered ways within the political realm.In this paper we contribute to the small but growing literature that acknowledges the expressive dimensions of paying and receiving and not paying or receiving child support (e.g. Dudova 2006; Natalier & Hewitt 2010; Simpson 1997) . Our study draws on the written submissions that were part of the evidential processes of Australias most recen

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