| Abstract | This thesis examines the powerful appeals to psychology that are made in contemporary
popular debate in Britain about parents. It focuses on the political implications of
psychological discourse and the knowledge claims on which it rests. Using feminist and
discourse theory, it critically examines psychological discourse, psychology as a knowledge
practice, and considers the dilemmas of feminist knowledge production given the practices
and relations it bolsters.
Constructions of mothers and fathers in parenting magazines and news-media images of lone
mothers, lesbian mothers and `absent fathers' are found to be profoundly gendered and
conservative (hetero-gender normative) in spite of the rhetorical shift towards the genderneutral
discourse of `parents'. Gender essentialist and identity/status-bound understandings
are most striking where people's `fitness to parent' is questioned, often implicitly, which
suggests that such understandings are naturalised in representations of parents who are not
problematised.
It is argued that the notion of `fitness to parent', rather than contributing to discussion of
parent-child relationships, obscures how impoverished popular debate is, because it has little
ideological coherence despite its mobilisation of judgemental scrutiny and powerful
condemnation. Ideas about `unfit' parents do not, by exclusion, define a culturally ideal
parent, but their implicit nature paves the way for common-sense appeals which deny their
value-bases, reducing opportunities to challenge normative assumptions or superficial identity
categories.
`Second wave' feminist analyses of family ideology are employed, but are criticised from a
feminist post-structuralist perspective which highlights the limitations of `identity' (for
prematurely foreclosing understandings of subjectivity and desire), and of `social influence'
as a model of individual-society relation. A critique of identity politics is employed to
highlight how parental identities deployed in popular debate are imbued with psychological
presumptions, without necessarily referring to psychologically/emotionally meaningful
qualities of relationships between parents and children. Instead, a relational, performative
approach to thinking about parents, and a psychosocial approach for considering the politics
of cultural discourses are advocated. An examination of recent social policy debates suggests
that the former may be gaining in persuasive value and impact on policy.
Examining the authority of contemporary childrearing expertise suggests that arguments
about parents are persuasive when they refer to psychological issues, whether or not they
make explicit claims to expert knowledge. Paradoxically, as pop psychology becomes
ubiquitous in Western cultures, the rising status attributed to the emotional realm can provide
a means of contesting expert psychology, by undermining the valorisation of objectivity.
However, the `psychologisation' of contemporary social life reinforces psychology's
conceptual framework, which can, in turn, naturalise its conventional epistemology. This
dilemma is explored in two spheres: feminist research and research with child participants. It
is argued that feminists, and those critical of psychology's modernist foundations, might
employ their `expert' warrant strategically in public debates about parents, but should also
expose the politics of psychological knowledge. Similarly, despite theoretical limitations,
identity politics might be put to good effect, such as to help children's voices be heard today.
Finally, it is argued that, today, psychology is powerful, not only through experts or
professionals, but as expertise, such that people draw on psychological discourses in their
own reflexive projects of the self. Thus, psychological discourses, including implicit notions
of fitness to parent, are implicated in the construction of contemporary parental subjectivities. |
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