Fathers’ Rights Groups: Promoting Heroic Heterosexuality

This presentation aims at showing how Fathers rights groups promote heroic heterosexuality in their collective means of action. It is based on a PhD fieldwork realised in France and Quebec among many Fathers’ groups but also family associations and politics. Fathers’ rights groups are mainly developed in Anglo-Saxon countries and composed by divorced or separated fathers that denounce family justice decisions regarding physical custody of children. These fathers were involved in male breadwinner winner model and more generally in traditional family pattern. Their claims are directly linked with the reconsideration of the traditional family unit, engendered by the increasing of marital instability. How do they collectively promote “heroic heterosexuality”? First, they collectively denounce the increasing of divorce, which is, according to them, at the origin of the moral values crisis in our society. They consider that family justice plays a substantive role in this crisis by giving systematically the custody of the children to mothers. Second, Fathers’ rights groups raise awareness among public opinion by dramatizing the role of fathers in their life’s children. By manipulating public statistics, they denounce family justice sexism, which would denigrate fathers’ roles in the society by creating single-family model as a family norm. Then, they use a repertoire of action promoting a heroic image of fathers: they wear super-heroes costumes, they climb public monuments, and they claim private messages (e.g. “Kevin, your daddy loves you”) by way of political messages. Finally, they defend draft bill that promote shared physical custody by default when one parent ask it. These draft bills have a main purpose: control the decisional discretion of judges and thus control the so-called favouritism that would be applied by the judges in favour of mothers.