This article focuses on the use of independent money management by a small number of cohabitants living in New Zealand. This style of money management seems to be popular with cohabitants and is likely to become increasingly significant as the number of couples who cohabit continues to grow in Western countries such as New Zealand. Yet it has received sparse attention within the literature on domestic monies. This literature has noted that money management practices operate either to diminish or to exacerbate inequalities between women and men, most noticeably in the realm of decision-making and personal spending money. Independent money management is pursued in order to achieve equality and autonomy, thereby overcoming some of the difficulties identified in other forms of money management. However, it is argued that equality and autonomy exist in tension with each other. In certain relational settings, adherence to the goal of autonomy leads to the emergence of inequalities and the continued exercise of power within heterosexual relationships.
Recent scholarship has critiqued the tendency for separated mothers in custody disputes to be defined as hostile and alienating. Through the presentation of three case studies, drawn from an interview-based study with 21 women, we show how such pejorative constructions only arise when the conflicting gendered moral accountabilities of contemporary motherhood are overlooked. We found that mothers tend to believe that contact with non-resident fathers is generally in a child's best interests. However, as a result of balancing complex moral obligations for the care of their children, they may raise questions about particular kinds of arrangements for contact with particular fathers. We argue, therefore, that family law practice will lead to better outcomes for children when professionals listen to the history of, and reasons for, mothers' positions. To enable family law professionals to undertake this task, we offer an alternative interpretive framework for making sense of women's stories. Should family law professionals make use of this framework, it is likely that they will understand that the positions mothers adopt are often the outcome of the difficult moral dilemmas they encounter in caring for their children, and that the reductive rubric of the 'hostile mother' needs to be treated with scepticism.
Academic research is subject to audit in many national settings. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the government regulates the flow of publicly funded research income into tertiary institutions through the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF). This article enquires into the effects of the PBRF by exploring data collected from 16 academic women of varying rank in the arts, humanities and social sciences. References to the women's emotions were extracted from the transcripts of semi-structured interviews, in which they were asked about experiences of being researchers and doing research in the early years of the PBRF. The analysis presented here undertakes a politicised reading of those emotions-as capacities subject to governmentality-to engage with two issues currently explored in the international higher education literature: (1) the gendered effects of audit, and (2) the notable absence of collective political resistance on the part of academics. We argue that, while the PBRF does produce emotions implicated in reshaping researcher practices, identities, and relationships with colleagues, those effects are fractured and far from predictably gendered. Moreover, the dominant flavour of the feelings described is unlikely to support collective political resistance and more likely to be implicated in increased individualism, pressure to perform and judgmentalism towards others. At the same time, some emotions prompted and sustained forms of active resistance towards research audit's threat to academic imaginations and collegial culture. Questions of gender and resistance in research auditPaying detailed attention to how changes are being experienced is an important element in theorising what is happening inside the university sector, and [there is a] need to resist over-simple derivations from what might be seen as global trends. (Clegg, 2008, p. 343) National audits of academic research have buffeted higher education, with disturbing effects of many kinds. Ironically, these forms of intensified accountability-notably in the United Kingdom, Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) and Australia-have been accompanied by a reduction in public funding for the sector, the escalation of academic workload, the spectre of institutional restructuring and job-losses, and the perception of an exacerbated, and gendered, divide between teaching and research. There has been no shortage of critical commentary about the effects of these changes on higher education in general and, more particularly, on academic identities and work (see, for example, Strathern
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