Money and gender relations in the south african maintenance system

Policy makers, in their endeavour to craft the state, treat social relations and legislation as neutral and impersonal. This detached engagement with social life is undertaken to facilitate a particular social order (Manicon 1992). In the maintenance system, this shaping of social life is also undertaken in how maintenance money is dealt with, in purely economic terms. Through a discussion of in-depth interviews with women and men who use the maintenance system, this article illustrates how maintenance money is naturalised in conceptions of gender in general and in terms of fatherhood, within the maintenance system. Maintenance money is central in influencing relationships between women and men, men and their children, and (most significantly) in the smooth operation of the maintenance system. This article demonstrates that the use of the maintenance system shifts the negotiations for men's money to the state, thus challenging the bases of traditional gender relations and the notions that men are eager providers. It illustrates that by using the maintenance system, women use the state to claim their power. This they do by accessing men's money, without engaging in the matching traditional obligations. The article concludes that the maintenance system with its neutral position on maintenance money provides a platform for already-existing relationship tensions between women and men to be played out.