Female dependents,individual customers and promiscuous digital personas: The multiple governing of women through the Australian social security couple rule

Abstract

This article argues that women social security recipients are governed by multiple political rationalities through the couple rule in Australia. It focuses on different periods of development of the couple rule – its inception within women's only payments of the 1970s, it's ‘de-gendering’ with the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth), and its current intersections with the digitisation of social security administration. It shows that different governing tools emerged across time to govern women through their relationships, but did not replace each other. Rather, the result is that women are now multiply governed by these seemingly contradictory rationalities. Women are governed as dependents by welfarist rationality through expectations of frugality and fidelity to a paternal state. They are governed as independent individuals through neo-liberal political rationalisations of ‘choice’. In addition, through algorithmic governmentality, women are constituted and reconstituted into a possibly promiscuous digital persona using information which is abstracted from women's daily lives. Through each of these modes of governing, the patriarchal assumptions of the couple rule endure.