Men, Caregiving and the Media

The Dad Dilemma

Sarah C. Hunter, Damien W. Riggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429848834
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Analysing diverse media representations of men who provide primary care to their children, this book demonstrates how the practice of fatherhood – and of masculinity - is changing, and the ways media representations sensationalise and reinforce gender inequities in regards to carework.

This book examines disparities between practices of carework amongst heterosexual couples and media representations of men who provide primary care, whilst also including a discussion of media accounts of primary caregiving amongst gay couples. The book also provides a detailed analysis of the relationship between care labor and public understandings of masculinity. Assessing whether media accounts of fathers who provide primary care undermine egalitarian approaches to the division of labor amongst heterosexual couples, this book is a vital intervention into public discourse about masculinity, fathering and caregiving.

This book will an important resource for students, researchers, educators and practitioners as it brings together a range of in-depth literatures, and empirical analyses to provide a clear overview of contemporary fathering. It will be essential reading in the fields of gender studies and masculinity studies, together with sociology of families, cultural studies, social psychology and social policy.

1
Introduction

Introduction

In early 2018 the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Arden, announced that she was pregnant, which was followed by a statement that her partner Clarke Gayford would take a primary caregiving role when Arden returned to work six weeks after the birth of the baby. Media attention to the announcement came from across the globe, primarily focused on Gayford as an exemplary man and father-to-be. For example, Walters (2018) noted that Gayford was to be “congratulated on his choice to take time off from his job to care for his daughter”. As we will argue throughout this book, this type of statement is emblematic of how men who provide primary care for their children are depicted in the media: as making ‘choices’ to engage in a role that is positioned as other than ‘work’. Women, by contrast, are rarely praised for making a ‘choice’ to provide primary care to their children. Instead, it is treated as axiomatic that women will do so.

Whilst some of the media attention to the couple has emphasised the ‘pacesetting’ role that Arden has adopted in returning to work following the birth of the child (e.g., Walters, 2018), Arden is often depicted in media reports as ‘lucky’ to have such a supportive partner. The headline of a story by Andrews (2018), for example, promised to inform readers as to ‘Why Jacinda Arden hit the partner jackpot’. The story goes on to note that Arden could not have returned to her job as Prime Minister “without her partner”, which is notable given how rare it is that the same type of statement is made about men working after the birth of a child. Another article similarly states that “it would be near impossible for Arden to have returned to work so quickly after the birth of their daughter Neve without the support of fishing TV show presenter Gayford” (Leighton-Dore, 2018). The same article hails Gayford as the “ideal poster boy for the modern man”, overlooking the significance of Arden’s own achievements as a working mother.

Arguably central to media stories such as these is the binary of work and care. Arden’s job as Prime Minister is placed in opposition to her normatively expected role as primary caregiver, just as Gayford’s role as primary caregiver is placed in opposition to his normatively expected role as primary income earner. Yet as can be seen in the example above referencing Gayford’s job as a TV show presenter, there is a sense in which his normative position as engaged in paid employment is recouped. Indeed, three months after the birth of baby Neve the media reported that Gayford was going “back to work” (Stuff.co.nz, 2018), signaling both that caring for a child is not work, but also that Gayford was only momentarily positioned outside of a normatively masculine role as income earner. Further, the story notes that Gayford can only go ‘back to work’ due to the support of some “wonderful grandmothers”, demonstrating again that carework remains primarily an expectation that falls to women.

These are but a few examples of many that circulate in the media about men who provide primary care to their children. As we will argue in this book, such media accounts (including news media, television, parenting blogs, and self-help books) position men who provide primary care in very specific, and we will argue limited, ways. As we noted above, a hallmark of such media representations is a reliance upon a binary of work and care, with the former treated as paid work primarily engaged in by men, and the latter unpaid work provided primarily by women. In the context of this binary, we suggest, both men and women are held to account for failing to conform. Yet this is not the only binary evident in media reports of men who provide primary care for their children. Other binaries that we will explore both in this chapter and across the book include masculinity and femininity, maternal and paternal, and mothering and fathering as paired opposites. These types of gendered binaries sit within a broader context shaped by essentialist beliefs about gender that instruct people how to represent both themselves and others in order to be rendered intelligible.

Another core feature of media representations of men who provide primary care to their children is heteronormativity. Given that in gay couples it is almost certain that if a child joins the family one father must provide primary care, it is surprising that media representations of men who provide primary care to their children so rarely focus on gay fathers. As we will explore in more detail below, the almost exclusive focus in the media on heterosexual fathers who provide primary care speaks to concerns about masculinity amongst such fathers, concerns that are not equally applied to gay fathers (or at least are applied in different ways). As such, our focus in this book is almost entirely on representations of heterosexual fathers and the ways in which they are represented. This is not intended to perpetuate the relative invisibility of gay fathers in the media, but rather to provide an in-depth focus on how heterosexual fathers are represented in particular ways, and why this is the case. We do, however, in Chapter 7, consider in closer detail how fictional media representations of gay fathers highlight both similarities and differences between representations of gay and heterosexual fathers who provide primary care to their children.

In what follows in this introductory chapter we first explore in more detail the gendered contexts in which reproduction and care occur. We then turn to consider debates about the role of masculinity in accounts of caregiving, and we question how masculinity is so routinely normalised rather than problematised. Given that the focus of this book is primarily on media accounts of men who provide primary care to their children, we then examine accounts of media influence, before outlining the contents of the other chapters in this book. Before turning to examine each of these areas, it is important that we first provide a comment on the language that we use. We have opted to use the descriptive phrase ‘men who provide primary care to their children’ rather than the more common ‘stay-at-home father’. We do this for a number of reasons. First, and as the case of Clarke Gayford above would suggest, ‘stay-at-home’ is misrepresentative in terms of its suggestion that men such as Gayford are solely ‘at home’, and not also engaged in paid work. Second, we prefer a descriptive phrase rather than creating yet another category (e.g., ‘primary caregiving fathers’) so as to avoid the reification of what are a diverse group of men and the creation of a homogenising category. This point about terminology is one we will return to in the final chapter of this book.

The gendered contexts of reproduction and care

Key to understanding how men come to provide primary care to their children is understanding why men have children in the first place. To date, very little attention has been paid to this topic in regards to heterosexual men, either in the literature on men and parenting, the literature on men and primary care-giving, or the literature on media representations of men as parents. An exception to this appears in the work of Morison and Macleod (2015). Their work has explored heterosexual men’s journeys to parenthood in the South African context. Their findings suggest that men may come to parenthood as a result of two intertwined injunctions: a pronatalist injunction to reproduce, and the naturalisation of fatherhood as a key component of a normative masculinity. Riggs and Bartholomaeus (2016, 2018) too found in their Australian research that heterosexual men viewed reproduction as a natural part of adulthood, one situated in the context of an injunction experienced by many to reproduce (specifically from parents and friends). In both research projects participants framed themselves against people who did not have children, with such people both implicitly and explicitly positioned as problematic or as ‘unnatural’ due to their perceived lack of desire to reproduce.

Somewhat differently, research on gay men’s journeys to parenthood has focused more closely on why gay men choose to have children. This focus has been shaped by at least two intersecting contextual factors. The first pertains to historical assumptions that being gay meant forsaking having children. How gay men, in the face of this assumption, have increasingly come to have children, has thus been a focus area. And second, given that most gay men need a third party through which to have children (i.e., a person to carry the child, though as we shall see in the final chapter of this book, this is not true for all gay men), gay men’s journeys to parenthood, particularly in the case of surrogacy, are understood to be highly purposive, and thus likely to involve clear decisions about parenthood. As we explore in Chapter 7 of this book, some gay men come to parenthood through their incorporation into normative understandings of what it means to be a gay man, which in some contexts increasingly means having children. For other gay men, including those who come to be involved with children as sperm donors, journeys to kinship or intended kinship may relate to other normative ideals such as leaving a genetic mark in the world (Riggs & Scholz, 2011). Of course these same narratives may be taken up by heterosexual men, but it would appear that, given the historical assumptions outlined above, narratives about genetic relatedness take on specific meaning for some gay men.

Whilst research on heterosexual men who provide primary care to their children has seldom focused on why such men have children, it has most certainly focused on what motivates such men to become primary caregivers to their children. Early research primarily emphasised either a lack of employment or the loss of a job as a key motivation to heterosexual men to provide primary care. More recent research, however, challenges such findings. Richards Solomon (2017), for example, in her study of heterosexual men living in the United States found that some had actually left highly paid employment in order to care for their children. For some men this was because of a belief that care provided by a parent was better than care provided in daycare, and their female partner was keen to remain in paid employment. Other research, such as that conducted by Lee and Lee (2018) in the United States, has found that heterosexual men take on a primary caregiving role because they see that as a way of providing for their family. As Lee and Lee note, providing care is a relatively new discourse adopted by men, though it does not inherently sit outside of normative masculine ideologies of being a provider more broadly.

Whilst heterosexual men’s motivations to become parents has been rarely considered, and though there has been increasing attention to why men provide primary care, an important additional focus of the literature on men who provide primary care has been on how men experience care provision and how this can both change with time in ways that challenge normative expectations, but can also serve to reinforce normative expectations. In terms of the latter, and returning to our earlier point about the binaries that shape accounts of men as primary caregivers, considerable attention has been paid to how men who provide primary care consistently frame their care provision in comparison to women. Richards Solomon (2017), for example, notes that her participants often suggested that opposed to women, who ‘naturally’ knew how to care for children, men had to actively learn how to care for children. Similarly, in her study of Canadian men who provide primary care to their children, Doucet (2006) found that whilst her participants were resolute in the fact that they were not mothers, they nonetheless repeatedly compared their capacity as parents to the capacity that they presumed women had, often noting that the embodied aspects of care for very young children came ‘naturally’ to women as a result of gestation and birth, whereas men had to learn how to have an embodied relationship with children (see also Lupton & Barclay, 1997; Miller, 2011).

This point about the embodied aspects of caregiving brings us to the second point raised in the paragraph above, namely how do men’s experiences change with time. Lee and Lee (2018), for example, report that for many of their participants their emotional responses to family members changed as a result of being a primary caregiver to children, such that they felt they became more sensitive to the emotions of others, more able to relate emotionally to others, and that this newfound emotionality was something in which they took pride. Rochlen, Suizzo, McKelley, and Scaringi (2008) too, in their research with heterosexual men living in the United States who provide primary care to their children, found that over time a majority of their participants found themselves being more feelings-oriented, more attached to friends, more connected to community, and as having a closer relationship to their children. In terms of embodiment specifically, Doucet (2006) found that many of her participants struggled to balance their concerns about how men who are physically close to their children are often pathologised or stigmatised, with a desire to maintain close, caring relationships with their children.

Across all of this research, another repeated theme is that of women’s perceived roles in mediating the actions of heterosexual men who provide primary care. The literature frequently refers to men perceiving that they are unwelcomed or viewed with suspicion by mothers in parenting groups (e.g., Doucet, 2006; Richards Solomon, 2017; Steinour, 2018). Importantly, however, this same literature attends closely to the gendered aspects of these types of interactions, rather than defaulting to a presumption of ‘maternal gatekeeping’. Miller (2011), for example, explores how normative expectations placed upon women in terms of care do not cease simply because some men become primary caregivers. In other words, that women are overwhelmingly expected to, and indeed do, provide care for children in the context of most families should not be overlooked in a rush to praise men who provide primary care. As we will see in the following section, how accounts of masculinity serve to frame men who provide primary care in very particular ways requires ongoing attention in order to avoid perpetuating binaries of mothers and fathers that often serve only to render invisible the work that mothers do in providing primary care.

Debates over masculinity and carework

It may seem odd for us to, on the one hand, endorse the findings of Doucet (2006) that men do not mother, and to have examined the normative expectations placed on men and women in terms of caregiving, yet on the other hand to encourage ongoing attention to the fact that women provide the overwhelming majority of care to children. Our aim in making these two potentially competing claims is to provide a framework for the discussion of masculinity that we undertake in this section. More specifically, it is to present a core argument of this book, namely that whilst it is frequently suggested that men who provide primary care challenge norms of masculinity, we do not believe that this means that men step outside of such norms. Moreover, we suggest that the repeated framing of fatherhood and motherhood, maternal and paternal, and masculinity and femininity as paired opposites means that even if one aim might be to challenge such gendered norms, this does not mean that we can simply do away with gender. To claim to do so would be to discount how gendered the care of children is, as we discussed above.

Turning to consider masculinity, then, multiple terms have been proposed to describe how men who provide primary care negotiate norms of masculinity. The starting place for such terms is often the concept of hegemonic masculinity, which describes an ideology wherein men are measured against a norm that is seen as natural. This norm is one in which men are expected to be primary income earners in families, to be emotionally close with their loved ones, to be assertive and dominant in social interactions, and as per our argument above, to be heterosexual and to engage in highly normative and indeed regulatory relationships with women (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Men who provide primary care to their children challenge some of these expectations, leading researchers to propose something of a shift in terms of the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity. Terms used to describe this shift include ‘caring masculinities’ (Elliot, 2016), ‘evolved masculinities’ (Richards Solomon, 2017), and ‘masculine care’ (Stevens, 2015). To us, however, terms such as these are problematic for the ways in which they yet further enshrine masculinity and femininity as binary opposites. More specifically, our concern is that these types of terms presume that what are seen as new forms of masculinities are constituted by an incorporation of the feminine, rather than being a rewriting of gender binaries in their entirety.

Of course this is a strong statement to make with regard to our concern about some of the terms used to account for the masculinities of men who provide primary care. We are most certainly mindful of Miller’s (2011) argument that the generic term ‘parenting’ erases all of the emotional labor that women provide. At the same time, we are also mindful that Miller argues that “when gender is being done differently it can at least challenge the oppositional dimensions of binary categories” (p. 179, emphasis in original). This, we feel, is a productive tension: one that seeks to acknowledge the concrete reality of current gender disparities in terms of carework, but one that does not seek to simply bring men ‘into the fold’ of carework on terms that only subtly rework masculine norms. Rather, our interest in this book is to develop an approach that holds the potential to deco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Contextualising the changing nature of fatherhood
• 3 ‘It’s a mom’s world’: parenting books written for men who provide primary care
• 4 ‘We are all equal. But no Dad can be a Mum’: newsprint media constructions and representations of men who provide primary care
• 5 ‘We are not Mr Mom’: blogging and self-representation by men who provide primary care
• 6 ‘I don’t think it’s a role reversal. I just think it’s a role sharing’: small screen representations of men who provide primary care
• 7 ‘Of course they’d let me coach, ‘cos I’m having a boy!’: small screen representations of gay men providing primary care
• 8 Conclusion
• Index