Fathering, Masculinity and the Embodiment of Care

Gillian Ranson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137455888
• eBook ISBN: 9781137455895
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Many fathers are now providing hands-on, engaged care to babies and young children. This book draws on observations of, and interviews with, caregiving fathers, as well as analyses of fathers' memoirs and online blogs, to examine fathers' caregiving work as embodied practice and as lived experience.

Part I
Setting the Scene

Introduction

This is a book about men and caregiving – specifically the kind of direct, hands-on care that many fathers are now providing to babies and very young children. This kind of caregiving is a distinctive form of work, and it is usually mothers, not fathers, who are recognized as doing most of it. The reasons why this is the case are embedded in understandings about how men, as fathers, should think and behave (particularly in relation to the mothers with whom, in most families, they live). So this book is about masculinity as much as it is about a particular kind of work – the physical, engaged and embodied work of caring for children.

What does a study of men’s caregiving as embodied involve, and why is such a focus important? What’s involved, in a nutshell, is an examination of what it is that fathers are actually doing, in the time they are engaged with their babies – the tactics they develop to hold them or feed them or wash them or play with them, and the bodily capacities they bring to their caregiving tasks. In this book, I also examine how fathers experience this caregiving – how they talk about it, what it means to them. My intention is not to valorize them for doing what legions of women have done and continue to do, but rather to show that this work, whether it is done by women or men, consists of a set of bodily practices that can be learned – and learned, furthermore, by men as well as women. As to why this focus is important, I argue that it is because fathers’ embodied caregiving has important consequences. As I shall show, men can, if they choose, become competent in its practices. And in the process of acquiring this competence, they change, in ways that are deeply significant for their relationships with their children and their partners, and, some would argue, for the wider world.

How this particular book came to be written is a story that draws on the voices of fathers (and mothers too) whose words I have been hearing and reading and thinking about for several years, mostly in the context of my research on Canadian families and the division of caring work. The first of these projects (described in Ranson, 2010) examined this division by couples who were clearly going ‘against the grain’ of stereotypical understandings of mothering and fathering work, and (by definition) involved fathers who were doing a much greater amount of hands-on, direct caregiving to young children than is usually the case. Their assured performance of this work showed me that gender did not have to be a factor in the allocation of caregiving labour. It tended to have other consequences as well: a sense of confidence in their abilities, a sense of closeness with their children, and equitable relationships with their partners. Sam, one of the fathers in that study, had taken leave from his paid employment to be a solo caregiver to both his children when they were babies, and had been deeply involved in their care as they grew. He commented: ‘Just that hands-on, like literally hands-on … it’s something that sort of shapes you, for the life of your child … and just sort of innerly as well’ (Ranson, 2010: 182).

Outcomes like those Sam and other fathers in the study described seemed to have their beginnings in fathers’ early and direct involvement in childcare. So my next research step was to look more closely at fathers who were committing to this early involvement – namely, fathers taking advantage of Canada’s relatively generous provisions for shared parental leave to care for babies in their first year of life. As part of a project that I describe in more detail later in the book, I paid multiple visits to a group of fathers who were at home providing just this kind of care. I thought I would be talking to them in general terms about the experience of the leave, their engagement with this new kind of work, and, possibly, changes in their thinking about their paid employment. But because I was seeing them regularly, and watching them as they looked after their babies, I began to realize the extent to which this care was embodied. Their interactions with their babies were physical – they were not ‘caring’ in the abstract. And this physical engagement seemed to matter.

It certainly seemed to matter to the fathers involved in it. Like Sam, they were coming to know their children in ways most often associated with mothers, and to experience the attachment that came with that knowledge. My observations, and our conversations, were added to other stories I came across in the course of my research, and that stayed with me. One was sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman’s moving testimony to her own husband’s capacity for care – care that he learned through years of ‘nursing earaches, bellyaches, changing diapers, calming night terrors, holding pans for vomit, taking out splinters, washing bloody wounds.’ He had ‘grown accustomed to the sheer physicality of the body, the sights and sounds and smells’ – and in the process became a man who knew how to care, in a physical, engaged way, for others as well (Rothman, 1989: 227).

Another came from the writer Michael Chabon, a father of four children, who reproduced from his own experience an account of the ‘daily work’ of caring for children, and its effects, in terms very similar to Rothman’s:

[A]bove all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders … Lucky me, that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.

(Chabon, 2009: 18–19)

I also found food for thought in a chapter I read (in an anthology of writing about men’s bodies) by the philosopher (and father) Maurice Hamington. In the chapter, entitled ‘A Father’s Touch,’ Hamington looked beyond the personal to envisage what the broader consequences of fathers’ caregiving could be. He used his own experience of the bodily dimension of caring for his daughter – reading to her while she was sitting on his lap, or going through the routine of washing her hair – to build a case for fathers’ caring embodiment as the basis for a ‘moral revolution.’ Hamington writes that when he is washing his daughter’s hair – touching her gently, protecting her eyes, working round her ears and so on – ‘something more than the given task passes between us’ (Hamington, 2001: 278). Through interactions like these, ‘[c]hildren can know their father’s body and touch as accessible, kind and caring, just as tradition has allowed this understanding of women’s bodies’ (p. 275). What fathers learn, in their turn, is the ‘caring moral orientation’ more often acquired by women, because they are the ones who have done most of the caring. Fathers, he writes, have often been ‘socialized to suppress their bodies’ relational tuning.’ So they have much to gain from a closer engagement with their children’s care. ‘If involved, embodied acts of caring become an integral part of the experience of fatherhood, then a new element is introduced into what these fathers bring to encounters with the world’ (p. 276).¹

Hamington’s recognition of the effect of children on their fathers is picked up by many studies whose focus is on fatherhood more generally. There is a growing body of research literature, from scholars in many countries, who have investigated, from many angles and disciplinary perspectives, the changes in men over the transition to fatherhood, the type and degree of involvement they have with their children, and the effects of this involvement on their understanding of fatherhood, and their sense of themselves as men. The resounding conclusion is that fatherhood matters to men, almost always in positive ways. In the US, for example, a study by Palkovitz (2002) of men who described themselves as ‘involved’ fathers suggested that fatherhood stimulated a ‘settling down’ process, made them more giving, and caused them to assume fathering as a key responsibility. In Canada, a major research study of 215 fathers, representing diverse groups in seven cluster sites across the country, produced similar findings. The authors note: ‘[Fathers] become more other oriented, emotionally aware and attentive, more careful about time choices related to work and family, and overall more confident and self-assured. These positive benefits in turn have implications for more healthy relationships with children and parenting partners’ (Daly et al., 2012: 1422. See also Daly et al., 2009; Ashbourne et al., 2011).

In the Canadian study, the researchers offer glimpses of embodied caregiving in the accounts of the fathers they interviewed. Ashbourne et al. (2011) note:

One father describes his experience of his own frustration in response to his son’s ‘whining’: ‘When I get too frustrated I start singing … and when I start singing, he sings with me, he doesn’t cry. And that makes me laugh and simmer down, and then I’m singing and he stops whining, and that helps me relax even more.’ (p. 76)

Another new father was asked at what point he really felt like a father:

Honestly, might sound funny, but it’s when I changed that first diaper … my son was having gastro problems, helping him, that’s when I felt like I was a father, not when my child first came out, when he was first born, I mean the doctors were doing everything … when I stepped in and started doing stuff when my child was at home … that’s when I started to feel like a father. (p. 78)

The embodiment of fathers’ caregiving evident in these excerpts is not taken further in the study. And in most other studies of fathering, it does not appear at all. Fathers’ caregiving is generally considered in the context of the gendered division of household labour, or of broader gender differences in parenting. Fathers’ bodies are not the focus (Doucet, 2006b).

But if the embodiment of caregiving is absent from the literature on fathering, research on embodiment ‘deals only sparsely with how bodies matter in fathering’ (Doucet, 2006b: 697). In studies of embodiment, as Morgan (1993/2002) notes, ‘a somewhat one-dimensional picture of men and their bodies emerges, one over-concerned with hardness, aggression and heterosexual performance, a kind of “over-phallusized” picture … ’ (p. 407). Why is this the case? One answer is that perceptions of men’s bodies fit with dominant understandings of masculinity. According to Connell (2005), ‘true masculinity’ is thought to proceed from men’s bodies, either because it is inherent in them, or because it expresses something about them. In other words,

[e]ither the body drives and directs action (e.g. men are naturally more aggressive than women; rape results from uncontrollable lust or an innate urge to violence), or the body sets limits to action (e.g. men naturally do not take care of infants; homosexuality is unnatural and therefore confined to a perverse minority).

(Connell, 2005: 45)

To change this picture of masculinity is to change perceptions of men’s bodies also. For Connell, this requires re-embodiment for men, ‘a search for different ways of using, feeling and showing male bodies.’ He adds:

Re-embodiment is involved, for instance, in changing the division of labour in early child care. As well as the institutional changes required, this has an important bodily dimension. Baby work is very tactile, from getting the milk in, to wiping the shit up, to rocking a small person to sleep. To engage with this experience is to develop capacities of male bodies other than those developed in war, sport or industrial labour. It is also to experience other pleasures.

(Connell, 2005: 233)

Of course, fathers’ bodies are not the only ones implicated in the activities Connell describes. Lupton (2012) uses the concept of interembodiment to capture the relational dimension of embodiment – the fact that ‘apparently individuated and autonomous bodies are actually experienced at the phenomenological level as intertwined’ (Lupton, 2012: 39). Drawing on the work of Tahhan (2008), she describes the ‘skinship’ that develops through this intertwining, and the intimate relationships between infants and their carers that follow from it. Though mothers and infants have been the focus of much of the discussion of interembodiment, Lupton notes that fathers too can experience its pleasures, as they too engage in embodied caring work. She calls for more research to ‘document and theorize the changing ways in which carers think and feel about the tiny bodies they care for, the practices in which carers engage and how they negotiate the strong emotions engendered by this caring’ (Lupton, 2012: 48).

I was introduced to Lupton’s conceptualization in a 2013 theoretical study by Canadian sociologist Andrea Doucet, whom I cited earlier, and who (as I will show in the next chapter) is the scholar widely recognized as having done the most to bring the separate research streams of fathering and embodiment together. In a series of studies, she interviewed more than 200 caregiving fathers. In their narratives she was able to hear the ‘ethic of care’ described by Hamington, and she too noted the moral transformation caregiving could produce. But it was ‘the weight of embodiment’ within the fathers’ accounts of their caregiving that emerged as ‘one of the stronger themes’ in the research (Doucet, 2013: 288, emphasis in original). This was not what she was expecting. She notes that she did not set out to study the body; it never appeared in interview guides and she never asked any of her interviewees to speak about it. Yet it came up again and again. Fathers talked about their discomfort in ‘female-dominated childrearing venues’ (like playgroups); they emphasized the ‘masculine and physical’ quality of their caregiving, demonstrated through play with babies and sports with older children; single fathers, in particular, described the occasional uneasiness they experienced as their daughters entered adolescence, when public displays of physical affection could be misconstrued (Doucet, 2006b, 2013).

Doucet’s research has been groundbreaking in making the embodied character of fathers’ caregiving visible. She has shown how, as subjects embodied in time and space, they are aware of their own, male bodies and the way they are perceived by others. This is especially true in the ‘estrogen-filled worlds’ (Doucet 2006b) through which, as children’s caregivers, they are often required to move. A father, rather than a mother, attending to children in certain community contexts (like a moms’ and tots’ playgroup) brings issues of intersubjective embodiment very much to the fore. More recently, Doucet has revisited her earlier work in the light of new materialist scholarship that has led to a significant theoretical reframing (Doucet, 2013). She has moved from a focus on inter-actions to what she calls ‘intra-actions’ – the intricately intertwined connections between bodies that take into account not only bodies and their social settings, but also subjects as themselves embodied (p.294). It is a reframing that ‘brings the body into full view’ (p. 297). Doucet draws on Lupton’s work as she calls on scholars to think in new ways about how bodies are part of ‘this old and still critically important story of gender and care work’. This rethinking, for Doucet, would involve ‘recognizing that care involves temporal, spatial and fluctuating embodied entanglements – mind, muscle, flesh, breasts, lungs, hormones, hugs, physical play, arms, hands, face, neck, touching, holding on, letting go – and emotions of unbridled joy and unexpected grief’. It would involve exploring, as Lupton describes it, the ‘inseparability of bodies’ that are joined by caring work (Doucet, 2013: 300).

I will be taking up Doucet’s research in more detail in later chapters. Here, I will note that I too am interested in ‘intra-actions’, and the ‘entanglements’ of embodied care. My particular focus is on the mundane and daily things that fathers are doing for their babies – the cuddling, diaper changing, bathing and soothing that, in Lupton’s (2012) terms, are practices by which fathers experience interembodiment. I want to understand what they learn to do, and what they make of what they are doing. I am also extending Doucet’s work by looking more closely at the period in fathers’ caregiving – their children’s infancy – when she suggests that involvement may be subject to the greatest gender challenge.

My research for this book began with the project I noted earlier, on Canadian fathers who were taking parental leave to care for babies. It was this project that sensitized me to the issue of embodiment in caregiving, and what that embodied experience meant for fathers. From this point the research grew in several directions. My recruitment of current leave-takers serendipitously put me in touch with a father who had taken leave in the past, and was keen to talk about his experience. I realized that he represented a group of fathers from whom I could learn a great deal, and I set out to locate and interview more of them.

As my interest in fathers’ caregiving grew, I sought out men’s memoirs about fathering, to add to my background knowledge. This is a burgeoning genre, and much of it, consciously designed to entertain a general audience, did not speak to my interests. But I was lucky enough, early in my reading, to discover two memoirs² that were rich with descriptions of fathers’ caregiving labour, combined with thoughtful reflections on fathering as practice and identity. Much later, I discovered the soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Setting the Scene
• Part II Seeing and Hearing Fathers
• Part III Reading Fathers
• Part IV Joining the Threads
• Appendix: Details of Interviewees
• Notes
• References
• Index