Organisers: Ursula Müller and Mechtild Oechsle (Bielefeld)
Venue: Bielefeld
Time: 9.-21.04.2007
With fathers being paid more attention to in public discourse, a phase seems to come to an end in which changes in gender relations have been seen as being restricted to female life courses. “Modernization of fatherhood” turns out to be a central, though far from being the only, element of “moderniziation” of masculinities, including the question if transition to fatherhood is desirable and successful. As “femininity” has differentiated from “motherliness”, ”masculinity” seems to differentiate from “fatherliness” with regard to cultural images and practices as well. In these processes, non-contemporaneities and contradictions are observable. Research results in various disciplines agree upon large discrepancies existing between men’s changed desires to live fatherhood more actively, and their factual practices. Cultural representations of fatherhood often lay across with fathers’ practices that can be empirically observed. The “multiplication” of cultural images and practices of fatherhood makes it difficult to conclude orientations from structural characteristics of groups of fathers.
Nevertheless, structural frames seem to have impact in a way that still has to be investigated more thoroughly; the structural impact of work organizations is addressed here, but also strategies of standardization by law, and steering by politics that may vary according to the respective countries, and still have to be evaluated referring to their effects.
Evaluation of current trends presupposes the analysis of mutual impact, but as well of contradictions and contra-rotations between models and cultural representations of fatherliness, fathers’ social practices and their blending with the level of psyche and interaction, structural effects of working organization contextualized by structural changes in paid work, as well as political regulations of fatherhood and standardization by law. The claim, but also the chance for multi-level analysis in this field is seen in an interdisciplinary research design, combining perspectives and methodological strategies of various disciplines, and using their potential in order to obtain a more complex understanding of recent developments of fatherhood. Continue reading →
