It’s More Than Deciding What to Wank Into: Negotiating an Unconventional Fatherhood

Abstract

This chapter makes explicit my own experiences as an informal sperm donor to a lesbian couple and the unusual conceptualisation of fatherhood this renders. Explored here in particular are the emerging negotiations whereby my fatherhood was and is constructed interdependently between family members and myself. As part of this journey, I reveal the anxiety about my use of autoethnography, not least because of the lasting effects the printed word has on those involved, irrespective of procedural anonymity.

I had never considered myself to be an ethnographer, let alone an autoethnographer. In my background in educational research I had always adopted a more traditional form of qualitative research. In teaching qualitative research to undergraduates I was always a little uneasy that autoethnography could look a little like storytelling. I was eventually ‘forced’ into autoethnography because of the difficulties I found in recruiting men like me to my research. I would have been much happier with lots of interviews. However, during a teaching session with my sociology students at university we were talking about my PhD and my experiences as a sperm donor father. I was explaining how my own experiences had formed the basis of my research into the subject. One student remarked that she thought it was really weird that I would reflect on my particular role as a somewhat unusual father and immediately see this as something that could be developed academically into a PhD. She felt that this was the difference between, as she put it, ‘you academics that spend your life in books and the rest of us’. She said, ‘a normal person wouldn’t think “this will make a great PhD”, they would just get on with doing it’. I think I had been an autoethnographer all along.

It is my son James’ 10th birthday and he has decided he wants to invite all his friends to a paintball day. He has invited me as well. He has lots of his school and football friends there together with a smattering of dads. I don’t know any of them. We are all moving from one combat area to another. We are all dressed in anonymous combat clothes with full face masks. In front of me are three of his friends talking. One says, ‘who is the guy who came on a motorbike?’ (This is me). ‘That’s James’ dad’ replies one of them. ‘Can’t be’ says the third ‘James doesn’t have a dad’. There’s a silence of a few seconds. ‘Not a real one’.