Abstract
Men who serve as primary parents to their children challenge gender norms. They are the product of changes wrought by the feminist movement, the LGBTQ movement, and changes in the economy that Chodorow advocated in The Reproduction of Mothering. According to preliminary research with stay-at-home fathers, in addition to needing a capacity for empathy, tolerance for attachment and dependency, and a desire for intimacy, men who serve as primary parents also require gender flexibility, a strong identity, and a secure relationship with their female partner. The author argues that we need Chodorow’s formulation of gender now more than ever. Masculinity that denies and eschews dependency, vulnerability, relatedness, and need is at the core of a masculinity that grounds itself in violence, aggression, domination, and radical independence. Stay-at-home fathers are at the vanguard of new versions of masculinity.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Beverley Burch, Other Women: Psychoanalytic Views of Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Gibson Margaret, ed., Queering Motherhood: Narrative and Theoretical Perspectives (Bradford, Ontario: Demeter Press, 2014); Maureen Sullivan, The Family of Woman: Lesbian Mothers, Their Children, and the Undoing of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
- 2.
Meghan Daum, ed., Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (New York: Picador, 2016).
- 3.
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women put Motherhood Before Marriage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).
- 4.
Daphne de Marneffe, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2004).
- 5.
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978).
- 6.
Gretchen Livingston, “Growing Number of Dads Home with the Kids: Biggest Increase Among Those Caring for Family” (Pew Research Center, 2014). Retrieved from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/06/05/growing-number-of-dads-home-with-the-kids/#fn-19605-4, June 5.
- 7.
D’Vera Cohn, Gretchen Livingston, and Wendy Wang, “After Decades of Decline, a Rise in Stay at Home Mothers” (Pew Research Center, 2014). Retrieved from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-decline-a-rise-in-stay-at-home-mothers/, April 8.
- 8.
Kathleen Gerson, The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 9.
Paula England, “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled,” Gender and Society 4, no. 2 (2010): 149–166.
- 10.
Nancy Chodorow, The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
- 11.
Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998).
- 12.
Ken Corbett, Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
- 13.
Virginia Goldner, “Toward a Critical Relational Theory of Gender,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 1, no. 3 (1991): 249–272; Virginia Goldner, “Ironic Gender/Authentic Sex,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4, no. 2 (2003): 113–139.
- 14.
Jill Yavorsky, Claire Dush, and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, “Production of Inequality: Gender Division of Labor Across the Transition to Parenthood,” Journal of Marriage and Family 77, no. 3 (2015): 662–679.
Bibliography
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Bell, L.C. (2021). The Production of Male Mothering. In: Bueskens, P. (eds) Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55590-0_10
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