Mediated Relationships, Ties and Intimacies

Abstract

In this chapter, Hodkinson and Das outline how new fathers struggling with mental health difficulties use networked media to negotiate, initiate and reciprocate emotional ties and intimacies. Focusing on moments of disclosure as an affectively significant for the development of intimate ties, the authors show how platforms and their affordances are worked with, within and against, in the fraught and liminal establishment of connections. They explore a mixture of fluid and sometimes fleeting intimacies fathers establish as they cope with mental health struggles in the context of restrictive paternal positionings and struggles communicating with those close to them. The analysis focuses both on the use of media to communicate difficult emotions within existing relationships and on the establishment of new supportive interactions, ties and relationships online.

This chapter is based on material that has been previously published as Das, R., & Hodkinson, P. (2019). Tapestries of intimacy: Networked intimacies and new fathers’ emotional self-disclosure of mental health struggles. Social Media+ Society, 5(2).