Abstract
This study draws on the results of qualitative research conducted in Verona, north-eastern Italy, collecting data from in-depth interviews and examining the ways in which different masculinities emerge in the sphere of child care. The presented research takes as its theoretical frame of reference the plural conception of masculinity developed by Connell during the last 20 years, analysing the dynamics of hegemony and subordination among different masculinities present in some families. The research contributes to the strand of men's studies which analyses the masculinities emerging from practices usually associated with fatherhood. Contrary to the findings of other studies carried out in Italy in the same context, the male breadwinner model seems to have lost strength and legitimacy. The research shows that a multiplicity of social actors (members of couples, educational personnel and users of the early childhood services, employers of parents, local and national institutional actors in the Italian scenario) are constructing and legitimising a ‘male helper’ model of masculinity, which seems more appropriate to the context of reference than other models of masculinity and which is emerging as the hegemonic masculinity in the considered social and geographical context.
Highlights
In recent years, communist studies have been enjoying what one may call a renaissance after the apparent stagnation which lasted the quarter-century that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Gilman-Opalsky 2011, 20)
Promising scholarly trends on communism that developed in the 1970s and 1980s struggled to develop amid the ending of the USSR project, with the history of, for example, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) often becoming the stick with which neo-liberal politicians like Silvio Berlusconi hit at rivals, depicting them as supporters of one, monolithic communist project that was totalitarian in essence and, obviously, evil (Fantoni 2014, 822)
The so-called ‘second generation’ of historians of communism was enriched by geographical awareness, empirical abundance and theoretical acuteness but struggled through the 1990s ‘end of communism’ (White 1987, 209–11)
Summary
Communist studies have been enjoying what one may call a renaissance after the apparent stagnation which lasted the quarter-century that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Gilman-Opalsky 2011, 20). Enzo reiterated the point a few years later, writing in 1936 that the Zionist aim may be described in general terms as the effort to concentrate Jewish masses in Palestine in productive occupations on the basis of the possibilities of employment that will be created by private and national Jewish capital This concentration must lead naturally to the political as well as the economic autonomy of the Jewish masses. As Enzo and others emphasised, labour must be productive, though not necessarily associated with efficiency, and isolation avoided at all costs This second part of this essay, after a brief summary of the period between his alleged ‘conversion’ and the end of the Second World War, intends to demonstrate that the councils that Sereni envisaged at the end of the conflict reflected many of the Zionist themes discussed above. This, as I hope to have demonstrated, had been built on the substantial foundations of socialist Zionism and continued to be informed by them
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