Abstract
This paper addresses an enduring puzzle in fathering research: Why are care and breadwinning largely configured as binary oppositions rather than as relational and intra-acting concepts and practices, as is often the case in research on mothering? Guided by Margaret Somers’ historical sociology of concept formation, I conduct a Foucauldian-inspired genealogy of the concept of “father involvement” as a cultural and historical object embedded in specific histories, conceptual networks, and social and conceptual narratives. With the aim of un-thinking and re-thinking conceptual possibilities that might expand knowledges about fathering, care, and breadwinning, I look to researchers in other sites who have drawn attention to the relationalities of care and earning. Specifically, I explore two conceptual pathways: First the concept of “material indirect care”, from fatherhood research pioneer Joseph Pleck, which envisages breadwinning as connected to care, and, in some contexts, as a form of care; and second, the concept of “provisioning” from the work of feminist economists, which highlights broad, interwoven patterns of care work and paid work. I argue that an approach to concepts that connect or entangle caring and breadwinning recognizes that people are care providers, care receivers, financial providers, and financial receivers in varied and multiple ways across time. This move is underpinned by, and can shift, our understandings of human subjectivity as relational and intra-dependent, with inevitable periods of dependency and vulnerability across the life course. Such a view also acknowledges the critical role of resources, services, and policies for supporting and sustaining the provisioning and caring activities of all parents, including fathers. Finally, I note the theoretical and political risks of this conceptual exercise, and the need for caution when making an argument about fathers’ breadwinning and caregiving entanglements.
Highlights
Concepts are not answers, solutions . . . Instead, they are modes of address, modes of connection, what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) sometimes call “moveable bridges” (p. 32)between those forces which relentlessly impinge on us from the outside to form a problem and those forces we can muster within ourselves, harnessed and transferred from outside, by which to address problems
In addition to the potential they illuminate for thinking about conceptual histories and rethinking new possibilities, these points are connected to historical epistemologies: the second dimension of Somers’ historical sociology of concept formation
Another way of thinking about the connections between care and breadwinning is illustrated in the concept of provisioning, defined as “all the work women do to provide for themselves and others—whether paid or unpaid in the market, home, or community spheres” and “the daily work performed to acquire material and intangible resources for meeting responsibilities that ensure the survival and well-being of people” (Neysmith et al 2010, p. 152)
Summary
Solutions . . . Instead, they are modes of address, modes of connection, what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) sometimes call “moveable bridges” (p. 32). Rather than highlighting the possible complex conceptual intra-connections between care and earning, emphasis is usually placed on how fathers’ earning activities take away from their caregiving Notable exceptions to this include research on low-income fatherhood (see Edin and Nelson 2013) and selected fathering research on breadwinning and care that acknowledges “providing as a form of involvement and care” I maintain that in addition to well-developed narratives of fathering and care, including scholarship on father’s caregiving, caring masculinities, and fathering embodiment (e.g., Doucet 2018; Dermott 2008; Ranson 2015; Elliott 2015; Robb 2019), we need fatherhood narratives that attend to the conceptual and practice-based interplay between breadwinning and caregiving This is especially true in current historical socio-economic contexts, when rising levels of employment precarity, which translate into “care deficits” and “care crises”. I argue for a conceptual reconfiguration of father involvement, drawing on a small selection of research on fathers and on mothering
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