The absence of biological fathers in South Africa has been constructed as a problem for children of both sexes but more so for boy-children. Arguably the dominant discourse in this respect has demonized non-nuclear, female-headed households. Fathers are constructed as either absent or ‘bad’. Thus it has become important to explore more closely how male care-givers have been experienced by groups of men in South Africa. This article examines discourses of fatherhood and fatherlessness by drawing on qualitative interviews with a group of 29 men who speak about their reported experiences and understandings of being fathered or growing up without biological fathers. Two major and intertwined subjugated discourses about adult men's experiences of being fathered that counterbalance the prevailing discourses about meaning of fatherhood and fatherlessness became evident, namely, ‘being always there’ and ‘talking fatherhood’. The importance of the experience of fatherhood as ‘being there’, which relates to a quality of time and relationship between child and father rather than physical time together, is illustrated. It is not only biological fathers who can ‘be there’ for their sons but also social fathers, other significant male role models and father figures who step in at different times in participants' lives when biological fathers are unavailable for whatever reason. Second, many positive experiences of fathers or father figures that resist a traditional role of authority and control and subscribe to more nurturant and non-violent forms of care, represented as ‘talking’ fathers, are underlined. If we are to better understand the impact of colonial and apartheid history and its legacy on family life in contemporary society, there is a need for more historically and contextually informed studies on the meaning of fatherhood and fatherlessness.
The legacy of apartheid and continued social and economic change have meant that many South African men and women have grown up in families from which biological fathers are missing. In both popular and professional knowledge and practice this has been posed as inherently a problem particularly for boys who are assumed to lack a positive male role model. In drawing on qualitative interviews with a group of South African men in which they speak about their understandings of being fathered as boys, this paper makes two key arguments. The first is that contemporary South African discourses tend to pathologize the absence of the biological father while simultaneously undermining the role of social fathers. Yet, this study shows that in the absence of biological fathers other men such as maternal or paternal uncles, grandfathers, neighbours, and teachers often serve as social fathers. Most of the men who participated in this study are able to identify men who -as social rather than biological fathers -played significant roles in their lives. Secondly, we suggest that while dominant discourses around social fatherhood foreground authoritarian and controlling behaviours, there are moments when alternative more nurturing and consultative versions of being a father and/or being fathered are evident in the experiences of this group of men. IntroductionPopular and professional discourses suggest that the absent father is the source of many societal ills, and that biological fathers are critical for the mental and psychological health of boys growing into young men. Psychology has long problematized the figure of the absent father, and sons who grow up in the absence of a biological father are generally understood to have been deprived (for a discussion of these discourses see Lupton and Barclay 1997, Lewis and Lamb 2004. In this paper, we suggest that such understandings emerge out of particular conceptualizations of 'the family', out of the privileging of the nuclear family model comprising biological mother, father, and children. It is specifically the absence of the biological father in the patriarchal nuclear family that is presented as problematic, and problematic specifically for the boy child. Such conceptualizations and normative assumptions of family privilege the biological over the social, ahistorically essentializing and normalizing particular family structures and particular gender regimes. And yet there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that far from the basic building-block of human communities across time and space, the stereotypical patriarchal nuclear family as understood in much contemporary legislation and social policy is a relatively recent invention (Burgess and Russell 2004). Its roots lie in centuries of social, political, and economic change, expressed/exemplified in a global
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