Fatherhood, UK political culture and the new politics

Abstract

This article discusses the trope of fatherhood and its deployment within the UK political scene to ask how and why this has become a strategy in the postideological context of contemporary party politics. It uses psychoanalytic ideas to explore the fantasies of what is at stake in such a move and explores how politicians can be read as symptomatic of broader struggles around hegemonic masculinity as represented within the celebritized arena of political culture.

Working class fathers and daughters: Thinking about desire, identification, gender and education

“…Discourses abound in political and social policy debates about 'absent' and inadequate fathers and their absence is explicitly linked to social and personal ills, although the focus here is typically on sons, not daughters. This is especially so for working class and Black boys and young men involved in criminal and/or anti-social behavior -for instance, during the 2010 riots in the UK (see Yates, 2012).…”

“…Gail Lewis' (2012) exploration of her remembered relationship with her father and step-father as paternal objects uses cultural and contemporary object relations theory to look closely at the ways in which Oedipal dynamics and domestic space inscribed as 'multiracial' are imbricated to build internal psychic, and external embodied, social worlds. Candida Yates (2012) analyses the political representations of fatherhood in the UK and the fantasies of good, authoritative fathers they contain. In a Norwegian context, Monica Rudberg and Harriet Bjerrum-Nielsen (2012) blend discursive and socio-cultural perspectives with psychoanalytic ideas to look at changing patterns of masculinity and parental identification across three generations of men (son, father, grandfather) in the same families.…”