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

Abstract

Given the overwhelming attention paid to the mother-child dyad in all realms of psychology and many in sociology, what theoretical frameworks are available to us through which to explore and understand father-daughter relationships? More specifically, what significance might working class fathers, both the flesh and blood person and the 'father in the mind' so frequently approached through the realm of the imaginary, have for their daughters' relationship with education? Drawing on a longitudinal study of girls growing up from 4 to 21 years old, we look to the work of psychoanalytic and psychosocial theorists to think about the place of fathers in the educational experiences, trajectories and outcomes of working class girls and young women. In doing so, we want to disassemble some of the 'heteronormative unconscious' ideas and phantasies, so often dependent on splitting, that are attached to femininity and masculinity, especially in their classed representations. We also want to explore the ways in which the terms of gender are simultaneously fixed and fluid, binary and challenging of the binary, when we consider working class girls and young women's relationships with their fathers and the connections that these may have with education and schooling.

Masculinizing Care? Gender, Ethics of Care, and Fathers’ Rights Groups

“…They continue to sit alongside more hands-on notions of fathering, even where breadwinning and involved fathering may be incompatible (Björk 2013; Eerola 2014; Hanlon 2012; Johansson and Klinth 2008; Miller 2011). Third, much of the Nordic research on involved fatherhood demonstrates how narratives of new fatherhood both transgress and reinscribe dominant gender constructions (Bach 2017; Bach and Aarseth 2016; Björk 2013; Bjørnholt 2014; Farstad and Stefansen 2015; Klinth 2008; Lucey, Olsvold, and Aarseth 2016; see also, Miller 2011). Gendered relations of power are thereby simultaneously challenged and bolstered.…”

“… 8. Working-class fathers may be less able to emphasize agency (Lucey, Olsvold, and Aarseth 2016; Tarrant 2018). …”

Feeling Gender

“…On the contrary, the farmer girls stress that they themselves as adults never even came close to their mothers' level of proficiency and diligence. Among the rural workingclass girls we find a more ambivalent evaluation of the mothers' work and a sadder tone in the descriptions of their admired, but often more distant and tired, fathers (see Lucey et al 2016). Here the mother's proficiency is more often associated with perfectionism and exaggerated frugality than with the relatively high status of female work in the farming culture.…”

“…But, at the same time, he may also be seen as vulnerable and in need of the daughter's help and support. As Lucey et al (2016) argue in a paper on working-class fathers and daughters, daughters may unconsciously identify with the fathers' provider role and try to take some burdens off their shoulders. For the middle-class girls in this generation the father is a more distant figure, but is still often surrounded by the excitement of being the stranger in the family.…”

Gender Formation of Foster Children at Aisyiyah Female Orphanage of Tegal Municipality Based on Muhammadiyah Gender Ideology

“…It is also a manifestation of a Psychoanalytic Feminist in which masculinity and femininity are only psychic with interdependent relationships (Bowman, 2016), where one depends on each other's existence. In this case, masculinity and femininity are not seen as opposites, but each category is seen as an entity (Lucey, Olsvold, & Aarseth, 2016).…”