Fathers and Families: A Cultural Inquiry

Abstract

Our society has become indifferent to fathers at best, except in connection with money, and hostile to them at worst. It uses law and other cultural mechanisms to promote confused, trivialized and politicized notions of fatherhood. Restricting ourselves for practical purposes to the enduringly massive but increasingly ignored straight segment of society, we argue not only that children need fathers but also that men need fatherhood as the one remaining source of a healthy collective identity. To support our theory, we place fatherhood in the larger cultural context of reproduction by asking what it means to be human, to be a man or a woman, to be part of a family, to be part of a community or nation, and to give or take life. We hope to broaden and deepen discussions of both sex and gender, in short, with resources from the humanities.