Overview
- Features innovative analysis of fathers in forty Hollywood family films
- Applies post-structuralist theory to extend sociological understanding of the contradictory cultural expectations of contemporary fatherhood
- Identifies and names the phenomenon of "pure fatherhood"
Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life (PSFL)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Setting the Scene
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Front Matter
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Changing Expectations of the Father
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book maps father failure and redemption through three decades of Hollywood family films, revealing how libertarian notions that align agency with autonomy lead to new conflicts for the contemporary father. The films find resolution to these conflicts through a re-gendering of parenting as relationship. In their creation of a ‘pure’ fatherhood that is valorised as authentic for its lack of parental responsibilities, the films serve to challenge the perception that fathering enacted outside the nuclear family structure is fragile. McNulty Norton finds in the films a new essentialism that secures the pure relationship to the biological father, reinforcing his position in the face of changing family forms.
Reviews
—Hannah Hamad, Senior Lecturer of Media and Communication, Cardiff University, UK
“Drawing on detailed analysis of Hollywood films from the 1990s onwards, this engaging book presents a convincing and nuanced argument for the increasing value of authentic father-child relationship on screen: one that relies on a re-gendering rather than de-gendering of parenting.”
—Esther Dermott, Professor and Head of School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, UK
“This book throws new light on the debate over a crisis in the nature of contemporary Western fatherhood. McNulty Norton brings a penetrating sociological eye to the irresolvable tensions in constructions of fatherhood in film, and illuminates the shifts to statuses of mother and child that are bound up in these portrayals.”
—Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology, University of Southampton, UK
“This book provides an original contribution to scholarship on the contradictory cultural expectations of contemporary fatherhood. McNulty-Norton brilliantly charts the emergence and decline of gender role stereotypes in Hollywood movies in ways that are inflected by race and lays out how expectations of the ‘caregiving father’ have given way to expectations of the ‘intimate father.’”
—Jo Lindsay, Professor of Sociology, Monash University, Australia
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Denise McNulty Norton is an independent researcher. Her research interests include the sociology of free will and the discursive construction of family.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Pure Fatherhood and the Hollywood Family Film
Authors: Denise McNulty Norton
Series Title: Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71648-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-71647-9Published: 21 July 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-71650-9Published: 22 July 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-71648-6Published: 20 July 2021
Series ISSN: 2731-6440
Series E-ISSN: 2731-6459
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 198
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Sociology of Family, Youth and Aging, Media and Communication, Gender Studies, Film Theory, Media Sociology