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The second edition of Andrea Doucet's Do Men Mother? builds upon the award winning first edition to further illuminate fathers' candid reflections on caring and the intricate social worlds that men and women inhabit as they 'love and let go' of their children. Including interviews with over one hundred fathers – from truck drivers to insurance salesmen, physicians to artists – Doucet illustrates how men are breaking the mould of traditional parenting models. This edition expands her argument wider and deeper, building on changes to the theoretical work that informs the field, her own intellectual trajectory, and the fieldwork of revisiting six fathers and their partners a decade after her initial interviews. She continues to examine key questions such as: What leads fathers to trade earning for caring? How do fathers navigate through the 'maternal worlds' of mothers and infants? Are men mothering or are they redefining fatherhood? In asking and unravelling the question 'Do men mother?' this study tells a compelling story about Canadian parents radically re-envisioning child care and domestic responsibilities in the twenty-first century

This article addresses two puzzles that are at the heart of the field of gender divisions of domestic labour. How is it that care concepts seldom appear in a field that is focused on unpaid care work? Why does the field focus on divisions rather than on relationships and relationalities? To address these puzzles, I interrogate some of the conceptual underpinnings in the field's dominant theories: social exchange and 'doing gender'. Through a weaving of Margaret Somers' historical sociology of concept formation and Nancy Fraser's historical mapping of capitalism, care and social reproduction, I aim to rethink and remake the field of gender divisions of domestic labour through care theories, especially feminist care ethics and care economies research. I argue that care concepts – which highlight relationalities, responsiveness and responsibilities – can radically re-orient how we approach the 'who' and 'what' questions of this field's long-standing central focus on 'who does what?'

In the past decade, multiple compounding crises – ecological, racial injustices, 'care crises' and multiple recent crises related to the COVID-19 pandemic – have reinforced the powerful role of critical and social policy researchers to push back against 'fake news', 'alternative facts', and a post-truth era that denigrates science and evidence-based research. These new realities can pose challenges for social scientists who work within relational, ontological, non-representational, new materialist, performative, decolonising, or ecological 'turns' in social theory and epistemologies. This article's overarching question is: How does one work within non-representational research paradigms while also attempting to hold onto representational, authoritative and convincing versions of truth, evidence, facts and data? Informed by my research on feminist philosopher and epistemologist Lorraine Code's 40-year trajectory of writing about knowledge making and ecological social imaginaries, I navigate these dilemmas by calling on an unexpected ally to family sociology and family policy: the late American environmentalist Rachel Carson. Extending Code's case study of Carson, I argue for an approach that combines (1) ecological relational ontologies, (2) the ethics and politics of knowledge making, (3) crossing social imaginaries of knowledge making and (4) a reconfigured view of knowledge makers as working towards just and cohabitable worlds.

How can parental leave design be more socially inclusive? Should all parents be entitled to parental benefits or only those parents who are eligible based on a particular level of labour market participation? To think through questions of social inclusion in parental leave policy design, particularly issues related to entitlements to benefits, I make three arguments. First, aiming to extend Dobrotić and Blum's work on entitlements to parental benefits, I argue that 'mixed systems' that include both citizenship‐based and employment‐based benefits are just and socially inclusive approaches to parental leaves and citizenship. Second, to build a robust conceptual scaffolding for a 'mixed' benefits approach, I argue that that we need to attend to the histories and relationalities of the concepts and conceptual narratives that implicitly or explicitly inform parental leave policies and scholarship. Third, and more broadly, I argue that a metanarrative of care and work binaries underpins most scholarship and public and policy discourses on care work and paid work and on social policies, including parental leave policies. In this article, I outline revisioned conceptual narratives of care and work relationalities, arguing that they can begin to chip away at this metanarrative and that this kind of un‐thinking and rethinking can help us to envision parental leave beyond employment policy - as care and work policy. Specifically, I focus on conceptual narratives that combine (1) care and work intra‐connections, (2) ethics of care and justice, and (3) 'social care', 'caring with', transformative social protection, and social citizenship. Methodologically and epistemologically, this article is guided by my reading of Margaret Somers' genealogical and relational approach to concepts, conceptual narratives, and metanarratives, and it is written in a Global North socio‐economic context marked by the COVID‐19 pandemic and 21st century neoliberalism.

Over the past half‐century, enormous changes have occurred in gendered divisions of housework and child care across many countries, with a growing consensus that there is a slow but steady pace of change in gendered divisions of time and tasks but one that is combined with a puzzling persistence of gender differences in parental caregiving responsibilities. Rooted in a 14‐year qualitative and ethnographic research program that focuses mainly on breadwinning mothers and fathers who self‐identify as stay‐at‐home or primary caregivers and guided by genealogical and relational sociological approaches, the author argues that the concept of parental responsibility requires greater attention and that its theorization and conceptualization have critical implications for if and how it can be measured, the methodological approaches that might be used to assess it, and the conceptual fit between parental responsibilities and gender equality.

Cet article souligne l'absence du corps dans les études sur la division sexuelle des responsabilités parentales et soutient qu'on doit y intégrer le concept clé de l'embodiment masculin dans les soins proférés aux enfants. Issue d'une recherche qualitative qui se penche depuis vingt ans sur les mères pourvoyeuses économiques et les pères pourvoyeurs des soins, je cite les penseurs fondateurs de ce concept (Dorothy E. Smith, Merleau‐Ponty, Bourdieu, Goffman) et aboutis à une réflexion informée par de nouvelles approches matérialistes, en postulant l'indivisibilité ontologique du lien corps/social et l'interrelation entre donneurs et receveurs de soins. L'article se veut une invitation au débat, une réponse tentative à l'exhortation d'Anne Fausto‐Sterling () de "reformuler nos vieilles questions pour pouvoir arriver à une façon systématique d'aborder l'entrelacement corps‐culture" (pp. 1516–1517).This article points to the recurring invisibility of the body in studies of parental care giving and argues that one critical missing link within our understandings of gender differences in care work is that of male embodiment in care giving. Rooted in a two‐decade‐long qualitative and ethnographic research program on breadwinning mothers and care‐giving fathers, I begin with several key thinkers on embodiment (Dorothy E. Smith, Merleau‐Ponty, Bourdieu, Goffman) and I end the article with thinking‐in‐progress, informed by new materialist lenses, and argue for the ontological inseparability of body‐social linkages and care‐giving relations between carers and the cared‐for. This article is an invitation to debate and a quiet taking up of Anne Fausto‐Sterling's (2005) plea that "(w)e need to ask old questions in new ways so that we can think systematically about the interweaving of bodies and culture" (pp. 1516–1517).

S'appuyant sur un projet de recherche d'une durée de quatre ans concernant des pères canadiens dispensateurs de soins de première ligne ainsi que sur deux projets récents sur la première année de soins prodigués au nourrisson, l'auteure attire l'attention sur plusieurs questions théoriques importantes pour l'étude de l'égalité des sexes et de la différence entre les sexes au sujet de l'éducation des enfants. Elle propose d'abord de transférer le centre d'intérêt, qui porte en ce moment sur lestravauxdomestiques, vers lesresponsabilitésfamiliales et communautaires. Elle soutient ensuite que le terrain politique à la base de l'étude du maternage et du paternage exige de la clarté sur la façon dont les chercheurs interprètent l'interaction constante entre l'égalité et les différences. Finalement, elle défend l'idée voulant que les responsabilités parentales, étant donné qu'il y a eu certains changements au cours du temps, demeurent influencées par le genre parce qu'elles sont profondément enracinées dans l'habituset dans la personnification dans des contextes spatiaux et temporels spécifiques.Drawing on a four‐year research project on Canadian primary caregiving fathers, as well two recent projects on the first year of parenting, this article highlights several theoretical and substantive issues in the study of gender equality and gender differences in parenting. First, I call for shifts from a focus on domestictaskstoward domestic and community‐basedresponsibilities. Second, I argue that the political terrain underpinning the study of mothering and fathering calls for clarity on how researchers interpret the constant interplay between equality and differences. Third, while there has been some change over time, parental responsibilities remain gendered because they are deeply rooted in habitus and embodiment across specific spatial and temporal contexts.

This article addresses the question of why there are persistent gender differences in the responsibility for children. It argues that understanding continuing gender divisions of domestic responsibility, particularly in the first year of parenting, requires attending to issues of identity; commitment; embodiment; deeply rooted socialization or habitus; and normative community assumptions around gender, breadwinning, and caring. Rooted in three qualitative research studies conducted over the past eight years with more than two hundred Canadian fathers and forty mothers, the author argues for renewed thinking around issues of gender equality and gender differences and how these play out in domestic and community spaces in that first year of parenting. Bridging together time, space, and embodiment, the author also maintains that short-term potential differences in domestic responsibilities in parenting should not necessarily lead to long-term chronic inequities between women and men.

Drawing on a qualitative study of Canadian fathers who self-define as primary caregivers, this paper explores men's unique challenges to the gendered politics of unpaid work. While recognizing that fathers' narratives can widen our understandings of what it means to care for and take on the emotional responsibility for children, I also draw attention to the political and theoretical tensions that sit on the edges of feminist research on fathering. ; En se basant sur l'étude qualitative des pères canadiens qui se définissent en tant que prestataires de soins primaires, cet article explore les politiques basées sur les sexes du travail non rémunéré. Tout en reconnaissant que les récits des pères peuvent élargir notre compréhension de ce que signifie de prendre soin et d'assumer la responsabilité émotionnelle pour les enfants, j'attire l'attention sur les tensions politiques et théoriques qui sont sur les bords de la recherche féministe sur le rôle 'des pères.