Suchergebnisse

This article aims to develop new conceptions of the psychosocial dynamics that drive the re-romanticization of domestic femininity in current financialized capitalism. Feminist scholars have described this heightened cultivation of mothering as a reparative move in response to irreconcilable tensions between cultural ideals of the 'balancing mother' and 'lean-in femininity'. This article adds a materialist-psychosocial lens to these conceptions, to enhance understanding of what drives this craving for domestic femininity. Drawing on a free-association narrative interview study with couples in the financial elite in the comparatively gender-egalitarian Norwegian context, I describe a specific emotional mechanism that resists democratization of gender in this specific group. The interviews reveal a felt need to cultivate 'the human side of things' at safe distance from the competitiveness of 'hard-core finance'. The Nordic earner–carer model with its entwinement of care and professional pursuits, cultivated by the more self-fulfilment-oriented parts of the professional middle-class appears not only unwanted but threatening. In my analysis, I retrieve and develop a psychoanalytically inspired historical-materialist feminism, one that perceives of the gendered division of work as a split in modes of focusing human energy. I suggest that the resurgent cultivation of domestic femininity is nurtured by a self-energizing antagonism between competitive and relational practices. I further argue that the cultivation of domestic femininity in these financial couples points to a potential antagonism between the democratization of love and the specific anxiety-driven competitiveness to which this financial-elite group may be particularly susceptible.

This article explores the emotional dynamics involved in the shaping of middle-class subjectivities, aiming to move beyond the 'fear of falling' thesis and the attendant emphasis on the quest for positional advantage. I argue that this thesis offers a one-dimensional notion of what it is that drives middle-class perceptions, values and motivations, unsuitable for explaining current tensions between symbolic and economic fractions. Drawing on a comparative narrative interview study of managerial and professional parents in Norway, I describe the emotionally charged investments – 'fear of falling' and 'fear of fading' – as well as the excitements that drive different modes of socialisation in these groups. Further developing the phenomenological and psychosocial trajectories in Bourdieu's practice theory yields a productive tool for exploring these modes of socialisation, contributing to an enhanced conception of emotional dynamics of different middle-class subjectivities.

This article explores men's motivations for change in the interface of a feminist demand for gender equality and the appeal of new consumerist lifestyles. Drawing on a longitudinal study of egalitarian dual career couples within a Nordic welfare state, the article analyzes the case story of four men interviewed in 1990 and 2005. During this period, the men and their partners challenge a gendered division of work in their families by turning the administrative and emotional cohesion in the family's daily life into a joint lifestyle project. The described trajectories suggest that this transgression is an outcome of a specific interweaving of a feminist discourse on equal responsibility and an aesthetic consumption discourse. The consumerist appeal seems to have offered a vehicle to turn a moral demand into a motivational force in these men's own life projects; consequently, it has facilitated the creation of a degendered commitment toward domestic participation.

This article adds to the emergent literature on classed fathering by exploring how middle-class and working-class fathers relate to their sons' ADHD diagnosis. The strong requirement on parents to adhere to a dominant medical discourse of ADHD is used as a case to explore how the entwinement of class and gender shape different fathering practices. The article draws on in-depth interviews with 16 fathers of boys diagnosed with ADHD. These interviews were part of a larger study including interviews with children and their mothers. All the fathers interviewed were critical of the medical understanding of their sons' behaviour, and seemed, in different ways to defend their sons against the diagnosis and medication. However, this resistance is much clearer in the working-class fathers' narratives than in the middle-class fathers'. We argue that classed masculinities allow these fathers to take on a love-driven identification with their sons' problematic masculine behaviour. Seen in a wider context, the fathers' critical voices offer considerable resistance to the medicalisation discourse, and thus also to currently dominant parenting regimes.