Masculinities in Motion: Imagining Fatherhood

I recently encountered a photo essay entitled ‘Masculinities in Motion’ by Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, a lecturer in gender studies at The University of West Indies. Her photographs depict men in San Fernando, Trinidad going about their everyday lives in a marketplace, a Carnival “mas” camp and a fishing wharf.  She includes brief captions beneath each picture that draw on conversations between the author and the subjects of each photograph.

http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/april2007/journals/Masculinities_in_Motion207_pm.pdf 

The title 'Masculinities in motion’ conjures images of men on the move. It connotes limitless male possibility and a plurality of manliness that is being continually fashioned. Yet photographs themselves do not move. They can’t. Thus, her title communicates the ephemerality of the photograph, as a momentary framing, a temporary pinning-down that admits to its own transience. Her images cannot keep up with the men her camera captures. And it appears that the author does not need them to. We are not presented with "The West Indian Male" (whoever that quintessential actor might be). We are presented with short fragments of narratives (in the form of captions and the images themselves) that move the reader/viewer beyond caricatures. What are encountered are snapshots of day-to-day life. Such snapshots gesture towards realities characterised by creativity, pride, hardship, tenderness, violence, love and fun (amongst other things).

“Imagining Fatherhood”

This image, its title and the short caption beneath it, speak directly to themes I am currently confronting in my own work. The photographer/ethnographer writes,

Some men ‘create’ fatherhood, which then becomes a compelling motive to work. A father tries to secure temporary employment so that he can support his common-law partner and son. Yet, the boy is a neighbour's child. His mother couldn’t look after him as well as the young couple nearby. So, without any formal “paper”, the couple has informally adopted him. The three live together in one room they built from gathered and donated materials. This union is a long Caribbean tradition of making family that defy “fictive” and “blood” categories, and rules regarding legitimacy (Hosein 2007: 3-4).

This idea of family as an open-ended concept, as something made through shared contact and experience, as well as 'blood', is nothing new to Caribbean people. However, what is somewhat more recent is the realisation amongst anthropologists (and social scientists more generally) that Caribbean men are often intimately intertwined in these creative practices of making kin. All too readily regarded as marginal actors positioned on the periphery of female-oriented networks, men have been considered an appendage to family life in much anthropological writing.  However, following the lead of scholars such as Christine Barrow (1996; 1998) and Barry Chevannes (2001), Hosein's image and words encourage a more complex and nuanced understanding of the existent positionalities of men, and fathers more specifically, within the family.

Fatherhood in this instance is imagined, but it is not imaginary. It derives from the immediate material realities of Trinidadian life. Concrete social and economic contingencies make childhood relocation a necessity in many such instances. A mother who is unable to care for her son gives him to neighbours who might better meet his needs. But they themselves have limited resources with which to raise a child, and must seek work to fulfill their new parental roles. At the risk of sounding functionalist (functionalism has after all misunderstood Caribbean families in some important ways as Barrow 1988 highlights), child shifting provides something of a morally sustained mechanism of ensuring child welfare within extended family and community networks. As Wardle notes, fields of relations spanning rural, urban and overseas sites often provide effective/affective responses to family 'crises' (Gordon 1987) that Caribbean states snipped by structural adjustment policies are unable to remedy (Wardle 2004).  In such networks, love expressed materially through provision - to sustain life and health - can become an important means for the making and maintenance of bonds between father and child (Seller 2005). Therefore, as Hosein states, neither “blood”, legal adoption “paper[s]”, nor “fictive” notions of relatedness necessarily produce father-son bonds. Instead, sacrifice, contact, labour and giving offer some indication as to how men can 'create' fatherhood.

The images command the reader – scholar, policy maker, or anyone else - to 'imagine fatherhood' beyond preconfigured understandings. The title contains the latent imperative to conceive of paternal relatedness in direct response to practice and encounter. However, a flexibility and openness to recognise diverse, variegated and yet unencountered patterns of fathering/male care must also be assumed by the ethnographer/social scientist. The emergence of organisations such as Fathers Inc. in Jamaica and The Roving Caregiver programme in Dominica and elsewhere attest to transformations of fatherhood taking place across the region. People's engagement with, and responses to these projects/organisations are yet to be rigorously studied by social scientists. But what is clear is the fact that fatherhood - as a salient aspect of Caribbean men's masculine selves - is a constant process of becoming. It is our role as social scientists to offer a detailed momentary framing of such motion.

References

•  Gabrielle Jamela Hosein (2007) ‘Masculinities in Motion’, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. Vol.1(1) http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/april2007/journals/Masculinities_in_Motion207_pm.pdf 

              Gabrielle Jamela Hosein – UWI Profile: http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/april2007/gabriellehosein.asp

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• Barrow 1988 "Anthropology, The Family and Women in the Caribbean." In Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd, eds. Gender in Caribbean Development. Jamaica: UWI. Pp, 156-169.
• _______ 1996 Family in the Caribbean: Themes and perspectives. London: Ian Randle
•  _______ 1998 “Caribbean Masculinity and Family: Revisiting 'Marginality'and 'Reputation'”. In Christine Barrow (ed.), Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies and Identities. Kingston: Ian Randle.
• Chevannes (2001) Learning to Be a Man: Culture, Socialization, and Gender Identity in Five Caribbean Communities. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press
• Gordon 1987 “I go to 'Tanties': The economic significance of child-shifting in Antigua, West Indies”. Journal of Comparative Family Studies
• Seller 2005 “Out of State But Still in Mind: Family Love and the Cultural Context of Migration in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean ”, Les Cahiers du Gres 5(1). Pp, 43-59.
• Wardle 2004 “Choosing Parents: Adoption into a Global Network”. In F. Bowie. London  (ed.) Cross-cultural Approaches to Adoption: Routledge.