Engaging Multiple Roles and Identities
Engaging Multiple Roles and Identities
Men’s Experiences (Re)negotiating Work and Family
This chapter examines how gay men configure their roles and identities as parents in the context of broad cultural discourses regarding gender, parenthood, and family. It considers how gay fathers make decisions about the division of work and family responsibilities and how they feel about those arrangements, with particular emphasis on the experiences of those whose work arrangements do not conform to cultural expectations for masculinity (that is, working part-time or staying at home). It also explores how gay fathers reevaluate their work roles in light of fatherhood as well as the extent to which they feel less committed to work upon becoming a parent. It shows that gay men must navigate and reconcile dominant ideologies surrounding masculinity—which emphasize breadwinning and are fundamentally interconnected with and foundational to heteronormativity—with their own realities as parents who are performing both paid and unpaid labor.
Keywords: gay men, gender, parenthood, family, gay fathers, work arrangements, masculinity, fatherhood, breadwinning, heteronormativity
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