Download all the Abstracts for panel 8 (245 Kb)  or read them below.

Between “blood” and “sharing”: trajectories of fatherhood and masculinities in Uganda

Panelist: Anna Baral

The role of Ugandan men as fathers and providers is being challenged by precarious economic conditions, made worse by the long Covid-lockdown: fatherhood has been changing in multiple and apparently contradictory directions. On one side, DNA paternity testing is gaining popularity in Uganda, with fathers increasingly unwilling to take care of children who are not biologically theirs. The test as “scientific fact” contrasts with older ways of establishing children affiliation to the patrilineal clan, and with ideas of kinship based on relationality and responsibility. A “negative” DNA test relieves fathers of the burden of care and breaks relationships in the name of economic sustainability. On the other side, the extraordinarily long national lockdown under the Covid pandemic, which has exacerbated the breadwinners’ frustrations , has also offered new trajectories of care to fathers. Men explored different ways of validating themselves in the crisis, renouncing to the centrality of economic provision and performing fatherhood through forms of sharing and reciprocity. The paper explores aspects of changing fatherhood and masculinity in Uganda through ethnographic examples from two research projects that show the complexity of men’s orientation to “care”.  

“The football dads”: entanglements of economy and care in the football migration industry

Panelist: Emy Lindberg

This paper explores how kinship is performed through the particular transnational family affiliation that is established between male, Ghanaian footballers and the people they call fathers, referred to here as “the football dads”. These are people that the footballer migrants singled out as some of the most important persons in their lives and careers. By unpacking who the football dads are, and what they do, the paper discusses what the naming of a father entails in practice. With the backdrop in a comparison of what fatherhood is and how it is practiced in Ghana and Sweden, the paper shows how this relationship is performed through transnational, reciprocal transactions of both emotional and financial character. Whilst acknowledging the power asymmetry inherent in one of the most archetypical power relationships there is; that between father and son, the paper focuses on the caring and loving aspects of the affiliation, as this was emphasized by both the footballers and the football dads themselves. As such, it employs the notion of caring masculinities (Elliot 2016). Finally, the paper demonstrates how intimate and personal relationships are intrinsically linked to global processes of commodification and capitalism, as manifested in the football industry. The football dad – footballer relationship is a key relationship within the football migration trajectory and the economic and relational migration infrastructure, a cross-cultural phenomenon of performative and creative, yet historically grounded kinship. 

Ice baths and psychedelics: care and self-care amongst young artist men in Iceland

Panelist: Alexander Sallstedt 

Based on my ethnographic fieldwork amongst young artist men in Iceland, this paper explore aspects of care involved in their practice of cold sea swimming (ice baths) and in their consumption of psychedelic substances. Both of these functioned as a means for the men to near themselves nature, and to cultivate a meaningful, affective—caring—relationship with nature, and, by implication, with themselves. I draw from Karla Elliott’s (2015) writing on “caring masculinities” when considering this interchange between nature, care, and self-care as a positive one; as do I contrast this with the critical sentiment “more style than substance” popularized by Michael Messner (1993) in his work on progressive male norms in America in the 1990s. 

“Off bed, we are father and son”: practices of caring masculinity among younger rural gay migrants in Shanghai 

Panelist: Shen Qing

The majority of the younger gay men who desire older gay men or engage in intergenerational relationships with gay elders in Shanghai are rural migrant workers from underdeveloped regions in China. Their desire is largely conceived in pragmatic terms and met with suspicion. In mainstream imaginations they are depicted as receivers of Shanghainese gay elders’ material and financial support and are structurally feminized. My paper examines the ways in which these rural gay migrants unsettle their preconceived inferior subject positions by feminizing the gay elders. Two types of practices are discussed in this paper. The first is outwitting and thus devaluing the seniority of gay elders. The younger migrants argue that they have more experience in dealing with the underworld and people from all walks of life in post-socialist period as opposed to the elders whose adult life was largely confined by one’s work unit in socialist China. By doing so they infantilize and feminize their elderly partners whose expertise and thoughts are considered out of tune with current times. Second, the gay migrants actively perform the role of a filial son who provides emotional and material care to their “old daddy”. This caring practice aligns with Confucius notions of filial piety, which is best captured in one of their favorite sayings which goes “in bed we are husband and wife, off bed we are father and son”. The practice of “caring masculinity” enables them to counter the stigma and gain an upper hand in age-discrepancy relationships.