A "Choreography of Becoming": Fathering, Embodied Care, and New Materialisms

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).