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What About the Children! Masculinities, Sexualities and Hegemony
Author: Damien W. Riggs
Date Of Publication: Apr 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1874-2
Isbn: 1-4438-1874-7
What About the Children! takes up the important task of examining the role of hegemonic masculinities in propping up a normative social order in which children are constructed as the property of adults. By examining adult-child relations in the context of a wide range of family forms and social contexts, the book provides some hard answers to questions relating to what exactly are the best interests of children, and how they should be determined. The book responds by suggesting that there is a pressing need to recognise the capacity of children to voice their own desires and needs, and that in failing to recognise this all adults (and men in particular) only serve to further perpetuate a possessive logic that, at least in part, gives rise to the mistreatment or abuse of children. Covering topics such as the experiences of foster fathers, gay adoptive fathers and sperm donors, and exploring phenomena such as books on raising boys and movies about gay parents, the book offers important insights as to the operations of hegemony in the lives of a broad range of men. Importantly, the book moves beyond simply identifying the operations of hegemony in relation to possessive investments in children, and goes on to propose a ‘non-indifferent’ approach to understanding adult-child relations that at its heart examines the operations of power that produce children as supposedly docile subjects (and only certain adults as capable of caring for them). As a result, the book makes a significant contribution to setting an alternative agenda for child protection both within Australia and internationally by asking the question ‘protection for whom?’.
Damien W. Riggs is a lecturer in social work at Flinders University and a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide. He is the author (with Victoria Clarke, Sonja Ellis and Elizabeth Peel) of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer Psychology: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the editor of the Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review.
“Damien Riggs is a unique voice in the Australian academic world. His work has crossed lesbian and gay studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender studies and, as here, studies of reproduction and parenting. In What About the Children! he critically examines the edges of mainstream conceptions of parenting and in each instance of this he teases out the ways that normative forms of masculinity, parenthood and childhood haunt even the most apparently historically new and socially challenging expressions of men's contributions to reproduction and parenting. In so doing, Riggs shows us how hard it is to forge new and creative forms of gender and parenting, yet he also manages to clear the path for precisely those forms which will encourage men and boys to challenge hegemonic forms of gender and sexuality. For this reason it is to be commended and deserves to be read widely.”
—Barbara Baird, Associate Professor, Department of Women's Studies, Flinders University, South Australia
Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99
Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)
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