Browsing by Subject "Fatherhood"

This study aims to identify diverse masculinities of fatherhood and the subject positions in Japanese news media. In post-war Japan, Japanese men upheld breadwinning masculinity, also called Salaryman masculinity, which positioned the domestic sphere as the domain of women. In contemporary Japan, men are socially expected to play the care roles instead of solo financial provider roles within the household. However, conventional patriarchal ideology has persisted, assigning men as breadwinners and women as primal caregivers as complemental partners. Hybrid masculinity that adopts caring role but upholds the dominating power over women has been also observed. Since masculinity reconstructs patriarchal power relations, this study attempts to investigate the complex discourses of constructed masculinities of fatherhood and the subject positions that men can adopt in contemporary Japan. As this study focuses on the power dynamics of masculinity, this study is situated within the field of critical social psychology and is grounded in social constructionism. This study applies the concept of Hegemonic masculinity developed by Connell (1987). Foucauldian discourse analysis is adopted to approach the discourses and subject positions. The research questions are: RQ1) What kind of masculinities of fatherhood are constructed in Japanese news media? and RQ2) What kind of subject positions are provided for Japanese fathers in the news media? In total, 31 articles, provided by 14 news medias, are collected from Yahoo! News online news platform, of which the range of published date is May 2019 to October 2019. As a result, this study identifies five discourses: Men work discourse, Men are not good at childrearing discourse, Time with family is precious discourse, Men participate in childrearing discourse, and Equal parenthood discourse. The subject positions attached to the discourses are suggested as: Breadwinner, Secondary caregiver, Involved father, In a higher status than women, and Equal partner of women. Whereas breadwinning masculinity still has upheld the domination over women, the masculinity that explicitly rejects the traditional gender role is also identified. In addition to the traditional hegemonic salaryman masculinity, hybrid masculinity that exploits the femininity to maintain the hegemonical power is identified. Within several discourses, emphasized femininity is constructed by women by positioning themselves as primary caregivers. With the help of the analysis framework of Foucauldian discourse analysis developed by Willig (2008), this study illustrates the practices and possible psychological experiences by men. This study proposes to the government and public institutions to constitute gender-neutral discourses within the policies and services. This study contributes to critical social psychology by adding to articulated knowledge of possibilities for making sense of the relation between masculinity and domestic sphere. Furthermore, this study proposes the possible shifts of gender relations towards equality by identifying gender-equal discourse that has not been observed in other current masculinity studies in Japan.