Emergent fatherhood: new articulations of fatherhood among Muslim men in Denmark
- PDF / 315,356 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 76 Downloads / 200 Views
Emergent fatherhood: new articulations of fatherhood among Muslim men in Denmark Jeppe Schmidt Grüner 1 Accepted: 9 November 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This article explores how new practices and articulations of fatherhood are emerging among Muslim men in Denmark. With an explicit focus on care as both practice and ideal, the article accounts for the emergence of new forms of fatherly commitment, intimacy, and caregiving in domestic life. Drawing on ethnographic material from different social housing areas in and around the city of Copenhagen, I show how these new practices and imaginaries of fatherhood are assemblages of both Islamic ethics and values afforded by the Danish welfare state. Exploring the interlacement of care, Islam, and fatherhood in Denmark, the article provides a nuanced perspective on the various social roles of Muslim men as both fathers, sons, and husbands. Keywords Fatherhood . Morality . Care . Islam
Introduction
I want to give my two children what my father he could not give to me ... he came here to Denmark from Turkey and he would spend all of his time working, you know, supporting us, and I love him for that, but he was never someone that I could talk to like a friend … and it is not because he didn’t want to, but it was a different time and as I said he was supporting a big family and that was what he was doing …but I want to talk with my kids, be their friend and help them, give them what my father couldn’t give me. Senol
* Jeppe Schmidt Grüner
1
Aarhus N, Denmark
Contemporary Islam
Senol is a 46-year-old man and the father of two. The family migrated to Denmark from Turkey when Senol was a young child. In our conversations, Senol often expressed his need to give something else to his children than what his father gave to him. In this article, I turn to the stories and experiences of Muslim men, who, like Senol, question what it takes to be a good father and how they want to be remembered by their children. The concept of fatherhood that I apply here rests on the idea of what Marcia Inhorn calls “emergent fatherhood” (Inhorn et al. 2015). I draw on Inhorn’s definition of emergent as the kind of new meanings and values, new practices, and new relationships that are continually being created (ibid.: pp. 6–9). Drawing on the concept of emergent, I try to capture the individual change of the life course and change across generations among the Muslim men I worked with. In the context of this article, my main concern is to explore how emergent fatherhood entails new forms of fatherly affect and caregiving, and how we might understand these practices and imaginaries as an assemblage of both Islamic ethics and values afforded by the Danish welfare state. With an explicit focus on care as both social practice and ideal, I wish to give a nuanced account of Muslim men in Denmark and their various roles as both fathers, sons, and husbands. It is my argument that a study of care and caregiving among Muslim fathers will shed light on the ongoing transformations and negation
Data Loading...
