Talking to Tom Dick and Harry. Fathers, Autism and Class: A Feminist Analysis

ABSTRACT This thesis reports the findings of a qualitative research project with working-class fathers with autistic children. A feminist focus recognises the socially constructed nature of autism, gender, and masculinity (Connell, 1995; Garland-Thompson, 2005, Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002; Robinson, 2014). Additionally, an intersectional lens spotlights working-class fathers specifically, displaces the middle-class ‘new father’ whose voice has dominated most prior research and illuminates the fluctuating nature of power and powerlessness as it affects these men specifically (Braun, Vincent, and Ball, 2010). The study uses photo elicitation and narrative interviewing (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000; Harper, 2002) and has a ‘practices’ focus (Morgan 1996; 2011) which recognises how personal beliefs and structural, relational, geographical, and cultural influences variously enable and undermine participants’ ability to act as they see fit in their social roles as working-class paternal masculine subjects (Coston and Kimmel, 2012; Robertson, 2006). The data collected reveals a complex picture. Some fathers desired to be more engaged with their children and identified barriers, ideological, institutional, relational, and material, which prevented this. Appearing too involved in care invited surveillance from professionals, but, on the other hand, affirming difficulties in ‘coping’ advantaged some men, enabling the provision of validation, services and support specifically with no loss to masculine status (Link and Phelan, 2014; Goffman, 1963). Most men used their unusual and unique circumstances as fathers with autistic children to accomplish a successful hybrid masculinity which, on the surface, seems to disrupt gender (Bridges and Pascoe, 2014; Butler, 1990). This hybridity can conceal the benefits a masculine identity can convey, affording these men increased status as fathers with autistic children specifically (Demetriou, 2001). The data suggests it is the contradictory relationship fathers have with masculinity, rather than autism, which structures their lives as fathers of autistic children specifically.