Meet Them Where They Are: The Importance of Contextual Relevance in Prison-Based Parenting Programs

Parenting from prison is dramatically different than parenting in the community. The removal from home and redefinition of self that occurs within the carceral setting often leads incarcerated parents to feel anxious and inadequate in their parental role. While some prison-based parenting programs (PBPPs) can assuage these issues, they often lack contextual relevance, which can make participants frustrated and dissatisfied. Using an example of a prison-based fatherhood program, this article argues that in order for PBPPs to have sustained positive outcomes, they must also address the issues enmeshed in parenting from prison.

Pregnant Embodiment and Field Research

Feminist scholars have long argued for embodied reflexivity that involves accounting for how embodiment shapes qualitative field research as an intersubjective process. This chapter draws on ethnographic research with sixty-four low-income men of color who participated in a US government-funded fatherhood program conducted when the author was visibly pregnant with her first child. It analyzes pregnant embodiment as a strategy for facilitating rapport and credibility with socially dissimilar respondents and contributes to an epistemology of embodiment that attends to how researchers’ bodily states and experiences are sources of both data and analysis in field research. It concludes with insights generated from the project about how attention to embodiment is a valuable and illuminating reflexive space from which to better understand and empathize with respondents.

“Manning Up” to be a Good Father: Hybrid Fatherhood, Masculinity, and U.S. Responsible Fatherhood Policy

Drawing on theories of masculinities, I analyze how a U.S. government funded “responsible fatherhood” program utilized a political discourse of hybrid masculinity to shape disadvantaged men’s ideas of successful fathering. Using data from three sources that uniquely traces how this discourse traveled from policy to program implementation—including analysis of the curriculum, in-depth interviews with 10 staff, and in-depth interviews and focus groups with 64 participating fathers—I theorize hybrid fatherhood. As a discourse of paternal involvement that incorporates stereotypically feminine styles such as emotional expressiveness, hybrid fatherhood discursively reconfigures patriarchy by drawing distinctions between mothering and fathering and dominant and subordinate forms of masculinity as they relate to men’s parenting. I analyze how the promotion of hybrid fatherhood for poor men of color legitimates and sustains gender, race, and class inequalities through U.S. welfare policy.