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4. Religion and Sports as Common Grounds for Masculinization
- University of Illinois Press
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4 Religion and Sports as Common Grounds for Masculinization Tools for Masculinizing Domesticity The fatherhood responsibility movement is a reaction to the grievance that “the family” has become synonymous with mother and child and thus “feminized” (Blankenhorn 1995, 13; Gore 1996). In its claims for male participation and legitimacy in the family, the fatherhood responsibility movement anxiously seeks to masculinize domesticity by carving out specifically “male” notions of parenting. Although masculinization strategies are more explicit in marriage proponents’ promotion of gender difference, the fragilefamilies wing also participates in practices of gendering parenthood. Two intersecting arenas are particularly widely used to masculinize fatherhood in both the pro-marriage and the fragile-families wings: religion and sport. Religious and athletic discourses and practices constitute unifying gendered and (hetero)sexualized foundations for promoting responsible fatherhood. Although fragile-families and pro-marriage organizations generally approach gendered and parental relations differently, biblical and sport images permeate both camps. These arenas for “masculine” practice provide common metaphors for male bonding and role modeling, as well as familial relations. Simultaneously, religion and sport constitute long-standing arenas for contestations between men along the lines of race and class. Pro-marriage and fragile-families representatives use religious and athletic metaphors with different meanings and with different goals in mind. The fatherhood responsibility movement’s talk of a “fatherhood crisis” (Blankenhorn 1995; Horn, Blankenhorn, and Pearlstein 1999; Popenoe 1996) 99 echoes contemporary and past men’s movements’ uses of a rhetoric of crisis to negotiate shifts in understandings of masculinities (Robinson 2000). Former vice president Al Gore, a leading figure in the fatherhood responsibility movement, has declared, “Too often American society equates ‘parenthood’ with motherhood . . .” (1996, 13). Ideals of parenthood and notions of “the family” have become feminized and fathers superfluous according to the fatherhood responsibility movement (Popenoe 1998). In this context, sport and religion provide an abundance of masculinizing metaphors, practices, and settings . These arenas provide important tools for the fatherhood responsibility movement to negotiate and contest manhood in relation to the feminized domain of parenting. Fatherhood programs transpose the cultivation of masculinity and male parenting into sport arenas by, for instance, framing fathering practices in terms of coaching and team sport. Fathering practices become distinct from those of mothers and simultaneously heroic and appealing . Similarly, for the fatherhood responsibility movement as well as the Promise Keepers, biblical imagery serves to carve out a particularly male position in families. Fatherhood programs thus masculinize fatherhood by casting men as indispensable because they are naturally and divinely ordained “protectors” and “leaders” of women and children. As we have seen in chapter 1, marriage proponents use the Promise Keepers’ notion of “servant leadership ” as a model for responsible fatherhood and ideal masculinity. Biblical Rhetoric as Common Political Strategy By positioning its actions as a religious war, Promise Keepers eliminates the chance for compromise or reasoned discourse. No point of entry or common agreement exists from which to counter a purported directive from Christ. . . . One either accepts men as God-given leaders, or is declared an antagonist. —Robert A. Cole, “Promising to Be a Man” . . . Promise Keepers encourages the exclusion and abjection of those individuals who pollute this conception of the chosen community [of divinely ordained gendered and sexual roles]. . . . Promise Keepers invites men to reject those ideas that challenge their own efforts to realize normative conceptions of masculinity by framing those challenges as blasphemous and biblically unsound . —David S. Gutterman, “Exodus and the Chosen Men of God” The influences of the Promise Keepers and Million Man March on gender politics are not exceptional in the United States; religion permeates U.S. politics. Most scholars who discuss the inseparability of religion and politics in the 100 / fa t h e r h o o d p o l i t i c s i n t h e u n i t e d s ta t e s [18.234.55.154] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:28 GMT) United States refer to the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, who was struck by the religiousness of U.S. politics when he came to America in the early nineteenth century ([1835] 1990, 308). In his work Democracy in America , first published in 1835, Tocqueville emphasized the centrality of religion to U.S. social and political order and maintained that “from the beginning, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved” ([1835] 1990, 300). Tocqueville characterized U.S. society as deeply Christian ([1835] 1990, 303). Despite...