Mothering or smothering? Pastoral power and discourses of protection in Scottish school-age-childcare
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Childcare has historically been constructed as ‘women’s work’, undertaken predominately by unpaid caregivers such as mothers (Huppatz, K. [2023. Gender, work and social theory: The critical consequences of the cultural turn. London: Bloomsbury Academic].). Caring responsibilities have been discursively constructed with perceived expectations of being the good mother (Paechter, C. [1998. Educating the other: Gender, power and schooling. London: Falmer Press].) and a pastoral charge to protect the child (Brydon, S. [2009. “Men at the heart of mothering: Finding mother in Finding Nemo.” Journal of Gender Studies 18 (2): 131–146].). In this paper, I consider how pastoral power constructed through discourses of protection is reflected in both policy and expectations of good mothering, informing safeguarding behaviours known as maternal gatekeeping (Doucet, A. [2006. Do men mother? Toronto: University of Toronto Press].; Gaunt, R. [2008. “Maternal gatekeeping: Antecedents and consequences.” Journal of Family Issues 29 (3): 373–395].). This interpretative paper is guided by theoretical principles of feminism and poststructuralism and employs a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) as a lens to analyse powers reflected in everyday behaviours. The findings arguably indicate how protective maternal behaviours drawn from private spaces unknowingly may create gendered barriers to the recruitment and retention of men within childcare professions, informed by childcaring expectations historically placed unequally on women (Evans, M. [2017. The persistence of gender inequality. Cambridge: Polity Press].).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it