Daddy and Papa: Canadian Gay Men Becoming Parents, Caring for their Families, and Constructing Fatherhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gay fathers who parent together without a female caregiver represent an historically novel family unit, gaining federal recognition in Canada in 2005. Since then, an increasing number of Canadian gay men have pursued parenthood. Without easy access to the means of reproduction, prospective gay fathers must navigate complex pathways that primarily include different forms of adoption and surrogacy. Each pathway has costs and benefits and requires different resources. I analyze how gay men who pursue adoption develop a reflexive approach to fatherhood as they proceed under the scrutiny of a critical state. Gay men who pursue surrogacy, however, draw on normative scripts of masculinity as they anticipate fatherhood, reflecting the mastery they enjoy as they purchase the means of reproduction. Once fathers, they face the challenges of intensive childcare. They expect to remain involved with and receive childcare support from their gay community and families but receive little. The Canadian organization of childcare, the demands of intensive parenting, and the geographic distance between them and their communities and families complicate their access to support. Consequently, many fathers, especially those with older children, develop ties with the straight parents of their children’s friends. Additionally, I analyze how Canadian gay fathers navigate family and gender ideology as they take on the work of childcare. I show that they distance themselves from the models of masculinity and fatherhood that they know best. Given their histories with their fathers and relationship with masculinity, they construct fatherhood as ‘unlike’ their dads’ and instead as ‘like’ their mothers. Like other fathers, they integrate nurturance and emotion into fatherhood, but unlike other fathers, they readily identify with the many women in their lives, including their mothers, sisters, female friends, and paid female experts. Their fatherhood evinces little need to guard their identities as masculine, aligning more closely with expectations of motherhood and women. I conclude by discussing the limitations of this research, as well as the limitations of what we know about gay fathers in Canada and finally identify further directions and areas for inquiry within the developing field of the sociology of gay fatherhood in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".