"It's Almost Like I Have a Job, but I Don't Get Paid": Fathers at Home Reconfiguring Work, Care, and Masculinity

Rooted in a qualitative research project with 70 stay-at-home fathers in Canada, this paper explores the ways that work and family interact for fathers who “trade cash for care.” While fathers are at home, they also remain connected to traditionally masculine sources of identity such as paid work and they take on unpaid masculine self-provisioning work at home and community work that builds on traditional male interests. They thus carve out complex sets of relations between home, paid and unpaid work, community work, and their own sense of masculinity. Narratives from stay-at-home fathers speak volumes about the ways in which the long shadow of hegemonic masculinity hangs over them while also pointing to hints of resistance and change as fathers begin to critique concepts of “male time” and market capitalism approaches to work and care. The paper concludes by pointing to several theoretical contributions to research on fatherhood and masculinities as well as to policy implications that arise from this study on the social valuing of unpaid work.