Claiming and Controlling Space: Combining heterosexual fatherhood with artistic practice

Abstract

This article is structured around nine short vignettes that explore the complex and embedded gendered relations of fatherhood for heterosexual male contemporary Canadian visual artists at different stages of life. In contributing to the geographical literature on work, gender, and identities, this article answers the questions: What form does hegemonic masculinity take in the visual arts? How do male artists organize and conceptualize work life and family life? What impact does fatherhood have on artistic identity construction? In formulating answers to these questions, I argue that dominant discourses of masculinity have left some men feeling illegitimate as both artists and fathers, and reliant on spatial control as a mechanism to ‘fix’ their artistic identities.

Este artículo se estructura según nueve viñetas que exploran las relaciones de género, complejas e integradas, de la paternidad en distintas etapas de la vida de artistas heterosexuales en la comunidad contemporánea de artistas visuales en Canadá. Contribuyendo a la literatura geográfica sobre el trabajo, género, e identidad, este artículo responde a las siguientes preguntas: ¿Qué forma toma la masculinidad hegemónica en las artes visuales? ¿En qué maneras organizan y conceptualizan los artistas masculinos la vida de trabajo y la vida domestica? ¿Cuales son los impactos de la paternidad a la construcción de la identidad artística? En responder a estas preguntas, sostengo que los discursos dominantes de la masculinidad hacen que algunos hombres se sienten ilegítimos como artistas y padres, y que confíen en el control espacial como una técnica para ‘arreglar’ sus identidades artísticas.

Keywords:

• Masculinity
• fatherhood
• occupational identity
• artistic practices

Keywords:

• La masculinidad
• la paternidad
• la identidad ocupacional
• practicas artísticas

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my interviewees for their time, generosity, and personal reflections and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Notes

1. I am grateful to the reviewers for their insights.

2. The Renaissance understanding of genius emphasized the extraordinary creativity and originality of individuals, usually men, as expressed through masterpieces. The feminist art historians Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (1981) argue quite persuasively that the paradigm genius is male. In a subsequent book Parker & Pollock (1987) dismiss the entire ideology of genius as ‘élitist’ and aim to establish an alternative canon of great, individual female artists. Building on their work Christine Battersby (1989) provides a history of the concept of the word ‘genius’ and emphasizes the way in which it is a masculinized category.

3. With the consent of the participants, all of the interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were then manually coded and thematic clusters identified, textually amassed, and examined to explore similarities and differences of artistic practice and identity construction across genders and ages. In the body of this text, the male artists are referred to by pseudonym and details of their personal and working lives revealed with their permission.