A Father's Body, a Nation's Heart—Caregiving Fathers in Contemporary Norwegian Film

Abstract

Norway is internationally known for progressive gender politics that have emancipated women and domesticated fathers. Norwegian films produced in the last decade articulate a conservative counter-discourse to this state-feminist discourse of women's progress. In contemporary Norwegian films, men subscribe to caregiving fatherhood in order to prove their (hetero)sexual prowess and earn social recognition. In addition, by pledging to become caregiving fathers, these often troubled and undisciplined men become worthy members of the Norwegian national community. A closer investigation of caregiving fatherhood will help us better understand how heteronormativity continues to proliferate even in Norway, where state feminism has come a long way.

Notes

1 Gunnar Iversen, email to author, 4 February 2009.

2 The Norwegian Film Fund (NFF) operates on a two-pronged system: a consultant system principally intended to fund films with artistic aspirations and a 50/50 scheme, fashioned after the Danish model, which targets commercial successes. In the first case, three consultants choose the films they believe are most promising and exciting. In the second case, if the producers manage to raise 50% of the investment capital, the NFF guarantees the rest.

3 The Norwegian Home Guard (Heimevernet) was founded in 1946 and is a rapid mobilization force meant to protect local infrastructure and population. Mostly comprised of locals and operating at the level of districts and municipalities, the Norwegian Home Guard should be ready to respond within 24 hours to bomb threats, acts of terrorism, and other emergencies.

4 According to American scholar Lauren Berlant (2005), state emotionalism is a strategy of social binding in which the national political sphere is not the scene for abstraction-orientated deliberation, but rather for the orchestration of public feelings. Using the post-9/11 United States as an example, Berlant claims that the dominant rhetorical style in the George W. Bush administration was to profile terror as an American state emotion central to the production of patriotic publicness. Through terror, the conservative political elites proposed a conceptualization of the American nation as an affective public and a sphere of intimacy where all subjects were emotionally identical in their pain and suffering and, therefore, imaginable by each other. Feeling different or questioning the base of terror were in turn understood as forms of dissent and betrayal that needed sanction, hence the difficulties for the American public to question the validity of terror.