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Arttu Salo: In moderation at home, hardcore drinking elsewhere

Tampere University
LocationRemote connection
19.3.2021 10.00–14.00
LanguageFinnish
Entrance feeFree of charge
Arttu Salo
Arttu Salo studies in his doctoral dissertation the cultural representations of the alcohol consumption of fathers and asks what alcohol consumption habits are understood as both masculine and permissible for fathers. Both fatherhood and alcohol consumption are key determinants of masculinity, but all alcohol consumption defined as masculine is not necessarily proper for good parenting.

In the study the combining factors of the fatherhood and masculine alcohol consumption are located by the descriptions of alcohol consumption of fathers in popular cultural text materials. This is important from the point of view of social work, as gendered cultural classifications, and perceptions of alcohol consumption of fathers are linked to the planning, implementation, evaluation, and decision-making of the social interventions that relate to them.

The study consists of four case studies published as separate articles and a chapter that compiles them.

Four different types of text material have been selected as data for case studies. The articles are combined with a theoretical framework based on critical studies on men and masculinities and a cultural studies approach. However, a different analytical method suitable for the substance of each article has been used in them.

In the first article a narrative analysis has been applied to analyze two works of fiction depicting the modern fatherhood. In the second article, the research material is based on television and newspaper interviews of a professional boxer- father who has suffered from his own father’s problematic alcohol consumption. The survival and life story told in those interviews is studied by the methods of content analysis. The third article makes use of the discourse analysis to analyze the online discussion debating about the alcohol consumption amongst fathers and men who actively follow team sports. In the fourth article an autobiographical graphic novel of a post-divorce and every-other-week fathering is used as the research material, and it has been studied by the method of cultural text analysis.

The case study research materials present different kinds of fathers in various life situations whose alcohol consumption and attitudes towards alcohol vary. As builders of cultural representations of the alcohol consumption of fathers, they can be seen to complement each other.

Based on the results, the alcohol consumption acceptable for fathers of the current generation is defined above all by the rise of the idealized cultural masculinity of the caring fatherhood, to which the different ways of alcohol consumption defined as masculine are adapted.

However, to the caring fatherhood it is possible to reconcile the traditionally as masculine considered binge drinking with a new way of alcohol drinking that emphasizes the sociability of alcohol consumption and alcohol as a stimulant. This can be done both by taking the alcohol consumption away from the family and home and by providing an example of trouble-free alcohol consumption at home. This produces a diverse and broad, but at the same time contradictory, cultural moral code of alcohol consumption of fathers, in which the various ways of alcohol consumption are defined as acceptable and yet masculine for fathers.

The doctoral dissertation of M.Soc. Sc. Arttu Salo in the field of social work titled In moderation at home, hardcore drinking elsewere. The cultural moral code of the alcohol consumption of fathers and the ways of alcohol drinking appropriate for fathers will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Tampere University at 12 o'clock on Friday 19 March 2021. Professor Sanna Hautala from Lapland University will be the opponent while Professor Hannele Forsberg will act as the custos.

The public can follow the doctoral dissertation via remote connection.

The dissertation is available online at
http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-1867-3


Photo: Inka Hannula