ABSTRACT
As explicated in the preceding chapters, in the hierarchy of discourses at work in the representational landscape of popular screen masculinities, fatherhood is a constant center of gravity for the fluid, sometimes incoherent, otherwise “unmoored” masculine subjectivities that have characterized scholarly conceptualizations of what Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon term “the postfeminist man.” 1 Notwithstanding its pluralities, its dualistic gender ideology, and its instabilities as a subject position, fatherhood has been consistently deployed in contemporary popular cinema as the paradigmatic formation of masculinity for postfeminist culture. Moreover, and in line with the postfeminist tendency to seem to be able to take feminist critique on board while declining to challenge the vested interests of patriarchy, fatherhood in popular cinema has consistently operated in recuperative capacities. Further, it has done so in the guise of a feminist ideal of masculinity, and therein lays its seductive yet troubling appeal, and the viability of its hegemony. This chapter looks forward toward directions that future work on cinematic fatherhood in postfeminism could fruitfully take, newly or recently emergent discourses of postfeminist fatherhood, and notable developments in cinematic fatherhood that it has been beyond the scope of the previous chapters to address. These include treatments of fatherhood at the margins of mainstream U.S. cinema, in independent and crossover art-house films; queered postfeminist fatherhood, and fathers in families that (often ambivalently) push the boundaries of the straightforwardly heteronormative; and the cultural politics of irony and backlash in popular cinematic postfeminst fatherhood.
