ABSTRACT
This chapter presents emerging evidence from the Leverhulme Trust funded research study Men, Poverty and Lifetimes of Care. The study is a qualitative longitudinal exploration of men’s care responsibilities in low-income families in one post-industrial city in the north of England. In this city, worklessness, financial exclusion, impacts of poor housing on health, poor educational attainment and reduced life chances are concentrated in particular localities. A dynamic view of men’s care responsibilities and configurations of care across the life course in these localities contributes significant insights into the everyday lived experiences of their families and local communities and how this has changed over time, particularly since the imposition of austerity. The evidence highlights that men occupy a diverse range of social fathering roles in their families in different generational positions, as stepfathers, grandfathers and kinship carers. Their reflections on their positions as fathers and carers, their views of domestic life and living on a low income, and their limited engagements with local services, reveal that while low-income family life provides men with opportunities to perform caring masculinities, they remain marginalised. Under austerity, informal care is being further privatised and individualised, meaning that men are required to respond to the needs of other generations and interdependencies with limited economic, material and place-based resources. The focus on men providing care highlights the variable ways in which local processes of gender and generational inequalities and social exclusion have intensified in a global, neoliberal context, often at odds with the broader global aim of achieving gender equality that involves supporting men to provide care.
