Paradoxes of gender: Women declining motherhood and fathers claiming their children’s care and nurturance

Abstract

In this article our aim is to reveal an apparently paradoxical situation for normative sex/gender patterns in relation to upbringing. The discussion focuses on to what extend women discharging from the cultural mandate of motherhood, and men meeting as fathers the process of day-to-day care, would raise the appearance of new models who travel with greater freedom and autonomy, beyond gender roles forced limits. In the first part, a review of specialized literature has provided us with the conceptual developments around women without offspring and/or free from it, as well as the construction of paternity by men who assume and claim their children’s care and nurturance. In the second part, we show the re-sults of our field work performed through in-depth interviews revealing the experiences of women and men from their standpoint as subjects declining motherhood and vindicating fatherhood respectively.