New fatherhood and educational responsibilities. The case of fathers-readers and their path to emancipation

Abstract

The paper focuses the attention on the transformations of the constitutive paternity-authority bond, analysing the transition from the figure of the father as an unquestioned and hegemonic auctoritas to the father as an actor who, with authoritativeness and responsibility, is capable of taking on a broader affective-emotional and educative-formative role. This rewriting – as shown by the results of a research conducted with a group of fathers engaged in shared reading interventions with their children – involves the cultivation of a reflexive thought aimed at deconstructing the dominant representations of fatherhood in order to undertake a path, not always linear, of emancipation from gender cages.