 Author: Trevor Davies, MSc Dev Man (Open),
Director, African Fathers Initiative
http://www.africanfathers.org
(work in progress for presentation - comments and criticisms very welcome to trevor@africanfathers.org)
Abstract:
This presentation gives a brief situation analysis of imagery and social placement, then goes on to present some of the African Fathers Initiative visual research around the mediated representations of the cultures, lives and experiences of fathering in Africa. This research formed part of our work funded by the Bernard Van Leer Foundation into perceptions of fatherhood, what young children particularly want from fathers and the 'imagining' of their father that they have. We further talked to institutions such as health (e.g. Queen of Peace Health Centre, Harare), preschools and schools (e.g. in Orange Farm and Soweto, South Africa) and Social Workers (e.g. School of Social Work, University of Botswana), among others. The research will be published in December, 2008 but has been presented to a number of fora in draft including the recent Africa Development Forum 6 in Addis Ababa.
Our research expands previous work done in Africa by a few previous analyses. Notably that of the HSRC Fatherhood Project in South Africa. These initiatives and our own experiences show us that African men’s roles as fathers are, generally, not positively foregrounded in media except where explicitly ‘messaging’ a lifestyle role pertaining to an advertising campaign that markets the values of involved parenting and family. Negative stereotypes abound in other media templates such as news, opinion and feature genres.
Pathologisation of the black male in global discourses about African development and global media representations about the continent continue to distort a gendered view of an Africa where, in a variety of contexts such as conflict, domestic violence, poverty alleviation and psychosocial well being, women are only the victims and men are only the stereotypical agressors.
This hinders our appreciation of the necessity for a more sympathetic gender lens on the prospects for shared roles and responsibilities of men and women for our present generation of children and the tackling of problems such as inter-generational poverty and early childhood development for example.
Two attempts to change mediated representations of African fathers are discussed here.
- A selection of downloadable poster resources from the AFI website and
- Three Public Service Announcement (PSA) adverts foregrounding the play relationship between fathers and children.
 We conclude that new media invite new methods of participatory visual action research around African fatherhood, new ways of presenting and viewing research and new ways of creating reflexive texts about fathering as an alternative way of understanding and generating new knowledge about the social phenomena of ‘fathering’. The strength of this work is that it operates on a terrain different from that occupied by the media effects model; it is about influences and perceptions, rather than effects and behaviour.
Today, the masculine ideals of absolute toughness, stubborn self-reliance and emotional silence have been shaken by a new emphasis on men's emotions, need for advice, and the problems of masculinity. This can only help the gender and in particular the fatherhood movement.
Key words: Africa, fatherhood, masculinity, representations, images
Introduction:
Images and their importance to us
Vilem Flusser (1983) maintained ‘Almost everyone today has a camera and takes snaps. Just as almost everyone has learned to write and produce texts. Anyone who is able to write is also able to read. But anyone who can take snaps does not necessarily have to be able to decode photographs’ .
Flusser was raising important caveats about our illusions surrounding the ‘democratization’ of photography (and now videography) - its transition from the difficult art of a few to the mass culture of us all. People’s belief in photographs as representing an automatic reflection of the world - the ‘real’ - is caught up in a culture now primarily encoded in images, rather than texts.
Photographs and other visual images (if we take video and film as a series of still images moving us on in a narrative) evoke powerful emotions in us all. It is often the images that we ourselves produce or purchase from studios, of family, friends, mothers, children and fathers that help us to fix our identity and place in society, the familial and the social context of our lives. We seldom write about family anymore, except in short emails to friends, but we photograph constantly, we put them up on Flickr or Facebook. They proclaim 'us' and 'ours' to the world. The cellphone and/or digital camera are our new letters and postage stamps.
The proliferation of images, produced, exchanged and consumed, is a key component of our modern social organisation. Anthony Giddens (1990) defines this as 'the precise co-ordination of the actions of many human beings physically absent from each other - not constrained by the mediation of place'. Photography and videography's role in creating the meaning we give to our lives cannot be underestimated in the creation of our 'mass movements' that direct our societal values and developments.
W.J.T. Mitchell (1994) ascribes a collective fear to us that we have of photographs, that somehow they contain magical properties. Even the most rational of us would think twice about ripping up a redundant photograph of our mother, father or child even though we may have countless others in our collection. Deleting them from our hard drive is our digital ripping up of a photograph and I am sure that like me you pause at the computer's request to 'confirm delete' a picture of one of my children! This fear of a latent power in images goes back in time to the pre-modern world. In the Bible God forbade the making of 'graven images' to worshipers of himself in case the worshippers substituted the worship of the image - 'the simulacrum in modern parlance' - for that of himself. In modern times anthropologists and ethnographers have described the fear that some societies hold that the camera will take ' a piece of their soul'.
Flusser continues, ‘Throughout history, texts have explained images; now photographs illustrate articles. Illuminated capital letters used to illustrate Bible texts; now newspaper articles illustrate photographs. Throughout history, texts dominated, today images dominate’.
 Of course as we have illiteracy of texts side by side with fluency in reading and writing so we have the same in visual literacy – the inability to ‘read’ photographs for their meaning. Academics are not excluded from this visual illiteracy, after all the primacy of the text has been everything to them. Writing is also a form of mediation and they (we) have venerated texts that have sought to explain our world throughout history – Marxist, capitalist, scientific, religious, liberal, illiberal, colonial and anti-colonial. Opposites attract and for every school of thought there has been a counter school and cultural value – an ideological flux but all within a dominating textual paradigm.
What happens when the text paradigm shifts into a new one – ‘textolatry’ into ‘idolatry’? The ability to explain our world needs to then be re-invented within the new paradigm. We are all temporarily without explanations whilst we reconceptualise the features of the new world view.
Background
The new hierarchy of images and text
 Concretely this paradigmatic shift can be seen in microcosm in our struggle to come to grips with and provide rational explanation for the ‘tabloidisation of the media’ for example. The analogy I want to make next is a naieve one but pertinent.
Barthes, DeBord, Foucault, Derrida and others have analysed what DeBord (1967) called ‘the society of the spectacle’. DeBord maintained that, ‘The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified’ .
Barthes (1970) explains for example, that even though we know wrestling is a ‘stage managed sport’, its exhibitions of pain, suffering, betrayal, guilt, treachery, cruelty, desire and elation allow the viewer a purer identification with the actors. Emotion takes over, raw but not without an ideological bent’ . It presents us with the eternal archetypes - the hero, the villain, the shapeshifter who may appear to be on our side but then betrays us etc. etc.
We suspend our critical functions in awe of the spectacle and the mythological archetypes it presents us with. The danger is the archetypes become stereotypes, the only fixed caricatures for our world and our behaviour patterns within it. Women care, men fight, women can’t fight, men can’t care. These ‘binaries’ are absurd behaviours – in the sense that they only exist as ideal types, but they can be taken on all too easily as ready made truths about our existence.
The semiotician Jacques Durand (1970) remarked, 'The 'myth' of inspiration, of the 'idea', reigns supreme in the creation of advertising at the present time. In reality, however, the most original ideas, the most audacious advertisements, appear as transpositions of rhetorical figures which have been indexed over the course of numerous centuries. This is explained in that rhetoric is in sum a repository of the various ways in which we can be 'original'. It is probable then that the creative process could be enriched and made easier if the creators would take account consciously of a system which they use intuitively'.
In my view, tabloids have bowed to Durand's wisdom even more succinctly than advertisers. The tabloids construction of story and image using age old archetypes and stereotypes is exactly what Durand describes. I believe from talks with editors that they know their art well and practice visual rhetorical devices with enormous competence. Our desire for stories to fascinate rather than explanations to de-mystify may be one unexplored aspect of the enormous popularity of tabloids.
Image, masculinity and fatherhood
 So it is with the archetypes of fatherhood. 'God the father', the 'father of the nation', 'the daddy of them all', are all rhetorical forms that we are familiar with and in fact are dear to us. In imaginative forms we entrench these linguistic repertoires into intentional images. The image summation of the linguistic rhetoric is frank: or at least less ambiguous than a 1,000 word article. The rhetorical images may be have 'positive' or 'negative' connotations. The meaning construed by audiences from the imagery and relaying text may be entirely different to what the constructors intended. Reception studies and audience research have long dispelled the theory of the 'passive' audience just consuming messages and acting upon them. The 'media effects' model was perhaps never a model at all but rather a fervent unsupported belief by many media analysts.
For example, Jeanne Prinsloo (2003) quotes Roshila Nair (1999) who proposes that a celluloid version of fathering is effected through the media and argues that the aggressive film character of Rambo served as a father figure with particular allure for underage combatants in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal in the early 1990s .
She writes about these boys, who were between nine and sixteen years of age, as living under violent circumstances where their fathers were mostly emasculated by extreme poverty. Caught up in the conflict, she argues, they had to make sense of their new role as participants in violence. This they did ‘by adopting the hero Rambo as father’ (Nair, 1999, p. 18).
 Nair’s concerns lie with the reverberations such macho masculine identities hold for the women these men encounter, and the destructive fathers they might become. She reminds us of the relative lack of representations of men as fathers in the media and the limited roles they portray when they are there.
When we discern these types of manufactured images as part of a panoply of tools for projecting and re-inforcing our societal archetypes around gender and fatherhood as a social phenomena – no matter how benign or unintended this engineering may seem – we can see that this generalized illiteracy about fatherhood imagery becomes dangerous.
David Gauntlett (2002) says, ‘The construction of identity has become a known requirement. Modern Western societies do not leave individuals in any doubt that they need to make choices of identity and lifestyle - even if their preferred options are rather obvious and conventional ones, or are limited due to lack of financial (or cultural) resources’.
One dominant role left for the text is of course to limit the polysemic nature of the image. In mass communications today the merging of image and text is ubiquitous - captions, headings and articles in journalism, pay-off lines in advertisements, comic strip balloons and filmic dialogue. The text supporting the image simply becomes an instruction in the way we are to see (and be) as fathers. Gender becomes a prison of the images projected on the ‘screens’ of our TVs, billboards, newspapers, magazines and cinema screens that we see all around us and whose manufactured meaning we become immersed in.
So it is with the institutional imagery around fatherhood. Barthes (1977) cogently reminds us that ‘the press photograph is a message’. He goes on to say that the message is conditioned by many factors, including the name of the newspaper it is carried in which itself ‘represents a knowledge that can heavily orientate the reading of the message strictly speaking: a photograph can change its meaning as it passes from the very conservative L’aurore to the communist L’humanite’.
Of course Marshall McLuhan (1964) echoes this symbiosis in his famous, terse assertion that ‘the medium is the message’ . McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his previous book, ‘The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man’ (1951), not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.
Extrapolating Barthes and McLuhan’s views to media images around fatherhood (and of course motherhood), we can infer, from both semiotic and hermeneutic analysis of their imagery, that many societal institutions, who provide assistance to parents as one strategy in the drive to ensure that young children develop to their full capacity, in reality create mediums and messages of exclusion when it comes to male care of children. The reality of much ‘parent support work’, is that mothers tend to be the main targets and users of these programmes, creating a gender imbalance that the African Fathers Initiative has recognised in its vision and mission.
 For example, the image on cover of 'Parenting' magazine seems obvious enough, mother and child, no involved male. But look at the words above the masthead. 'What matters to moms'. The text here has a 'repressive' level reinforcing the societal value that only women are involved in (should care) about parenting. The text directs us through the signifyers of the image to the ideological conclusion it wants us to endorse. This is the principal function of the text in support of the imagery.
These powerful institutional messages about who and what is important in gender equity and the nurturing of children filter through to the media templates we encounter as audiences. Many men believe that moving into roles formerly the hegemony of women would redefine them as ‘inadequate women’, as many media images now portray men. There are reports (mostly qualitative) that suggest a link between such role confusion and men’s alcohol use, their violence against women, risk-taking behaviors, suicide and homophobia.
What is the effect of this programmatic ‘blindness’ to active, responsible and involved fathers on the lives and potential development of fathers, mothers and children? Jeanne Prinsloo (2003) again reminds us that, ’While it is broadly accepted that the media do not reflect society, they do provide us with a repertoire of roles and images which we encounter and with which we engage’ . She goes on to say, ‘Media representations locate the father in the public spheres of the workplace or in contexts of physical endurance and challenge. He may be judged as inadequate when he fails in these roles. In contrast, the ‘good’ mother is defined by her ability to care for and nurture her family and sustain intimate relationships with them’.
Imagery and historical constructions of South African fatherhood
Has this always been the case?
 Lindsay Clowes (2003) maintains that, ‘Images of fatherhood have differed over time. The wide variety of ways in which fathers have been presented in differing media and at different times serve to remind us that the content of fatherhood is contested rather than fixed’. Her analysis of imagery in Drum magazine shows that, ‘in the early 1950s black men were regularly portrayed as fathers in domestic situations’.
‘Articles about important men foregrounded their role as fathers, photographs emphasized the proximity of fathers and children, and even advertisements accentuated fathers’ concerns for their offspring. The early Drum emphasised male identities in which being both father and son were important’.
Even political and traditional leaders – as the coverage of future Botswanan president, Seretse Khama, his wife and children (right) made clear – were portrayed against the backdrop of their families .
‘But this changed over the course of the decade as both verbal and visual images of men in Drum increasingly portrayed them either in work contexts devoid of wives and children or in the process of leaving wives and children behind on their way out of the home’.
There are other emblematic discourses discussed by Clowes in her essay that I don’t have the space for here, including contrasting racial differences in Drum and other magazines imaging through the fifties and sixties, with white men being foregrounded in an entirely different way- as ‘breadwinners’ and rarely in relationship with their children.
Today’s discourses around fatherhood and it’s imagery
Bringing us up to date, studies in several regions on disparate masculinities and male sexuality have drawn academic attention to issues about the formation of male identity, but men have generally been slow to own this evolving discourse, defining manhood and fatherhood, and to set their own agendas. Those who have tried to set their own agendas sometimes represented very different, and even conflicting, perspectives, such as the male mythopoetic movements (in the US primarily), which attempt to somehow ‘return’ to idealized male images and behaviours of the past.
Our own research in AFI refutes the idea that changing gender roles have put men and masculinity into a ‘crisis’. The problem for men is not their new role - or lack of one; instead, we see men’s fatherhood role confusion as stemming from their commitment to and outdated male mythopoesis, the traditional role of provider and the strong, cold, emotionless fortress.
Gauntlett (2002) examines Giddens suggestion that societies which try to 'modernise' in the most obvious institutional sense - by becoming something like a capitalist democracy - but which do not throw off other traditions, such as gender inequalities, are likely to fail in their attempt to be successful modern societies.
Giddens (1991) also maintains that 'A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though this is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's biography, if he is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.' (Giddens 1991: 54) . If Giddens is right then we should concentrate on changing the narratives of fatherhood rather than individual behaviours. This is what AFI and others seek to do.
There have been positive images of fatherhood in South African media in the early 2000 period – but only really with a concerted ‘push’ by interested institutions to put them there.
 One notable ‘push’ came from the ‘Fatherhood Project’, of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in South Africa . It remains the most comprehensive study on African fathering. A major part of its strategy was to produce positive imagery and portray role models through the use of professional photography and by inviting amateur photographers (mainly children) to send in images of their ‘ideal’ fathers. These images were curated into a traveling exhibition that reached many parts of South Africa. In addition, the exhibition provoked many media articles discussing the role of fathers in modern day South African society.
Some research was also done by the University of Pretoria into the use of TV with expectant fathers, looking at whether this media channel could be used to encourage more knowledge and involvement of fathers in their partners pregnancy and delivery of their baby but it appears that despite the encouraging findings no commercial or public TV station has taken up the challenge to produce programming in this area.
(Right) Martin with his son Sewell, Wentworth, 2003 by Jenny Gordon, professional photographer (HSRC Fatherhood Project)
African Fathers Initiative and gender platforms
Farid Esack, former member of the Commission on Gender Equality in the Western Cape and a prominent Muslim theologian, gave voice to the need for men to engage in the gender equity struggle. He made clear the analogy between the anti-apartheid struggle and the struggle for gender equality, by arguing that:
‘There isn’t a problem of women. In the apartheid years (people) spoke of a ‘black problem’ and there wasn’t a black problem. There was a white problem…And so there isn’t a women’s problem. Men are sitting with the problem. Of course it becomes a women’s problem…Women are quite literally the victims of all of this in the multifarious, insidious, all pervasive forms of violence against women. So women do end up with problems. But women aren’t the problem. If we do not address issues of men and men’s violence against women, and machismo and male insecurity and the question of masculinities as opposed to a very oppressive, homogenous understanding of a man, we will really be sitting with problems eternally.’
There is growing support among men to dismantle patriarchal practices that demean women. Most men have embraced the emancipation of women as part and parcel of their own emancipation from oppressive societal expectations of how ‘men’ behave or what they ideally should be. The African Fatherhood Initiative is situated within this contextual analysis of gender advocacy and action platforms.
Additionally we have learned from the HSRC Fatherhood Project the need to not just protest male sterotypes around fatherhood but to proactively create media resources to stimulate public discourse and policy change around the positive aspects of fatherhood for men, women and children.
AFI Imagery
Our approach is aimed at effecting change at the individual level, the second aims more at social action. Two genres of imagery have been tackled thus far:
- Posters - Posters are an effective means of publicizing issues of importance to public interest and serve a role in both education and intervention campaigns. Advertising makes wide use of posters, as do charitable and political organizations. Typically posters include both textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or wholly textual. Posters are designed to be both eye-catching and convey information; and
- Public Service Announcements - A PSA is a short film or videorecording presented by a nonprofit organization which attempts to persuade the audience to take some specific action or adopt a favourable view towards some service, institution, issue, or cause i.e. fatherhood.
Posters
 Seven posters have been produced dealing with various aspects of early fatherhood. The timeline starts with the partners pregnancy, encouraging men to have cognizance of the positive outcomes that involvement with health practitioners can have for their partners pregnancy and the health of the baby.
The theme continues to ask men to involve themselves in caring about their partners pregnancy by stressing their to celebrating the fact that a ‘part of you’ is in every unborn child.
Continuing to the birth the ‘It’s magic’ poster encourages men to to be present at the birth of their children, encouraging early bonding and caring values.
Responsibility for the child is immensely important and the next poster concerns birth registration, asking men to formally register themselves as the acknowledged father of the child.
‘Yours for life’ emphasizes that this is a lifetime commitment for the father child relationship and should be integrated into the new identity. Transitions to fatherhood are an important milestone and it is not just a biological ability to make a baby that defines a ‘father’ and ‘fatherhood’.
‘It takes a man to be a Dad’, emphasizes that caring and sensitivity are masculine attributes and necessary for the care and protection of children as they grow older.
‘Don’t hurt them’ asks men to consider their strength and capacity for physical action as essentials of caring and protecting rather than hurting and abusing and forms part of AFI’s sensitisation around the 16 days of activism against gender based violence.
 Public Service Announcements (PSA’s)
Each of three PSA’s for TV depict men playing with children in the final 10 second ‘pay off’. The visual narratives have been specifically chosen to show men parenting in three distinct socio-economic situations namely, peri-urban, low-income township; middle income medium density; and high income low density residential.
The musical soundtracks are each from three distinct African traditions in music, Zimbabwean mbira, South African pop and West African griot. They are ‘fun’ ads and finish with an overvoice pay off ‘Don’t we just love Africa’s fathers!’.
Objectives:
Process
The process set out to use existing media templates, adapted with some sensitivity, to stimulate and revitalize a public discourse around fatherhood. Controversy was important – but not at the expense of dignity or using salacious imagery. Focus groups were used to decide upon and fine tune outputs.
The researcher convened four focus groups of six people each (men, women, women and men, youth). The researcher facilitated discussions along with the video producer and one of the main actors present and interacting with the group. They first discussed sample TV adverts and posters from public health/awareness raising campaigns. Participants indicated that people were ‘fed up’ with being ‘lectured to’ – in particular men were very resistant to the ideas of being ‘problematised’ (but still had a tremendous appetite for informative and conscious raising messaging).
All focus groups indicated that ‘present health and lifestyle ads from government and others are boring’, ‘just don’t watch them’, ‘make the tea when they come on’ etc. etc. with youth being the most unwilling to watch.
We then took inspiration from new approaches in audience research developed by the University of Westminster, UK to introduce some reflexivity into the process. This work is connected to the 'turn towards the visual' and the new interdisciplinary area of visual culture or visual studies. Nicholas Mirzoeff's ‘Introduction to Visual Culture’ (1999) explains that visual culture "is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning, or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology", which refers to all kinds of visual media, from paintings and billboards to television and the internet.
Audience engagement with contemporary media typically involves a complex interchange of visual information, aspirations, ideas, and references to other media, across an array of electronic and print formats. However, the traditional research paradigms have tended to treat people as audiences of specific forms and genres, and have then expected them to describe their reception and interpretation of these messages, in words, to researchers. Thus the complex, multi-layered, visual world of today's media consumption is sliced up and dissolved into straightforward, written accounts of its 'reception'. We wanted to avoid this dichotomy.
Limited reflexivity was introduced into the process by selecting fifty images of fatherhood, pregnancy, newborns and allowing each focus group to discuss and rank their choices. There was remarkable consistency across all the groups in the final choices that were used for the posters.
In terms of the scenarios for the videos a similar process was embarked upon with the interviewer asking participants to reflect on their own childhood and what they would want to have done in play with their fathers. These ’imaginings’ formed the basis of our production team and actors themselves ‘workshoping’ with the researcher the process of production with a basic storyboard but no final script.
Pre-flighting posters and TV spots threw up some interesting comments that were absorbed consciously by the researcher and the production team. When research participants produce a thing, rather than just some speech, this is usually seen as a problem.
When reconvened to examine the outputs each group expressed surprise at the visual content but agreed that the outputs were ‘interesting’, ‘captivating’ and ‘unusual’. Men generally found the imaging of the posters more challenging than women and were more conservative in their comments. However they liked the TV spots very much and said they made them think immediately about how they could be involved in play activities more with their children. ‘I can do that’.
Women generally liked the poster imagery and thought it was about time that pregnancy ‘came out of the cupboard’. They found the ‘belly shots’ in some of the posters ‘beautiful’, proud, gorgeous’. The TV adverts were the source of great amusement but also women said they were ‘believable’, they ‘wish(ed) he would do that just once’, etc. Woen generally agreed that they enjoyed watching the video’s and that ‘women just don’t play with kids like that’.
Older children 14 -16 years liked the poster images, were not embarrassed and wanted to talk about pregnancy (boys and girls). The TV adverts were a great hit with most saying they wished their dads were ‘like that’. Some kids jumped up and ‘acted out’ the video scenes.
Who or what was targeted?
The main targets were / are men ‘of a certain status’ i.e. because the campaign is web-based and viral (mainly because of a lack of resources) at the moment it targets men who are in many ways middle to upper social strata, who have internet access at work or home and who may be by various factors, e.g. divorce, single parenting, health or education professional, drawn to our website.
What were the deliverables or the tangible outputs?
The posters have been available for download from the website since June 17th, 2008. To date 734 posters have been directly downloaded. How many have been copied, attached and distributed to email messages etc. we don’t know.
The TV spots were broadcast on ZBC in the third week of June and informal feedback shows they had a fairly high viewership. On YouTube over 500 viewings have taken place.
Outcomes: In what way has the process helped to challenge prevailing norms/ stereotypes?
Challenges and way forward:
The AFI adverts and posters do have a deliberate element of ‘blokeishness’ about them. Is this a problem? What do I mean by that? Before we started research and production I had the opportunity to visit the University of Malaga, Spain. There I saw two documentary films in the ethnography department. Briefly, one ‘Mujeres invisibles’ (ABuen Comun 2000) tells the lives of women in Cordoba, Andalusia through a series of in-depth interviews, every day lives, biographies and contextualizing footage. It’s a woman’s eye on a previously uncovered world and shows how the women continually shift between accommodating gendered constraints and then challenging them to make their own economic and social spaces in their world. The other, ‘Romance de Valentia’ (1994) is a typical story of the hegemonic mascululinity of the bullfighting culture, iconography and values that inform the world the bullfighter inhabits. In contrast to ‘Mujeres invisibles’, ‘Romance de Valentia’ is overtly constructed by its maker Sonia Herman Dolz with the use of actors and a leading bullfighter in different scenarios to it represents the bullfighter in ‘his’ world.
The challenge for us was to create artefacts (posters and TV ads) that broke the usual views of men, women and their children with intimacy (as in ‘Mujeres invisibles’) but with the man in his world (as in ‘Romance de Valentia’). I think we achieved this but who is to say what the artefact means, or what it reveals?
One response is to say that the 'problem' is illusory, since the researcher always has a job of interpretation to do, whether it is on the speech generated in an interview or focus group, or - as in this case - some other piece of 'evidence'. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge that visual media is more 'open to interpretation' - if only because its meaning may not have been more adequately translated into words, and it is in words that we are most used to finding the 'meaning' of things.
We have therefore considered a range of ways in which our visual narratives can be interpreted, using precedents from art history, visual sociology, discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and art therapy. Part of the proposed solution is the position most commonly adopted by art therapists today, where the 'expert' does not impose their own diagnosis, but instead the participant is asked to interpret what they have produced themselves. This will involve creation and feedback mechanisms that we don’t have the capacity to implement on a continental scale at the moment but our future approach is taking form in this small effort.
Replication:
We firmly believe this process can be replicated and that it must be so. We are not dealing with homogenous culture on the continent but a diversity of experiences and frameworks that make fatherhood different in each country and sub-culture. For example our focus group work on the selection of images was carried out mainly in urban settings with women, men and children who are to some extent visually saturated and aware of the images that surround them – a basic visual literacy.
Two of the posters most certainly would not be appropriate to rural settings or to cultures where there are constraints in showing semi-nakedness of the human form.
We need partnerships with women’s organisations, gender groups and men’s groups in each country to make the process work authentically in different settings.
The work is exploratory and needs support from partners who understand the need to break the mould of traditional approaches to involving men in gendered representations.
Finally the work needs audience and this is where again valuable links with other groups must be done to put the posters and TV spots in critical settings where they can be viewed and discussed by people in feedback loops.
Conclusions:
The artefacts we have created are stimulating public debate. We need to disseminate them more widely not to present them as idealized narratives of an ideal fatherhood model but to create public discourse about fatherhood. This can lead on to more finely tuned outputs appropriate for a variety of countries and cultures on the continent.
Creating this framework of ‘blueprints’ and examples for people to locally respond to and use to create their own appropriate narratives of positive, committed, involved and responsible fatherhood is the major challenge. It will require constant negotiation and renegotiation around imaging agenda’s of development organisations, media houses and advertising agencies amongst others.
Powerful ‘gatekeepers’ such as midwives and other health professional need to be brought on board to integrate the narratives in to the ‘normal way of being’ for men. |
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First draft of the AFI Training Manual on tackling abusive behaviour. Comments, additions, improvements welcome!
