Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability

Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2016) 1e8

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Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability* Barbara Pini a, *, Mary-Lou Conway b a b

Griffith University, Australia University of New England, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 2 May 2016 Received in revised form 4 December 2016 Accepted 12 December 2016 Available online xxx

This paper contributes to the literature on masculinities and rurality, and masculinities and disability through interviews about fatherhood with 16 rural men with an acquired disability. In the context of shifting notions of fatherhood in broader society, and dominant discourses of rural and disabled masculinity, we explore interviewees' understandings and enactments of being a parent. We address the question of how rural fathers with a disability define fatherhood through reference to Gerschick and Miller's (1995) typology of reliance, rejection and reformulation. The majority of the men in the sample understood fatherhood via discourses of breadwinning, physicality, and the outdoors. We argue that these strategies of reliance on traditional discourses of masculinity have particularly negative implications for men with a disability living in rural areas, due to the nature of the rural economy, poor service provision and limited accessibility to facilities. In the final section of the paper, we turn to constructions of fatherhood articulated by four participants. These men adopt strategies of both reliance and reformulation. They incorporate dimensions of hegemonic masculinity into their definition of parenthood, while simultaneously encompassing more normatively feminised practices and spaces. Crown Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Fatherhood Disability Masculinities Rural

1. Introduction This paper, which explores rural fatherhood for men with an acquired disability, is embedded in two areas of literature that have rarely been in conversation. These are: scholarship on rural men and masculinity, and men with a disability and masculinity. In the former literature, a key theme has been the intersecting and reinforcing nature of hegemonic discourses of masculinity and rurality (Cloke, 2005). Practicality, strength, technological expertise, physicality, competence in the natural environment, resilience and toughness inform both conventional definitions of rurality and conventional definitions of masculinity (Brandth, 2000; Bye, 2009; Pini, 2008). In the latter area of research, it has been the antithetical and contradictory nature of hegemonic discourses of masculinity and disability, which have been a central focus for researchers (Shuttleworth et al., 2012). Against dominant socio-cultural

* This paper reports on data from a larger study of disability in rural Australia. The larger project included a specific study of Indigenous rural people with a disability. This was conducted by other members of the research team (see Grech and Soldatic, 2015a, b). * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: b.pini@griffith.edu.au (B. Pini), [email protected] (M.-L. Conway).

constructions of the masculine subject, is that of the disabled subject as weak, dependent and passive (Loeser, 2015; Gerschick and Miller, 1995; Shakespeare, 1999). How men with a disability negotiate the discursive tension in constructions of disability and masculinity or traverse what Shuttleworth et al. (2012) label ‘the dilemma of disabled masculinity,’ has been of significant interest to scholars. Highly cited in this regard is Thomas Gerschick and Adam Miller's (1995) typology derived from interviews with ten physically disabled men. They contended that men with a disability adopt one of three strategies as a means of ‘coming to terms’ with masculinity and disability as normatively defined (Gerschick and Miller, 1995: 183). The first strategy, reliance, involves a continued adherence to conventional configurations of masculinity. The second strategy, rejection, is characterised by the renunciation of idealised notions of masculinity and potentially the denial of the importance of masculinity to one's identity. The final strategy, that of reformulation, entails adopting a mode of masculinity which involves a tactical recalibration of hegemonic masculinity that is consistent with a man's resources and capacities. Despite being widely used, Gerschick and Miller's (1995) categorisation is not without limitations. Shuttleworth et al. (2012) and Barrett (2014) point out that: the authors formulated interviews according to a pre-defined, trait-based notion of hegemonic masculinity; provided little context about the lives of their participants;

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.005 0743-0167/Crown Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Pini, B., Conway, M.-L., Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability, Journal of Rural Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.005

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B. Pini, M.-L. Conway / Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2016) 1e8

and did not always clearly distinguish between participant strategies of reformulation and rejection. Notwithstanding these limitations, Gerschick and Miller's (1995) notions of men with a disability relying, rejecting or reformulating masculinity have proved to be useful ways of understanding the gendered lives of disabled men (e.g. Coles, 2008; Lipenga, 2014; Loeser, 2015). We thus use their categorisation as a rubric in investigating how fatherhood, as a key signifier of masculinity (Whitehead, 2002), is enacted by 16 rural men with an acquired disability. We begin the paper by situating the study in the literature on fathering and masculinities. Following this, we provide an overview of our methodology and introduce the study's participants. We then explore the two dominant discourses through which the majority of men in the sample constituted fatherhood, that is, via breadwinning and via sports, physicality and the outdoors. We argue that these strategies of reliance on traditional discourses of masculinity in defining fatherhood have particularly negative implications for men with a disability living in rural areas, as employment opportunities and access to sports and the outdoors are circumscribed. Thereafter, reformulated constructions of fatherhood articulated by four participants are detailed. In these alternative constructions, the men perform fatherhood in new spaces and via new activities which have been more traditionally associated with femininity. 2. “New” fatherhood, rurality and disability This paper understands fatherhood as a ‘gender practice’ (Creighton et al., 2014: 2). Fatherhood is a resource for enacting masculinity, while masculinity informs the enactment of fatherhood (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill, 2003: 44). As such, gender theorists have been particularly interested in mapping changes in fathering, and in understanding what these changes mean for gendered power relations between men and women, and between groups of men. Such changes have been encapsulated in the commonly utilised nomenclature ‘new father’ (Brandth, 2012; Miller, 2010). As the term suggests, being a male parent is changing. According to Eerola and Huttunen (2011: 211), the ‘metanarrative’ of the ‘new father’ is involvement, emotional intimacy, participation, nurturing and care. However, what this means in terms of masculinity is not straightforward. For example, Brannen and Nilsen (2006: 347) report that despite discursive change around other aspects of masculine parenting, the notion of the ‘work-focused father’ continues to permeate ideas about masculinity. Thus, fathers may incorporate breadwinning into a discourse of care and involvement so that, despite a more expansive definition of fatherhood, past ideologies of masculinity remain intact (Christiansen and Palkovitz, 2001). Similarly, new ideas about fatherhood may be integrated into conventional norms about masculinity, as fathers stress child care but undertake this labour in outdoor physical pursuits which require strength and physical ability (Brandth and Kvande, 1998). A ‘new’ type of fatherhood and a ‘new’ type of masculinity are thus not necessarily supplanting the ‘old,’ but co-existing or competing with the ‘old’. Seeking to understand the extent to which shifts in discourses of fatherhood represent continuities or disruptions in conventional masculinities becomes more complex when attention is afforded to variations between fathers (e.g. Farstad and Stefansen, 2015; Lesch and Scheffler, 2015). Of such variations, very little work has considered geographical context. Rural geographers have sometimes bumped into fatherhood in the course of their research, but seldom has it been a key focus for analysis. Illustrative is the detailed ethnographic work by Trell et al. (2012; 2014a; 2014b) with rural young men in Estonia. The youth perform rural masculinity in ways that have been well rehearsed in the literature, that is, through

engaging with and controlling the natural environment,t and by demonstrating endurance in tough and rough outdoor conditions. However, the authors note that there are some fissures in conventional scripts of rural masculinity adopted by the young men. They express a commitment to sharing household labour and convey a desire to be an involved father. Similarly, Aure and Munkejord (2015) report that fatherhood emerges as a key theme in interviews with eighteen male newcomers in northern rural Norway. In delineating fatherhood, participants valorise breadwinning. However, demonstrating the intersecting nature of ‘old’ and ‘new’ fatherhood discourses, they also deploy notions of involvement, domestic work and care as they discuss what it means to be a male parent. In contrast to the studies cited above, Creighton et al. (2014) and Brandth and Overrein (2013) and Brandth (2016) address questions of fathering and masculinity in rural spaces overtly. Creighton et al. (2014: 2) draw on interview data to compare and contrast the fathering of men in urban and rural Canada noting the paucity of literature on ‘how places influence father identity work’. The authors report that all fathers emphasise active play but the type of play and the meanings given to the play differ significantly. In the urban, play is supervised and organised and viewed as important for developing confidence and promoting development. In the rural, play is associated with pursuits such as hunting, fishing and climbing, and is viewed by fathers as important to building capacities for a successful future rural life and rural identity (particularly for boys). Rural fathers also differed from their urban counterparts in that they had a gendered approach to domestic and familial labour, characterising their fatherhood care as ‘help’. Brandth and Overrein (2013) and Brandth (2016) add to this picture of rural fathering by drawing on interviews with two generations of Norwegian farming men. The oldest of the interviewees were born in the 1940s, while the youngest (their sons) were born in the 1960s and early 1970s. In both studies the authors identify differences in fathering between the two groups. For the older generation, time was spent with children alongside farm work, which was understood as necessary preparation for future agricultural careers. Younger farming men are less likely to engage their children in farm work and instead undertake father/child activities of interest to their offspring, such as music or sport. Three further insights can be gleaned from this work. First, as Brandth and Overrein (2013: 108) report, the ‘norms of intensive parenting’ as demanded by ‘new’ fatherhood, are evident in the narratives of the younger generation. Second, the spaces and activities that have traditionally defined rural masculinity continue to play a significant role in the fathering of younger men, but are attributed different meanings which allow these men to be reconciled with the discourses of the ‘new’ father. For example, modern fathers continue to hunt with their children as their own fathers did with them, but they imbue the practice with ‘nurturance, compassion and emotionality’ (Brandth, 2016: 447). Finally, adding nuance to their findings, Brandth and Overrein (2013) remind us that shifts in fathering discourses enunciated by participants need to be contextualised by other discursive and material changes. These include new understandings of the child and childhood, the restructuring of agriculture and the greater use of technology on farms. The still-limited literature on rural fathering outlined above is nevertheless substantial in comparison with studies of disability, masculinity, and fathering. As Kilkey and Clarke (2010: 132) conclude in reviewing the literature, ‘disability as a dimension of difference among fathers has received little or no attention’. In seeking to redress this lacuna in research, they report on data from two studies of British fathers with a range of physical, sensory, learning and psychiatric disabilities. They explain that men with a disability, like able-bodied men, view breadwinning as important to fathering, but the experience of disability as well as structural

Please cite this article in press as: Pini, B., Conway, M.-L., Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability, Journal of Rural Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.005

B. Pini, M.-L. Conway / Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2016) 1e8

barriers, render full-time paid work problematic for many. In contrast, some participants seek to ‘father differently’ and place a premium on the time they spend with their children (Kilkey and Clarke, 2010: 139). This is complicated however, as the embodied demands of a disability may reduce the available time a father with a disability can spend with his children. The authors also note how experiences in the public sphere shape fathering identities. For example, participants indicate that they have been overlooked, patronised and undermined as fathers, on account of their disability. In this paper, we contribute to the markedly under-researched area of disability, masculinity and fathering, adding to the discussion a focus on spatiality. We ask how rural men with an acquired disability ‘do’ fatherhood in the context of shifting discourses of male parenting and dominant definitions of rural masculinity. Our interest in is identifying strategies of relying, rejecting or reformulating masculinity (Gerschick and Miller, 1995). In undertaking this task we engage with the literature on geographies of disability, and conceptualisations of disability as a ‘dynamic, social and corporeal embodied identifier’ (Holt, 2010: 146). Our aim is to detail the complexities, fluidities and paradoxes of disabled rural men's identities as fathers, and to understand the implications of this parental identity in relation to masculinity. 3. Methodology Interviews of approximately 1 h were conducted with 16 AngloSaxoni rural men with an acquired disability aged between 34 and

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68. The sample was recruited through advertisements in newsletters of disability advocacy and service organisations. Interviews have been widely utilised in geographies of disability as a means of ‘giving voice to disabled people's experiences' and to ‘open up scope for inclusive research practice’ (Imrie and Edwards, 2007: 631). Our aim was to take the lead from participants and to address topics they wanted to discuss, so we utilised a few broad questions rather than a structured series of more specific questions. For example, rather than asking directly about fatherhood or relationships, we asked men to give us a sense of what a week involved. We then used what they shared to inform additional questions. In general, similar subjects emerged across the interviews, including the subject of fatherhood. Participants described the process as interesting and thought-provoking, confirming the claim by Sparkes and Smith (2002) that men with a disability typically have little narrative space to voice what it means to be a man. For some men, particularly those who had been disabled for a longer period of time, rehabilitation had been almost entirely instrumental. Even those for whom rehabilitation was more recent claimed they had been afforded little chance to think about their lives as men with disability. As one wryly observed, ‘We had lots of talks’ but ‘there wasn't much talking’. Disability was not new for the majority of the sample (See Table 1). A few of the men had become disabled relatively recently (2e4 years), but the majority had been disabled for long periods of time. Of the sixteen participants, three were amputees while four

Table 1 Participants. Name of Age Education participant

Current employment

Employment prior to acquiring disability

Type of disability

Marital status

Children

Andrew

48

Degree (Eng)

Small business

Two (adults)

59

Year 10

Jackeroo

Widowed

Two (adults)

Luke

39

Year 12

Disability Pension

Farm Labourer

Motor Neurone disease Diagnosed at 46 Multiple Sclerosis Diagnosed at 55 Quadriplegic Motorbike accident at 25

Yes (30 Years)

Albert

Retired (son manages business) Disability Pension

Two (16, 14) Children live with their mother

Tim

35

Year 10

Disability Pension

Farm Labourer

Divorced and Remarried (6 Years) Divorced

Matt

46

Year 10

Administration (Govt) Part- School student time and Disability Pension

Jarrod

63

Year 10

Disability Pension

Martin

62

Year 10 Draftsman e State Apprenticeship Government

Andrew

68

Year 10 Part-Time Administration Apprenticeship and Disability Pension

Electrician

James

52

Baker

Cameron

58

John

38

Year 10 Disability Pension Apprenticeship Year 10 Administration e State Government Year 10 Disability Pension Apprenticeship

Gerry

44

Year 10

Barry

34

Year 10

Wak

35

Year 10

Collin

46

Year 10

Hardware store and Disability Pension Farmer

Andrew

60

Year 10

Disability Pension

Maintenance Worker Draftsman e State Government

Storeman e State Government Carpenter

12-14 Hours a week service Miner sector and Disability Pension Disability Pension Farm Labourer Wool Store Miner Sales Representative

Quadriplegic Car accident at 24 Amputated hand in Divorced dynamite accident at 5

Double amputee leg.Car Yes (35 years) accident at 48 Paraplegic Accident Divorced and repairing car 60 Remarried (22 Years) Divorced Leg and Back injuries Motor cycle accident at 21 Spinal Injury Aged 39 Yes (17 Years) Amputated leg Car accident at 33 Back Injury Accident repairing car 34 Mining accident crushed leg at 32 Paraplegic Car accident at 28 Leg injury Motor cycle accident at 24 Paraplegic Work related accident at 39 Stroke at 56

One (6) Child lives with his mother Three (18, 15, 14) 14 year old lives with her mother. 15 year old lives with her father Two (adults) Two children and two step-children (adults) Two (adults)

Two (15, 16)

Yes (32 Years)

Two (adults)

Divorced. and Remarried (2 Years) Divorced

Three (17, 14, 13) Children live with their mother

No

Three (22, 18, 14) Children live with their mother

No

One (9) Father shares custody of daughter with maternal grandmother One (11) Father is sole parent

Yes (20 Years)

One (adult)

Yes (25 Years)

One (adult) Two step-daughters (adult)

Please cite this article in press as: Pini, B., Conway, M.-L., Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability, Journal of Rural Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.005

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B. Pini, M.-L. Conway / Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2016) 1e8

other participants had multiple sclerosis, a stroke, a back injury and motor neurone disease. The remainder had either quadriplegia or paraplegia. Importantly, these are not coherent categories and nor are the medical classifications ‘incomplete’ or ‘complete’ (which refer to the level on the spinal cord where the injury occurred). Participants reported variations in pain and numbness associated with having quadriplegia or paraplegia. Further differences in terms of impairment existed in relation to additional injuries sustained, as a result of the accidents through which many participants had become disabled. For example, some had hurt internal organs (lungs and kidneys) while others had residual issues with sight, hearing and cognition. In addition to these health concerns, some participants had suffered injuries post-disability (e.g. breaking a leg after falling from a wheelchair). Many suffered ongoing pain as a result of their disability and relied on strong medication with negative side-effects. A significant proportion had endured numerous operations and hospitalisations which had led to additional medical complications, such as septicaemia, arthritis and bronchitis. In short, participants' medical histories were complicated and long-standing. Over half lived in small towns near four different regional centres (Cairns, Townsville, Mt Isa and Armidale). To ensure the anonymity of participants, we have not named these small communities which have populations of between 1500 and 8000. A smaller group lived in regional centres. Townsville (population 180 0000) and Cairns (population 150 000) are very large cities in comparison to the small towns in which some of the sample resided, but their location in the far north of the state of Queensland distances them materially and symbolically from the state's capital, Brisbane, and the urban centres of Sydney and Melbourne. This is an issue addressed by Waitt and Johnston (2013: 147) in a study of Townsville in which the authors explain that while the city has a large population, it continues to be ‘constituted by various socio-cultural practices and beliefs that reflect and sustain a particularly Australian “rural idyll”. For Townsville and Cairns, this very specific construction of place, is, in part, informed by still powerfully circulating colonial discourses of ‘the tropics’ as ‘other’ (Driver and Yeoh, 2000: 1). That is, as small, friendly, slothful and slow places peopled by uncivilised and uncosmopolitan groups (‘red necks’) and a multitude of dangerous wildlife. Just one of the participants had undertaken university education, with the great majority having finished schooling at Year Ten at the age of 15. The type of employment most undertook prior to acquiring a disability reflected this educational level, with participants undertaking a range of semi-skilled labour. The participant who had completed tertiary education had a large business which rendered him middle-class, compared with the working-class status of the majority of interviewees. Interviews were conducted in the homes of participants. All were transcribed for analysis. Field diaries maintained by the research team recording observations and reflections were also included in the data set. The analysis of data was reiterative and recursive with coding and cross-coding being undertaken through attention to patterns, convergences, differences and marginal themes (Alvesson and K€ arreman, 2011). As it became clear that fatherhood was a central theme across the interviews, closer analysis was undertaken around its meanings, enactments and experiences. We looked for commonalities in how fatherhood was defined, as well as identified definitional divergences using Gerschick and Miller's (1995) typology as an analytical prism. The three themes discussed emerged from this process. 4. Doing fatherhood: being a breadwinner Of the 16 interviewees, seven had worked either in farming (as

employees) or mining prior to acquiring their disability. Importantly, continuing to take up the quintessentially ‘rural and masculinised occupational identities’ associated with these industries was no longer possible post-disability (Pini et al., 2010). While their employment lives mirrored the needs of the rural local labour market as abled-bodied men, this was not the case when they acquired their disability. Like others in the sample, including four tradesmen, they typically lacked formal education and had no experience undertaking work that was not defined by physicality. As a result of the difficulty trying to access employment, the majority of the sample (12 men) relied upon the disability pension. Despite this, there was strong evidence that fatherhood was defined centrally through employment. One way this was communicated by participants was by emphasising their employment biographies as able-bodied men. One recalled that prior to his accident he was ‘a fit person that used to work like a Trojan and make a good living,’ while another referred to working ‘seven days a week a lot of the time and doing 16e18 h days’. As well as referencing their own past work live,s participants invoked the employment histories of their fathers. One remembered his father as someone who ‘was never out of work a day of his life,’ while another recalled a man who ‘always worked hard for everything he had’. In chronicling their own past work lives and that of their fathers, participants signalled an embodied masculine self that was industrious, reliable, competent, and strong and located themselves within discourses of hegemonic rural masculinity and fatherhood, as competent and dutiful economic providers. They also distanced themselves from the type of pathologising discourses of the disability welfare recipient as lazy, malingering and undeserving which have been afforded considerable currency in Australia in the past decade (Soldatic and Pini, 2009, 2012). More particularly, they distinguished themselves from the gendered parental subject associated with these punitive discourses e that of the ‘bad father’ who has failed in his responsibilities as provider and is irresponsible, irrelevant and deviant (Brown et al., 2009). Such a subject position loomed large for most of the men, in that rural living rendered them, their lack of employment and reliance on welfare, highly visible. One commented that ‘I never thought I'd be on welfare. Never. I think people understand it. They know me and that I'd love to work if I could. At least I hope they do’. Neoliberal welfare reform and the ascendancy of associated discursive distinctions between a ‘deserving and an underserving poor’ have specific implications for non-urban residents requiring government assistance (Alston, 2010: 214). Everyday knowledges of the lives of rural welfare recipients circulate in public discourse in rural communities in ways they do not in large population centres. Of the four men who did not rely on the disability pension, one had used a pay-out from Workers’ Compensation to buy a modest block which he farmed with his partner. Two further participants in full time paid work, Cameron and Martin, were employed by large public sector organisations when they acquired their disability. The organisations had accommodated their disability in terms of either changing the nature of their duties and/or the physical set-up of their workplace. Cameron, 58, had become an amputee at the age of 33 when he was hit by a drunk driver while packing the boot of his car outside a church gathering for his then ten-year old son. Cameron also sustained cognitive impairment as a result of the accident. While he continued to be employed at the same workplace post-disability, and at the same level of pay, his career stalled. The travel and weekend work that were integral to his former role and to career advancement were no longer possible. He accepted a different role believing his primary responsibility was to provide for his family.

Please cite this article in press as: Pini, B., Conway, M.-L., Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability, Journal of Rural Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.005

B. Pini, M.-L. Conway / Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2016) 1e8

Cameron: My career was going places … It was either going to be London or Singapore. Our next move was out of Cairns and a progression up the ranks … All that was taken away from me. The possible progression had been removed. It (the new role) was the only choice at the time considering I still had to earn money for my family. It was the most important thing, Martin acquired his disability at 60 when a car he was fixing fell on top of him. At the time of the interview, two years had passed since the accident. His children had grown up and had left home, but he still highlighted the importance of work in terms of being a provider when in relation to fathering. He now works three half days a week for the state government department which had employed him pre-disability. Initially, it did not seem as if he would be able to return to his office, as it was not suitability fitted (e.g. no electronic doors for entry/exist, no disability toilets), but modifications were made to enable his return. Martin noted that few rural employers outside of large government departments would be able or willing to spend the ‘fair amount of money’ it must have taken to make the required changes to his workplace that facilitated his return. Such an observation is significant, given that the ongoing withdrawal and reduction in government services to rural areas would make this type of agenda setting by public entities increasingly limited (Davidson and Grant, 2001). A final participant with children who did not rely upon the disability pension was Andrew (48), who had established a successful small business in the Townsville region. Despite voicing disappointment and frustration at his declining bodily capacity due to motor neurone disease, Andrew was proud that his enterprise continued to allow his family to ‘share the fruits’ of his success in terms of financial security. Having his son take over the business was also a source of considerable achievement for him as a father. When first diagnosed with the illness two years prior to the interview, Andrew had attempted to adjust his work schedule and duties, but after twelve months this was no longer possible. He disclosed that this was a significant wrench: ‘Stopping work was the hardest. I felt like I was not the provider’. At the same time, he considered himself fortunate that his solid financial position enabled him to pay for personal care in order to lessen his dependency on his wife and adult son and daughter. It was important to his identity as a father and a husband, that they not be his primary carers. However, since handing over the enterprise, the relationship between father and son had shifted causing him considerable anguish. He explained: Andrew: I have noticed my son doesn't talk to me about his work much … We used to talk a lot about business and work, and golf. The people we used to spend time with e I don't see them too much. I wish they would while I can still speak a bit and have the grey matter still operating. In addition to the four participants described above, four interviewees receive the disability pension which they supplement with part-time/casual work, while the remaining eight rely solely on the disability pension. Of the first group, all have children under 18 years of age while in the latter group, five have non-adult children. Breadwinning discourses permeated interviews with these fathers as much as they did with those in full-time paid work. Such discourses were communicated through discussions about financial insecurity and the challenges this presented for their children. They spoke about wanting to alleviate the financial burdens their children had faced as a result of their inability to work and also about concerns that their children were visible by their disadvantage in their rural school and community. They mentioned wanting

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to take their family on holidays or wanting to buy their sons and daughters presents they knew they wanted. Some voiced dejection and disappointment at not being able to be an economic provider, while others hoped their situation would change in the future, laying out their plans in terms of providing. Luke: I want to be working. Get a bigger place. I've got two kids. One is in Year 12 and one is in Year 9. I'm looking to get out of here. It's too small. It all depends on what job I find. This is all right now but they are getting bigger. It's way too small. I hope to get out of here. As interviewees explained their desire for work or for more employment hours, they highlighted the challenges of securing labour in a rural location, especially as many of the regional centres have higher than average unemployment rates (NRHA and ACOSS, 2013). Further difficulties accessing employment exist because of limited transport. Only half of the participants had their own vehicles, yet public transport in the regional centres is inadequate and non-existent in small rural towns. Job placement agencies are similarly limited outside cities. Some interviewees had access to placement staff who fly into rural and regional areas for short visits, but there was then a disconnect between the urban middle-class officer and the rural working-class habitus of the participant. One explained: Barry: I find it hard for someone that can sit at a computer all day and come and tell me, “Look mate, you've got to get yourself a computer and you've got to do this and all that.” I think mate, that's not me you know? In summary, the idea that employment is an ‘integral part of what fathers do as fathers’ (Garey, 1999: 7) resonated throughout the narratives, despite the fact that interviewees had varying relationships to the formal labour market. In this respect, rural men with a disability adopted a strategy of ‘reliance’ in conflating fatherhood with employment (Gerschick and Miller, 1995), even as they enunciated the numerous obstacles that impeded their potential workforce participation. The fact that these obstacles have specifically rural dimensions demonstrates that ongoing adherence to normative definitions of fathering as breadwinning, is particularly fraught for men with a disability living outside the city. The near impossibility of meeting established definitions means that they are ‘undermined continuously’ (Gerschick and Miller, 1995: 198).

5. Doing fatherhood: sport, physicality and the outdoors It was evident that sport had been central to participants' identities as able-bodied males, outside of fathering. They described themselves as being ‘sport-crazy’ and ‘living for sport’ and catalogued participating in a wide range of sports including cricket, rugby league, hockey, golf, Australian Rules Football, sailing, and fishing. This level of engagement in sport was viewed as integral to a particular construction of place, and more specifically, a particularly gendered politics of place. One observed that almost as soon as he arrived in North Queensland he bought a boat ‘just like every other bloke here,’ while another interviewee referred to rugby league as a ‘religion for men here’. In these types of statements, interviewees enunciated the well documented construction of ‘how to be a rural man’ as tied to physicality and the outdoors (Bye, 2009). What they then did was to overlay this construction on to definitions of fatherhood. Interviewees explained that when they became fathers, sport

Please cite this article in press as: Pini, B., Conway, M.-L., Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability, Journal of Rural Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.005

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was a key means of articulating the types of discourses of involved and participative fatherhood that resonate today. As Kevin explained: Kevin: I used to coach them in soccer. I used to do a lot of push bike riding all that sort of thing. I couldn't do any of that. I got to watch my sons play soccer, but not actually get out there and physically play with them … That feels pretty lousy. Like other interviewees, Kevin was conversant with the dictates of ‘good’ fathering but he had first established an identity around this discourse when he had quite different corporeal capacities as an able-bodied man. He was unfamiliar with how to father when he did not have recourse to physicality. That fathering for men who were ‘do-ers’ and ‘show-ers’ was different, was taken up by another interviewee: John: Like I could go and pull your car apart and put it back together for you. But you ask me to write down what I've done to pull your car apart and put it back together? No. It doesn't work that way. In echoes of Kevin and John, Gerry also continued to define fatherhood around sport and the outdoors demonstrating the strategy of reliance as described by Gerschick and Miller (1995). He talked about his fathering prior to acquiring his disability echoing discourses of ‘new’ fatherhood, in that he used language such as ‘involved’ and ‘engaged’. Again, however, it was sport which he utilised to demonstrate these aspects of fathering, and sport which he continued to rely on to define fathering post-disability. Prior to acquiring his disability, he had been actively involved in coaching his children in swimming and football. He explained that when he became disabled at 32, his children were ten, six and two. His pedagogical approach was embodied, and tactile, and so he struggled when this was no longer possible. Gerry: I always tried to spend time with my kids. I was a coach, a football coach, a swimming coach and I used to do all that type of thing. But it's very hard to coach and become a so called, not a role model, but if you're a coach you've got to be able to e and I was always a do-er or a show-er. Then all of a sudden I'm sitting there telling people what to do and I couldn't show them how to do it. That's a fair knock you know? It stopped me from coaching in a way because I never knew any other way. That's the way I used to do it; I used to show them how to do it myself and now I can't. Coaching, and more broadly, involvement in children's sport had also become problematic for interviewees because of transport. As Kenway et al. (2006: 183) report in ethnographic work on young rural men in Australia, ‘non-city sports require parents to convey their young to different sporting venues across the region, sometimes quite frequently and over considerable distances’. To participate in their children's sport, interviewees required specialist vehicles (and wheelchairs) to access the types of uneven and rough sporting grounds that are typical in rural locations. Even if this were possible, their involvement was then dependent on whether a vehicle could fit their equipment, as well as passengers and an array of necessary sporting gear. It is understandable then that, as Gerry reflected, it had simply become ‘too hard’ to continue to be actively involved in his children's sport as a coach. Accessibility concerns also dominated interviews in which participants had previously focused their sporting lives around boating and fishing with their children. Tim talked of enjoying fishing and

boating with his young children prior to his accident, and lamented that these had become more difficult as a result of his disability, as none of the local recreational boat ramps were accessible for a person in a wheelchair. Tellingly, he also reflected nostalgically on the types of activities he had undertaken with his own father in his teenage years, such as kangaroo shooting and pig hunting in the bush, and sadly observed that he would not be enjoying such activities with his own son as he had envisaged. This theme was repeated across interviews highlighting intergenerational legacies of fathering practices in the rural. It also emphasised that rural fathers are invested in normative imaginings of rural childhoods as authentically natural and physical (Jones, 1999, 2007), and that they view themselves as important vehicles for ensuring their offspring enjoy this type of childhood. Overall, the positive and nostalgic recollections of their own rural masculine childhoods further highlighted that the strategy of reliance, as outlined by Gerschick and Miller (1995), is widely adopted by rural fathers who have acquired a disability. When participants invoked their fathers, they did not do so as a means of articulating changing practices they had adopted around fatherhood, but as a means of negatively assessing their own parenting against normative discourses of sport, physicality and the outdoors. 6. Doing fatherhood differently In presenting their typology, Gerchick and Miller's (1995) assert that the strategies of reliance, rejection and reformulation are not mutually exclusive. This was evident in the narratives of four interviewees who demonstrated adopting strategies of reliance as well as reformulation. The four men - Barry, Wal, Matt and James e all differ from the larger cohort in one key respect. That is, they care for their children, at least for some period of time, in the absence of a female partner. They have a level of responsibility for their children that others in the sample do not, as a result of custody arrangements or the absence or capacities of a female partner. Barry (34), who is a paraplegic, shares custody of his nine-year-old daughter with her maternal grandmother while Wal (35), who has a severe leg injury from a motorcycle accident, is a sole parent to his 11-year-old daughter. Matt (46), whose hand was amputated after a childhood accident, has three children 18, 15 and 13. The eldest, a son, is at university while his 15-year-old daughter lives with her mother and his 13-year-old daughter is with him. James (52) has three teenage children whom he cares for with his wife of seventeen years. He has a spinal injury while his wife has been very ill with cancer over a number of years. Notably, none of the four men defined good fathering in economic terms. Two relied entirely on the disability pension, and two received the disability pension as well as undertook some parttime work. The latter two participants enjoyed paid work but it was not a central focus in conversations about being a father. In contrast, like the larger sample of which they were part, sport, physicality and the outdoors were central elements of the four men's repertoire of good fathering. These men adopted strategies of reliance through reconfigured or new equipment. James, for example, bought an old van and had it modified so that he could continue to camp regularly with his wife and children. Additionally, Barry and Wal continued to take their children boating. The dams on which they boated were on private property so they had built hoists to access their boats and, as well, modified the boats by taking out seating, and adjusting steering wheels and seatbelts. In elaborating on their father/daughter outings, these participants proudly cited instances of spectators not knowing they had a disability while they were behind the wheel of the boat. Such comments reflect the considerable pressure placed on people with disability to correct or fix their bodies and pass as able-bodied. At

Please cite this article in press as: Pini, B., Conway, M.-L., Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability, Journal of Rural Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.005

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the same time, they also provide evidence of what Hansen and Philo (2006: 497) name as the ‘chronic lack of expectation on the part of non-disabled people regarding the capacities of impaired bodies.’ In driving a boat with daughters towed behind squealing in delight, they unsettle not only assumptions about what the body of a father with disability can do, but also what life is like for the child of a parent with a severe disability. Although representative of the strategies of reliance, the four men also engaged with sports and the outdoors in ways that were indicative of reformulation. For example, Matt stated that his relationship with his daughter was closely tied up with sport, but this did not mean coaching or training her. Instead, it meant being conversant with her achievements across a range of sport, encouraging her in her pursuits, ensuring she ate well and congratulating and commiserating with her about success and loss. In another illustration of the overlapping between strategies of reliance and reformulation, Wal drives his wheelchair alongside his daughter as she rides her bike around the town. This type of activity is quite distinct from the more physically engaged and competitive sports he had enjoyed prior to his disability and which he had imagined undertaking alongside his children. Similarly, James explained that his wife and children now undertook more of the physical work in setting up and packing up camp as a result of his disability. He disclosed that it had been a difficult transition to make to ask for and to receive assistance in the space of the outdoors where he had always demonstrated physical competence. The four dads also fathered through involvement in spaces which were perhaps less familiar to them, and in which they were less secure in terms of traditional scripts of rural masculinity, such as in kitchens or in schools. For example, as three of the men looked after their children without a partner, they had sole responsibility for household labour including the preparation of meals. James, whose wife has a long term illness, had also adopted a more flexible understanding of the gendered identity of father which incorporated an emphasis on household chores and childrearing. In focusing on the domestic realm to define fathering, James and his counterparts were more overtly adopting the strategy of reformulation. As the participants talked about reformulation strategies, it became clear that the process was emotionally fraught. As Wal explains below, after acquiring a disability he began to rewrite fatherhood, but this was challenging: Wal: She's very sports orientated and I suppose I was too … Yeah. It took a little while to come to terms with it. I used to get frustrated. But I've got around it … I had to change my way of eI had to teach myself. Wal's pedagogical work had enabled him to remake fatherhood and to develop a more versatile masculine self. What needs to be highlighted is that in the rural environment, reformulation may mean unsettling ‘the patterns of gendered community expectations and experiences’ that inform rural life (Little, 2002: 96). As an example, Wal told us that the weekend before the interview his daughter had been an entrant in a local annual festival Princess Competition. He had assisted her in preparing for the event and accompanied her in the festival parade. As the competition nomenclature suggests, it was part of a larger festival that was a gendered affair with males and females taking up different activities in different spaces. Wal did not experience any overt negative comment, even though he was the sole male preparing and accompanying an entrant, but he was aware that this reconfiguration of fatherhood in a rural space made him visible, and marked him as different from the norm. All four men who demonstrated elements of reformulation in

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their definitions of fathering saw themselves as ‘good’ parents, defining themselves positively against the set of criteria for fathering they had rewritten. They enjoyed deep, affective bonds and connections with their children which provided them with self-worth, support and esteem. 7. Conclusion This paper has examined fatherhood for rural men with an acquired disability in terms of Gerschick and Miller (1995) typology of reliance, rejection and reformulation. Two dominant definitions of fathering tied to hegemonic masculinity and thus, illustrative of reliance, were mobilised in the men's narratives. The first was that of breadwinning. In this regard, participants are similar to many other fathers described in the literature including men from urban areas (Ranson, 2012). However, their rural location means that they are at a distinct disadvantage if they continue to use workplace participation as a standard bearer of ‘good fatherhood’. The mining and agricultural sectors which dominant in rural Australia (Connell and Dufty-Jones, 2014) have typically been associated with masculine physical ability, even as technology has undermined this claim. Furthermore, in the rural communities in which participants reside, unemployment is higher, while appropriate health and employment services which could facilitate their entry to the labour market, scarce (Hugo, 2002). A second way in which interviewees characterised fatherhood in a manner consistent with a strategy of reliance was via an emphasis on sport and the outdoors. This is perhaps expected, given that physicality is integral to normative masculine subjectivity and a particularly pronounced facet of rural and working-class masculinity. Further, corporeal capacities had defined interviewees' lives in work and leisure prior to the acquisition of their disability. Physicality and the outdoors also infused memories of their own fathers and shaped their childhood biographies. It is thus not surprising that they constructed fatherhood around the physical and the outdoors, in echoes of the Canadian and Norwegian rural fathers interviewed by Creighton et al. (2014) and Brandth (2016) respectively. As is the case in terms of employment, interviewees’ capacities around physicality, sport and the outdoors are circumscribed by the material realities of rural living. There is no or very limited public transport and rural sporting and leisure sites are rarely accessible. Meanwhile, access to a vehicle that accommodates a person with a disability and to a four wheel drive/all-terrain wheelchair is prohibitive for most, because of high costs. In the final part of the paper attention was given to four men whose understandings of fatherhood involved both aspects of reliance and reformulation. Breadwinning was afforded little importance in defining fatherhood for this group of men. Importantly, however, physicality, sports and the outdoors as traditional markers of rural masculinity, were strongly linked with fatherhood in their narratives. In this respect, the four men reproduced traditional ideologies of masculinity through fathering and demonstrated the strategy of reliance. In large part they achieved this by modifications to equipment. At the same time, adopting a strategy of reliance was not clear cut. While these men continued to define ‘fathering through sport’ (Kay, 2007: 69) shifted in their approach. They promoted gentler forms of physical activity with their offspring, gave emotional support to sporting children, ensured children ate well and asked their sons and daughters for help in negotiating the outdoors. As such, the strategy of reliance was also somewhat one of reformulation in that there was a feminising of the practices around physicality, sport and the outdoors. A more overt illustration of reformulation was evident as the four men described participating in normatively feminine spaces, such as the home or school, and espoused normatively feminine

Please cite this article in press as: Pini, B., Conway, M.-L., Masculinity and fathering in the lives of rural men with a disability, Journal of Rural Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.005

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notions of intimacy, care and connection. They articulated a broader conceptualisation of being a male parent, which incorporated a responsibility for domestic and emotional labour. In such a manoeuvre, the men conceptualised fatherhood in a way which simultaneously engaged with and disengaged with dominant discourses of rural masculinity. Notably, men described the transition to a reformulated fathering masculinity in the rural as challenging. In a rural community, reformulations of masculinity may be more visible and potentially, the source of comment as they unsettle traditional gendered behaviours, values and identities. The narratives of self-constructed by the four men described in the last part of the paper mirror aspects of the masculine identity work identified by Valentine (1999) in a case study of Paul, a working-class male with a spinal injury. In relying upon and reformulating hegemonic masculinity like Paul, interviewees gained access to new spaces, adopted new activities and were exposed to new social relations. Importantly, this allowed them to define themselves as ‘good fathers’. Notwithstanding the specifics of their situations, they consequently demonstrate ways in which other rural men with a disability ‘can also negotiate or reconstitute their identities around their changing bodyspace’ (Valentine, 1999: 177), and therefore enjoy the pleasures and rewards fatherhood has to offer. Acknowledgements This study was funded by the Australian Research Council (DP110102710). Research assistance for this study was provided by Kylie Reinke and Roslyn Foskey. We are grateful to them for their expertise. References Alston, M., 2010. Australia's rural welfare policy: overlooked and demoralised. In: Milbourne, P. (Ed.), Volume 15: Welfare Reform in Rural Places: Comparative Perspectives. Research in Rural Sociology and Development. Bingley, Emerald, pp. 199e218. Alvesson, M., K€ arreman, D., 2011. Qualitative Research and Theory Development. Sage, London. Aure, M., Munkejord, M.C., 2015. Creating a man for the future: a narrative analysis of male in-migrants and their constructions of masculinities in a rural context. Sociol. Rural. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/soru.12111. Barrett, T., 2014. Disabled masculinities: a review and suggestions for furterh research. Masculinities Soc. Change 3 (1), 36e61. Brandth, B., 2000. From Lumberjack to Business Manager: Masculinity in the Norwegian Forestry Press J. Rural Stud. vol. 16 (3), 343e355. Brandth, B., 2012. Emotional dimensions of fathering and workdlife boundaries, 2012. In: McDonald, P., Jeanes, E. (Eds.), Men, Wage Work and Family. Routledge, London, pp. 114e128. Brandth, B., 2016. Rural masculinities and fathering practices. Gender. Place Cult. 23 (3), 435e450. Brandth, B., Kvande, E., 1998. Masculinity and child care: the reconstruction of fathering. Sociol. Rev. 46, 293e313. Brandth, B., Overrein, G., 2013. Resourcing children in a changing rural context: fathering and farm succession in two generations of farmers. Sociol. Rural. 53, 95e111. Brannen, J., Nilsen, A., 2006. 'From fatherhood to fathering': transmission and change among British fathers in four generation families. Sociology 40 (2), 335e352. Brown, L., Callahan, M., Strega, S., Walmsley, C., Dominelli, L., 2009. Manufacturing ghost fathers: the paradox of father presence and absence in child welfare. Child Fam. Soc. Work 14, 25e34. Bye, L., 2009. 'How to be a rural man’: young men's performances and negotiations of rural masculinities. J. Rural Stud. 25 (3), 278e288. Christiansen, S.L., Palkovitz, R., 2001. Why the “good provider” role still matters: providing as a form of paternal involvement. J. Fam. Issues 22, 84e106. Cloke, P., 2005. Masculinity and rurality, 2005. In: van Hoven, B., Horschelmann, K. (Eds.), Spaces of Masculinities. Routledge, London, pp. 45e62. Coles, T., 2008. Finding space in the field of masculinity. J. Sociol. 44 (3), 233e248. Connell, J., Dufty-Jones, R., 2014. Introduction: twenty-first century rural Australia, 2014. In: Dufty-Jones, R., Connell, J. (Eds.), Rural Change in Australia: Population, Economy, Environment. Ashgate, Farnham, pp. 1e13. Creighton, G., Brussoni, M., Oliffe, J., Olsen, L., 2014. Fathers on child's play: urban and rural Canadian perspectives. Men Masculinities 1e22. Davidson, A.P., Grant, B., 2001. Rural Australia: neo-liberalism or a “new feudalism”?

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