"Talk to me. There's two of us": Fathers and sickle cell screening.

Abstract

Studying kinship has involved doing family, displaying family, and ‘displaying family’ as a sensitizing concept to understand modalities troublesome to display. Fathers at ante-natal screening clinics for sickle cell are faced with pressures to produce multiple displays - of family, illness knowledge, the good father, and the model citizen - often in the face of racialized identities. Such fathers emphasize the importance of hypervisibility in gendered spaces and hypervigilence, lest pressures to adopt the ‘right’ disposition have adverse consequences for themselves, partners or their children. The displays of fathers, as well as displays they decline, are orientated to repair of social relationships. Where displays are provoked by social relations - resisting racist or gender stereotypes, navigating citizenship uncertainties, negotiating work and family lives - displays become problematic. Family display becomes troubled where the preferred social relationships fathers seek to constitute are ones that are not readily accommodated within extant social relations.