The Normality of the Patriarch
Mothering requires the physical presence of the mother, whereas paternal power can be manifested through absence.
- Deborah Chambers
The Normality of the Patriarch is an experiment in making transparent the patriarchal bias inherent in much of family studies scholarship. Consisting of 50 scholarly articles that problematise single-mother families, this work embraces the oversimplification and dichotomising which is rife within familial discourse, reducing the papers to their simplest coded form.
Each unique paper was searched for a selection of terms (“father”, “father-absent”, “absence”, “paternal”, “dad”, “fatherless”, “father deprivation” and “father hunger”) that were commonly used when discussing single-mother families. These terms were redacted, leaving behind heavy black boxes that signify the stubborn dominance of the absent father within the discussion of the studied families. Once redacted, the remaining text was made white, leaving only the negative weight of the paternal referent.
Printed onto transparent paper and compiled on top of commercial lightboxes, light seeps into each layer of the paper, creating a many tiered map of the burden of the absent father. Presented on a diffusing base print which mimics the orderly artefact handling and attribution of the museum. Bibliographic details are provided for the audience to cross reference the titles of each paper with their patriarchal weight. The lightbox, a tool for reading the negative photographic image, here makes the language bias within scholarship transparent - clearly visualising the negative weight of the father within each paper.
