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The Palgrave Handbook of Parenthood in Popular Culture is a collection of essays, exploring popular culture representations of parenthood, particularly as imbricated with meanings of motherhood and fatherhood. It interrogates ideologies that have constructed, driven, and continue to reinforce traditional parental roles, identities, and experiences, and opens up new, crucial, and often taboo-breaking conversations about reproduction, caregiving, and kinship structures in twenty-first-century contexts across the globe.

This chapter investigates film in a national context marked by gender equality-oriented, father-friendly family policy, and a general lack of stigmatization of single parents in dominant media and political discourses. Drawing upon international research on (single) fathers in cinema, the chapter analyzes three films from the 2010s, Mig äger ingen (Nobody Owns Me), Min så kallade pappa (My So-Called Dad), and Yarden (The Dockyard) to argue that whereas single fathers have been heroic protagonists in Anglophone film, in Swedish fictional film they are tragic figures, who fail to live up to both the “traditional” role of provider and protector of children, and the “modern” role of involved, caring father. These representations potentially “de-throne” the (patriarchal idea of the) father, since they expose social and material vulnerabilities of fathers. However, they also counter the “normalization” of single fatherhood and the ostensible “non-stigmatization” of single parents in Sweden.

This Handbook showcases representations of parenthood in twenty-first-century popular culture, critically assessing how these representations shape, respond to, and redefine notions of families, as well as popular culture genres. Uniquely, the collection brings together motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood studies. Chapters use intersectional approaches to illuminate LGBTQ+, racialized, Indigenous, and AI-generated as well as normative or ‘mainstream’ parental subjectivities and also address the topic of non-parenthood. The volume analyzes games, comics, social media, literature, film, television, and more. It is global in scope, signaled by the diverse cultural and geopolitical locations of the contributors and the texts they examine. Chapters are produced out of and/or are set within Canada, the United States, Britain, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Finland, India, Iran, China, Japan, South Korea, Jamaica, South Africa, and Australia.

The title of this book – Why EDI Matters – is a statement, not a question. It asserts that equ(al)ity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) are fundamental to democratic societies and strong institutions. Yet today, these principles face growing resistance, from backlash in U.S. higher education to conservative reactions targeting EDI in parts of Europe. This timely collective volume provides a critical yet constructive analysis of EDI in prestigious European universities, situating these challenges within a broader global context. It examines the political pressures, institutional complexities, and transformative potential of embedding EDI in higher education. At a moment when social justice, academic freedom, and democratic values are under threat, Why EDI Matters states that advancing EDI is not optional. It is essential for building resilient institutions and safeguarding the principles that sustain equitable, inclusive, and egalitarian societies.

This article investigates representations of single fathers in major Swedish newspapers 2010–2020, the gendered meanings of these constructions, and how they relate to gendered and socio-historically specific situations of single parents in Sweden. In newspapers, the term “single father” is broadly used to reference different familial situations, ranging from “only parent” to “co-parent.” There is no vilification of single fathers as a group or as individuals, which stands out in international comparison but is consistent with dominant discourses on single parenthood – and fathers – in Sweden. Single fathers are represented as successfully combining breadwinning and caregiving, flexible in their management of time-with-children, and reflexive regarding their parenthood. Overall, newspapers construct (good) single fathers as spending substantial time with their children and demonstrating “temporal conscience.” Seen against demographic statistics, two results stand out: first, that there are so few single fathers in the dailies, and second, that there is an overrepresentation of fathers with sole residential custody, and of fathers who share residential custody equally with a mother. These representations result in an exaggerated picture of single fathers’ time and engagement with children, which speaks to national father-friendly and gender-equality-oriented family policy and ideals of fatherhood.

This article offers an analysis of a son’s ‘relational auto/biography’ of his lone mother; Swedish author Peter Handberg’s novel Den vita fläcken (The White Spot 2015). It focuses on how the book builds a sense of the mother Gunhild’s lifetime through the use of three different temporal dimensions: historicization, extension, and relational weaving of life courses. Matrifocal books by sons are interesting in several ways. First, in that they counter the gendered convention of sons’ patrifocal auto/biography, and cross over to the matrifocal auto/biography that has typically been linked to the mother-daughter relationship. Second, in contrast to patrifocal narratives that typically attempt to recover the parent who was absent or lost, they attempt to tell the story of the always-present parent: the mother. In their description of a close, ongoing, and often loving – although seldom unproblematic – relationship between a (now middle-aged) son and his mother, they furthermore counter ingrained cultural myths that envision ‘mother-son separation as the precondition of manhood’ (O’Reilly 2016, 15). Therefore, I argue, while sons’ auto/biographical writing about their lone mothers can be an inroad to investigating how subjective narratives of (lone-parent) family lives are constructed in life writing, they can also be inroads to re-thinking conventional genderings in literary studies.

Denna artikel undersöker en sons ”relationella självbiografi” om sin ensamstående mamma, den svenske författaren Peter Handbergs roman Den vita fläcken (2015). Analysen fokuserar hur texten konstruerar mamman Gunhilds livstid genom att använda tre tids-dimensioner: den historiserar mammans liv, den expanderar det, och den väver samman hennes livslopp med andras. Söners böcker om sina mödrar är intressanta på flera sätt. För det första går de emot den könade genrekonventionen att söner skriver om sina fäder, medan döttrar skriver om sina mödrar. För det andra bryter de mönstret i det (manliga) självbiografiska skrivandet om frånvarande, saknade fäder, och ägnar sig åt föräldern som alltid varit närvarande: mamman. Genom att skriva mammans liv som centralt för (den nu medelålders) sonen, och framställa mor-son-relationen som nära, fortgående och kärleksfull, om än inte okomplicerad, ifrågasätter de också seglivade myter om att ”mor-son-separation” är en förutsättning för mäns vuxenblivande (O’Reilly 2016, 15). Därför menar jag att söners själv/biografiska skrivande om sina mödrar både kan öppna för nya perspektiv på hur berättelser om (ensamstående föräldrars) familjeliv konstrueras i litteraturen, och för nya perspektiv på genderiseringar och konventioner i litteraturkritiken som sådan. 

Med denna Festskrift firar vi att Centrum för genusvetenskap i över fyrtio år har fungerat som en viktig mötesplats för kunskap och vetenskapande – en sådan plats som många uppfattar som absolut nödvändig för sin överlevnad i akademin. Genom att sätta genus i centrum på Centrum skapar vi kunskap över gränser mellan vetenskapsområden, fakulteter och forskningsfält.

Centrum består i grund och botten av de människor som verkar där. Den här Festskriften är också en hyllning till alla dessa människor – deras arbete, engagemang, intelligens, uthållighet och inspirationsförmåga. Centrum existerar också tack vare de viktiga nationella och internationella nätverk inom forskning och utbildning som Centrum är del av. Med denna bok skickar vi alltså en hälsning och ett tack till alla våra kollegor inom fältet. 

Kapitlen i denna volym är en blandning som sträcker sig från essäer och personliga historieskrivningar om Centrum, till reflektioner om arbetslivet vid Centrum eller som genusforskare överlag, till forskningsartiklar om en rad mycket olika områden, vilka i sig också vittnar om den livliga och variationsrika forskningsmiljö som vi fortsätter att bygga tillsammans.