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Nataliya Zueva presents us with a very interesting addition to our journal. Not only is an article on the role of the father of interest, not least for its rarity, she takes a very particular view of fathers as part of parental couples. Aware that the role has a diverse potential occupancy in modern Western societies, brought by what she terms the ‘decline of the traditional family structure’, her focus is on ‘heteronormative families’ (2024, p. 213). Thus, her discussion is of male role holders. However, before beginning her discussion she acknowledges that sometimes his participation may be limited to a part in the act of conception (coitus or assisted pregnancy through sperm donation). With his absence in, for example, parenting by single mothers, or same-sex female parental couples, the paternal function ‘might then be provided by a good enough “other”, an alternative parental figure.’ (2024, p. 213). All this is straightforward enough until one seeks conceptual help in order to understand how this role is experienced by families across this diverse spectrum. It is then that one remembers that, regardless of this diversity, even the traditional role of the father is not so easily defined within the contemporary object-relations literature. Arguably, and indeed paradoxically, its lack of definition hinges upon the very term Zueva uses to describe her families – heteronormative.
I am not clear what Zueva means by saying her paper ‘is based on a heteronormative position, even though we are all witnessing that a significant shift has taken place in stereotypical gender-role thinking’ (2024, p. 213). For me, this read as her stubbornly seeing heteronormativity, despite her acknowledgement of a decline in traditional family structure, which also includes the effect of the role being potentially occupied by female parents. But throughout her discussions, she does not otherwise suggest hetero is normative. Far from it, and so it might be safer to suggest that she is thin