En bons Pères de Famille

"The real estate agent had warned me: initialing page 3 of my lease was not going to please me. It said that I would occupy my new apartment 'as a bonus pater familias' – a good family man/father. A bonus pater familias is a legal figure who represents the norm, the universal neutral entity around which society is structured. That's when everything clicked – when I was forced, in writing, to pledge allegiance to a system that places the morality of fathers at the center, denying my own experience and that of millions of women and children who are victims of their violence. After all, who was my father? A hero gone too soon? A misogynistic monster guilty of violence? The truth lies beyond these stereotypes. He was neither a monster nor a hero, he was a statistically normal man, a good family man. In this first-person essay, where intimacy and politics intertwine, Rose Lamy shows how "good fathers", both as individuals and as a social class, keep a lid on domestic violence.
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Rose Lamy is the author of Défaire le discours sexiste dans les médias (Lattès, 2021 for the trade edition; Points, 2022 for the pocketbook edition)." An ode to nuance as much as dynamite for the patriarchal family unit, her book project "shakes up [her] own family" Libération