Feeling fathers: emotion work, hegemonic masculinity and the contradictions of Turkish dadvertising


Yazıcı B.

JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.1-22, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 1 Sayı: 1
  • Basım Tarihi: 2026
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1080/09589236.2026.2693926
  • Dergi Adı: JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), Social Science Premium Collection (ProQuest), Health Research Premium Collection (ProQuest), Humanities Source Ultimate (EBSCO), Scopus, Sociology Database (ProQuest), Sociology Source Ultimate (EBSCO), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Periodicals Index Online, Educational research abstracts (ERA), Gender Studies Database, Index Islamicus, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Political Science Complete, Psycinfo, Social Sciences Abstracts, Political Science Abstract (IPSA), MLA International Bibliography
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-22
  • İstanbul Yeni Yüzyıl Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The rise of ‘dadvertising’, campaigns featuring emotionally engaged, nurturing fathers, highlights how commercial media commodifies masculinity. While studies have accumulated in Anglo-American and Northern European contexts, and a growing body of Turkish scholarship has examined advertising and masculinity, the intersection of paternal emotion work and dadvertising remains underexplored in Turkish scholarship. This paper addresses that gap by examining paternal emotion work in Turkish Father’s Day advertising (2020–2025). Drawing on Hochschild’s distinction between organizational emotional labour and domestic emotion work, Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity and Gill’s postfeminist sensibility, the study identifies four discursive formations. First, selective and bounded emotion work stages paternal care as episodic rather than routine. Second, emotional exceptionalism renders fathers’ caregiving heroic. Third, the commodification of paternal affect converts emotional expressiveness into brand capital. Fourth, postfeminist displacement uses individual-choice narratives to obscure the gendered care gap. Ultimately, Turkish dadvertising produces a modernized image of fatherhood that simultaneously reinscribes care inequality by framing men’s emotional participation as exceptional rather than quotidian. The findings contribute to feminist media studies by demonstrating how postfeminist advertising logic operates within a patriarchal, semi-peripheral context and by clarifying crucial conceptual boundaires between emotion work and emotional labour.