Between Love and Anger: The Role of Emotions in the European Fathers' Rights Movements

The main goal of my paper is to present and analyze the role of emotions in European fathers’ rights movement(s) belonging to the wider group of men’s social movements. Fathers’ rights groups, networks and organisations exist in all European countries and are one of the most recognizable and “powerful” phenomena among all European men’s movements. However, in spite of the role of emotions in mobilization, activism and/or failure/success there is still a lack of comprehensive, comparative research on the European dimension of the movement. Therefore, in the presented paper I will attempt to answer the following questions:

1. What types of emotions are expressed and/or used by the activists of European father’s right movements?
2. How dominant emotions influence on the character of the movements?
3. Are there any movements’ “emotional strategies” and how do they impact on the movements’ failures or successes?

The analysis will be developed on the basis of a) desk research and b) qualitative research on the contemporary European father's rights movements conducted between 2009 and 2011 with 16 members of dozen father’s rights groups in Poland as well as on the ongoing research on European father's rights movements which has been conducted since Fall 2014 in Sweden and United Kingdom.