The meanings of paternity: from unknown fathers to DNA testing

Author(s)

Sabrina Finamori

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2012-03-30

Examining board members

Heloísa André Pontes; Adriana Gracia Piscitelli; Alexandre Zarias; Claudia Lee Willians Fonseca; Luiz Fernando D Duarte

• Advisor: Heloísa André Pontes

Abstract

The present thesis analyses the life narratives of children that have searched at the present for the legal recognition of the biological father in order for us to understand how the meanings of fatherhood are constituted, are signified and re-signified in these particular experiences, questioning at the same time how paternity, filiation, and conjugality are mutually constituted as categories and social practices from the alterations in the laws and in the techniques of investigation of paternity during the twentieth century. As we recovered the nodal points of change in the laws and in the techniques, the aim is not much to offer a historical background, but to analyze how the conceptions present in the laws (and in their alterations along the time) can reverberate in the way by which the subjects conceive their actual relationships or, still, in the evaluation they make about their own past. Then, in guiding the attention to the narratives of people who desire to gain the legal recognition of paternity, the present research discusses the way the children attribute meanings to the quest for their fathers, and, consequently, to the paternity and to the family. Starting from narratives centered in the childhood, in the father's absence, in the process of searching for the father, in the actual relationships, and in the future expectations, I sought to analyze how categories, kinship terminologies and practices, constructed historically, set in motion and delineated on a day by day basis in the relationships, showed up in the particular forms by which the quest for fatherhood could make sense (AU)