Standing Firm Against the Stickiness of Care: The Absent Presence of Gender in a ‘Gender-Neutral’ Parenting Course

This article examines how expectant and new Danish parents are positioned within gendered frameworks in universal-access parenting courses. We argue that these courses, despite claims of gender-neutrality, reproduce gender as an absent-present history. On the one hand, the discourse of shared parenting remains prominent, emphasizing the equal importance of both parents. On the other hand, unequal ideals of fatherhood vis-à-vis motherhood continue to persist. Notably, fathers are, to some extent, positioned as needing specialized “father-friendly” support, while mothers are guided towards intrasubjective evaluation, aligning with normative ideals of “intensive motherhood”. These gendered framings create not only a “stickiness of care”—capturing how both the practical and emotional responsibilities of caregiving cling disproportionately to mothers— but also generate “sticky emotions” that adhere differently across gender. While emotions such as autonomy and playfulness tend to “stick” to fatherhood, feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt are more readily attached to motherhood. However, moments of resistance also emerge. Some mothers refuse to engage in the intrasubjective self-evaluation, instead asserting their own authority and rejecting the framing of mothers as emotionally vulnerable. Following this, we propose the concept of “standing firm feminism” to capture how mothers may assert self-reliance in the face of institutionalized maternal ideals.