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

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.