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The paper deals with this question: which techniques and interpretation patterns construct »good parents« through housework examples in psychiatric report within infanticide files. Parenthood is conceptualized as a caring relationship. Starting from a discourse-analytical framework, expanded by aspects of knowledge sociology, the paper focuses specifically on one infanticide case. This case of a mother who was accused of infanticide twice is interesting for the normative negotiation of good parenting because she lived in an alternative family form: What gender-related and personal responsibility strategies emerge in the patterns of interpretation? And which techniques are used to qualify men and women as good parents in the psychiatric report? The paper shows that the reports are not neutral factual matters. Rather, they show that parental facts, in a way, are brought forth. Furthermore, the results indicate that psychiatric experts in the criminal field can be understood as constructors of good parenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defining desire generally remains quite a cumbersome task due to the multiplicity and versatility of its conceptual nuances. Although queer theory has debunked many of the fundamental assumptions underlying continuities between categories such as sex, gender, sexual practice and desire as discursive-linguistic constructs, material dimensions concerning desire have yet to be adequately investigated. This paper portrays an autoethnographic journey through landscapes of desire and links personal experience to several approaches that the authors came across in the course of their research. Incorporating creative strategies of knowledge production into a queer-feminist reading of new materialisms can widen perceptions of desire and offer valuable insights into how and where desire might occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Up to now research and professional practice do not have any consistent theoretical concept of parenthood. Therefore they can only fall back on unquestioned ideas which they try to systemize and amend with theoretical fragments. Instead of improving a theoretical perspective they unwillingly fuel the normative discourse on parenthood. This paper now lines out a theoretical approach to parenthood, based on the process theory by Norbert Elias. Parenthood is not only understood as a psycho-social process of individuals but at the same time as a long-term psycho-social process of societies, in which individuals are socio-historically embedded via their networks. Through this indispensable core-process of parenthood societies ensure generativity and mold standards, ideals and habitus of parenthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]