The identity of stepmother is, in many ways, a troubled one – constructed as “other” and often associated with notions of “wickedness” in literature and everyday talk. This paper reports findings from a study on the difficulties faced by stepmothers and how they use talk about their (male) partners, often constructing men as hapless, helpless or hopeless, to repair their “troubled” identities. The data were collected from a web forum for stepmothers based in the UK and 13 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with stepmothers. The analysis took a synthetic narrative-discursive methodological approach, underpinned by feminist theory with particular attention to the discourses that were drawn on by participants and the constraints that these imposed. This paper presents these findings in relation to three constructions of their partners through which repair work was attempted: men as in need of rescue; men as flawed fathers; and men as damaged. The paper concludes with some suggestions for supporting stepmothers by challenging dominant narratives around families in talk, in the media and in government and institutional policies.

中文翻译：

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无助、无助、无望：继母谈论她们（男性）伴侣的分析

继母的身份在很多方面都是一个麻烦的身份——被构建为“他者”，并且经常与文学和日常谈话中的“邪恶”概念联系在一起。本文报告了一项关于继母面临的困难以及他们如何利用谈论（男性）伴侣的谈话的研究结果，这些谈话经常将男人塑造成不幸、无助或绝望，以修复他们“有问题的”身份。这些数据是从英国继母的网络论坛和与继母的 13 次半结构化面对面访谈中收集的。该分析采用综合的叙事-话语方法论方法，以女权主义理论为基础，特别关注参与者所引用的话语及其强加的限制。本文将这些发现与他们尝试修复工作的合作伙伴的三种结构有关：男性需要救援；男人是有缺陷的父亲；和男人一样受损。本文最后提出了一些建议，通过挑战谈话、媒体以及政府和机构政策中围绕家庭的主流叙事来支持继母。