Have you seen Meet the Parents, the movie with Robert De Niro? He is Jack, a former CIA agent. Suspicious and obsessive, he is about to meet his daughter's would-be husband: he is the alpha male father competing with the new guy, convinced that no one is as good as his little girl. The father's jealousy, and hostility towards his "replacement", are not up for discussion; we already know that things are going to go badly, thanks to the casual admission that fathers do this. But none of this bothers us. Why?
This is the question Katherine Angel poses in this bold and refined essay: is it possible to free ourselves from the figure of the father, from our daddy issues? Through news stories, films, TV series, psychoanalysis and the work of authors such as Virginia Woolf, Daddy's Beauty brings to light a problem that until now has been relegated to the private sphere: how the power exercised by fathers over daughters has pervaded, ubiquitously but invisibly, our imagination. If we are to free ourselves from patriarchy, then it is vital to try to put fathers back in their place.
