'Who's the Man and Who's the Woman?'
Same-sex Couples in Queensland 'Doing' Gender and Domestic Labour
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S132181660000670XKeywords:
Domestic labour in same-sex households, heteronormative gender roles, performance of gender, social and cultural spaceAbstract
This article reports an exploratory study that investigated domestic labour in same-sex households, to the best of my knowledge the first in Australia to do so. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 couples in Southeast Queensland reveal that these lesbians and gay men do not take on heteronormative gender roles when doing domestic labour, and that their practices reflect a variety of styles of sharing, with no pattern emerging as clearly dominant. Theoretical frameworks conceptualising gender as performative, and queer theory's figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions, suggest how the performance of gender may vary in different domains of social and cultural space, and in relation to other actors in those spaces. I have conceptualised this process by means of an analogy with the modulation of sound such that each person adjusts the balance between treble (conventionally feminine behaviours, attitudes and attributes) and bass (conventionally masculine behaviours and attributes). Rather than being ‘the man’ or ‘the woman’, or even displaying a single form of gay masculinity or lesbian femininity, lesbians and gay men can be seen to perform varying degrees of masculinity and femininity in the private space of the home, and in relation to their intimate partners, by the way they engage with domestic labour. Finally, I reflect on how the socio-geographical specificities of being situated in Southeast Queensland may have impacted on this research.
References
Babbie, E., 2001, The Practice of Social Research, 9th edn, Wadsworth, Belmont, CA.
Baxter, J., 1993, Work at Home: The Domestic Division of Labour, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia.
Berk, S.F. 1985, The Gender Factory: The Apportionment of Work in American Households, Plenum Press, New York.
Berlant, L., and Warner, M., 1998, ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547–66.
Biernacki, P., and Waldorf, D., 1981, ‘Snowball Sampling: Problems and Techniques of Chain Referral Sampling’, Sociological Methods and Research 10(2): 141–63.
Bouma, G.D. 2000, The Research Process, 4th edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
Burnley, I., and Murphy, P., 2003, Sea Change: Movement from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney.
Carrington, C., 1999, No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life Among Lesbians and Gay Men, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Connell, R.W. 1987, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Giddings, L.A. 1998, ‘Political Economy and the Construction of Gender: The Example of Housework Within Same-Sex Households’, Feminist Economics 4(2), 97–106.
Giddings, L.A., 2003, ‘But … Who Mows the Lawn? The Division of Labor in Same-sex Households’, in Moe, K.S. (ed.), Women, Family and Work: Writings on the Economics of Gender, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 85–102.
Goodnow, J., and Bowes, J., 1994, Men, Women and Household Work, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
Gorman-Murray, A., 2007, in press, ‘Rethinking Queer Migration through the Body’, Social and Cultural Geography 8(1).
Jackson, S., and Scott, S., 2002, ‘Introduction: The Gendering of Sociology’, in Jackson, S. and Scott, S. (eds), Gender, A Sociological Reader, Routledge, London, 1–26.
Kentlyn, S., 2006, ‘Adjusting Bass and Treble: The Continuously Modulated Performance of Gender’, QUT Centre for Social Change Research Conference, Brisbane, 27 October, www.socialchange.qut.edu.au/conferences/socialchange/docs/conf_papers2006/Kentlyn_FIN.pdf.
Kitzinger, C., and Wilkinson, S., 1995, ‘Transitions from Heterosexuality to Lesbianism: The Discursive Production of Lesbian Identities’, Developmental Psychology 31(1), 95–104.
Minichiello, V., Aroni, R., Timewell, E., and Alexander, L., (1995) In-Depth Interviewing, 2nd edn, Longman, Melbourne.
Natalier, K., 2003, ‘I'm Not his Wife’: Doing Gender in Share Households, PhD thesis, University of Queensland.
Oerton, S. 1997, ‘“Queer Housewives?” Some Problems in Theorising the Division of Domestic Labour in Lesbian and Gay Households’, Women's Studies International Forum 20(3), 421–30.
Oerton, S. 1998, ‘Reclaiming the “Housewife”? Lesbians and Household Work’, Journal of Lesbian Studies 2(4), 69–83.
Stiers, G.A., 1999, From This Day Forward: Commitment, Marriage, and Family in Lesbian and Gay Relationships, St Martin's Griffin, New York.
Walby, S., 1986, ‘Gender, Class and Stratification: Towards a New Approach’, in Crompton, R. Mann, M. (eds), Gender and Stratification, Polity, Cambridge.
West, C. and Zimmerman, D. 1987, ‘Doing Gender’, Gender and Society 1(2), 125–51.
Weston, K., 1995, ‘Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration’, GLQ 2, 253–77.
Weston, K. 2004, ‘Fieldwork in Lesbian and Gay Communities’, in Hesse-Biber, S., Nagy, S. and Yaiser, M.L. (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, Oxford University Press, New York, 198–205.
Williams, C.L., and Stein, A., 2002, ‘Introduction’, in Williams, C.L. and Stein, A. (eds), Sexuality and Gender, Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Willig, C., 1999, Applied Discourse Analysis: Social and Psychological Interventions, Open University Press, Buckingham.
