College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Exhausted Couples: Changes in the Gender Order and Crisis of Care
This talk takes as a point of departure the ideal of the bourgeois family: the woman cares for the children and housework, unpaid and invisible, while the man earns the money. But what happens when couples no longer adopt this ideal or take on the traditional gendered division of labor? What kinds of arrangements do they come up with, and how? These questions will be answered from a micro-sociological perspective based on interviews conducted with couples from different social classes living with children. In the stories told by the interviewees, new and old logics and (ir)rationalities of everyday practice are made visible. The analysis will show what is currently conceivable, expressible, and feasible for women and men in families. Their characterizations make apparent transformations in the symbolic gender order, for one, while also indicating there is a crisis of care, of reproductive work. A political intervention that does not make a valuation differentiation between public and private spheres of practice must focus on how they interlock and must conceptually take into account all kinds of socially necessary work – wage labor as well as care, social, political, and cultural labor.
Professor Tomke König is Professor of Sociology, Sociology of Gender, at Bielefeld University in Germany.