13 May 2021

Fenstermaker—The Division of Household Labor

Sarah Fenstermaker
"Work and Gender" (orig. 1985)
Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change
ed. Fenstermaker and West (2002)
pp. 105-118
p. 110—At least metaphorically, the division of household labor facilitates two production processes: the production of goods and services and what we might call the production of gender. Simultaneously, household members "do" gender, as they "do" housework and child care, and what I have been calling the division of household labor provides for the joint production of household labor and gender; it is the mechanism by which both the material and the symbolic products are realized.
Indeed, are there not as many "symbolic products" manufactured this way as the given society is able to conceive of and value? Because this seems to me also a perfect description of how what might be called status, prestige, distinction, or more likely simply conformity (in a nonetheless intensely value-laden sense) is produced; "normative conceptions," all of them, and none precisely coextensive with "class" per se. Seems to me as well that the holding-to-account that is done with regard to family distinction is, more often than in more widely discussed, historically fraught arenas such as race, undertaken quite bald-facedly and unremorsefully. If indeed it belongs in the category of manufactured accountabilities, it could for this reason be uniquely susceptible to study; but then, for it to be thus studied would require the studiers to treat the artifacts of family distinction as no more absolute or imperative than gender, race, or class identities are treated in Doing Difference; and thereby one may, I think, occasionally be up against the White Bourgeois streak in Feminism that we read so often about but less often can put a finger on.

[from a notebook, 2018]

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