Gendered Division (gendered + division)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Women's Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2001
Aili Tripp
Women's movements in Africa represent one of the key societal forces challenging state clientelistic practices, the politicization of communal differences, and personalized rule. In the 1980s and 1990s we have witnessed not only the demise of patronage-based women's wings that were tied to ruling parties, but also the concurrent growth of independent women's organizations with more far-reaching agendas. The emergence of such autonomous organizations has been a consequence of the loss of state legitimacy, the opening-up of political space, economic crisis, and the shrinking of state resources. Drawing on examples from Africa, this article shows why independent women's organizations and movements have often been well situated to challenge clientelistic practices tied to the state. Gendered divisions of labour, gendered organizational modes and the general exclusion of women from both formal and informal political arenas have defined women's relationship to the state, to power, and to patronage. These characteristics have, on occasion, put women's movements in a position to challenge various state-linked patronage practices. The article explores some of the implications of these challenges. [source]


,I'm Home for the Kids': Contradictory Implications for Work,Life Balance of Teleworking Mothers

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2008
Margo Hilbrecht
This study explores the experience of time flexibility and its relationship to work,life balance among married female teleworkers with school-aged children. Drawing from a larger study of teleworkers from a Canadian financial corporation, 18 mothers employed in professional positions discussed work, leisure and their perceptions of work,life balance in in-depth interviews. Telework was viewed positively because flexible scheduling facilitated optimal time management. A key factor was the pervasiveness of caregiving, which could result in ongoing tensions and contradictions between the ethic of care and their employment responsibilities. The ideology of ,intensive mothering' meant that work schedules were closely tied to the rhythms of children's school and leisure activities. The different temporal demands of motherhood and employment resulted in little opportunity for personal leisure. Time ,saved' from not having to commute to an office was reallocated to caregiving, housework or paid employment rather than to time for their self. The women also experienced a traditional gendered division of household labour and viewed telework as a helpful tool for combining their dual roles. Time flexibility enhanced their sense of balancing work and life and their perceived quality of life. At the same time, they did not question whether having the primary responsibility for caregiving while engaged in paid employment at home was fair or whether it was a form of exploitation. [source]


The division of labor in close relationships: An asymmetrical conflict issue

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS, Issue 3 2000
ESTHER S. KLUWER
This research addresses couples'reports of their (hypothetical) attempts to maintain or change a gendered division of labor through conflict interactions. Two experiments in which spouses responded to scenarios showed that spouses reported more conflict over the division of housework than conflict over paid work and child care, and that wives more often than husbands desired a change in their spouses'contribution. Spouses reported more wife-demand/husband-withdraw than husband-demand/wife-withdraw interaction during hypothetical conflict over the division of labor, but only when the wife desired a change in her spouse's contribution. Together, the data imply that wife-demand/husband-withdraw interaction is a likely response to the asymmetrically structured conflict situation in which the wife is discontent with her husband's contribution to housework, while her husband wants to maintain the status quo. We further showed that defenders of the status quo were more likely expected to reach their goal than complainants. In the role of complainant, wives were more likely expected to reach their goal than were their husbands, but only when the conflict issue concerned their own gender stereotypical domain (i.e., family work). [source]


What to do with the "Tubby Hubby"?"Obesity," the Crisis of Masculinity, and the Nuclear Family in Early Cold War Canada

ANTIPODE, Issue 5 2009
Deborah McPhail
Abstract:, Despite current insistence that obesity is a new problem, obesity and fat were discussed frequently in the medical and popular presses and by state officials during the early Cold War in Canada. Using Kristeva's (1982,,Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) concept of abjection, I argue that Cold War anxieties about fat, and specifically the obesity of white, middle-class men, had less to do with the growing girth of bodies than it did with a post-war crisis in masculinity related to the collapse of the public and private spheres. Through an analysis of fitness regimes and female-administered diets for men, I argue that anti-obesity rhetoric served to assuage dominant worries about degenerating masculinity by reasserting both the gendered division of labour and the white, middle-class, nuclear family as Canadian norms. [source]


Gender performances in a service orientated workplace in Aotearoa/New Zealand

NEW ZEALAND GEOGRAPHER, Issue 3 2005
Victoria Guyatt
Abstract:, This paper uses Butler's (1990) concept of performativity to explore the constructions of feminine and masculine identities integral to the gendered bodily performance in ,interactive' service economies. The empirical research for this paper is based on Fat Freddie's student pub in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and was collected over an eight-week period using an ethnographic methodology. While Butler argues we ,do' gender, I explore how these ,fabrications' are naturalized, and the effect this has on the division of labour within Fat Freddie's. While these performances are regulatory, they are, however, unstable and alternate subject positionings can be adopted. I discuss how these subject positionings within Fat Freddie's can disrupt dichotomized gendered divisions and hegemonic understandings of appropriate gendered roles and identities. [source]