Gender in Everyday Life Notes PDF

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Summary of gender in everyday life theories and criticism....

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Lecture 4 Notes The relationship between gender and everyday life can be seen as having two dimensions: gender in everyday life and the gendering of everyday life. Gender in everyday life explores how different opportunities and identities are constructed for men and women through everyday contexts and practices. The gendering of everyday life explores in what ways the idea of the everyday itself is tied up with assumptions about gender. -Everyday sexism project -Malmaison Hotel Felski (2000) One way the everyday comes to be understood in a way that is deeply gendered is because the everyday starts to be seen as a particular kind of space. As a division between men’s public work and women’s private work develops, women are increasingly seen as belonging to the home. Cleaning and cooking become allocated to women, supposedly on account of their ‘feminine’ natures, to which this kind of work comes naturally. Evidence for this can be found in the European Social Survey (2013) which showed that women living with a male partner still do nearly two thirds of the housework, even if they are in full time employment. Another one of Felski’s arguments is that the gendering of everyday life is a result of the way in which everyday life is associated with a particular experience of time. Everyday life continues to be associated with things we do repeatedly, such as cooking, eating and sleeping– all the routine habits of the body. It is seen as the opposite of the male led world of modern progress. As a result of this, everyday life comes to be related to ideas about women as cyclical beings, unable to escape the demands of bodily cycles or endlessly repeating

tasks of domestic labour. What Felski’s arguments show is that the way in which everyday life is routinely talked about is itself profoundly gendered. De Certeau (1984) / Smith (1988) De Certeau talked about the extent to which modern society is organised by the emergence of forms of discipline and expertise which claim authority over different aspects of our lives. Upon close inspections of these disciplines, it becomes clear they are gendered. Smith (1988) for example, discusses how as a sociologist, there is no legitimate way in which she can discuss her everyday life as a single mother. This is because sociology is one of these specialist abstract disciplines which De Certeau discussed, which are established and determined by men. Therefore the perspective valued in the discipline is the one middle class men are expected to occupy– general and impersonal. The experience to which, for the most part, woman are confined – the local and practical world of everyday experience – is therefore rendered sociologically meaningless. Smith argues that actually, the everyday work and experiences of women can allow for a clearer insight into the nature of social relationships than the everyday experience of men. This is because it is often women who do the work that links up messy, everyday life with the world of abstract discipline knowledge. Smith example of this is: When a patient goes to see a doctor, they will first normally see a nurse, who is a women, whose job it is to take the reported experience of that persons life and turn it into concise case notes. These allow the doctor, who is normally male, to treat the patient in an abstract way....