Abstract
This essay revisits Erving Goffman’s question regarding the connection between couple relationships and gender construction, expanding upon it by examining the ambivalent relationship of couples towards gender (in)difference, in which the latter is constitutive of their formation. On the one hand, couples exploit the (in)equality of their gender composition, while, on the other, they systematically ignore it in order to establish individualized personal relationships. The article culminates in a sociological diagnosis of this ambivalence, with statistical inequalities between men and women emerging as an aggregate effect of millions of small dyadic entities, each searching for their own relational meaning. How might they reconstruct their sexual inequality in view of the fact that gender is losing its relevance? Meanwhile, what used to be thought of as homosexual and heterosexual relations are losing their meaning as gender relations.
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Notes
This tradition began in the works of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. It observes a devaluation of collective memberships (such as gender, ethnicity, and class) in societies marked by advanced division of labour and individualism.
The reason for this is that small social systems are confronted with the face-to-face visibility of gender, while formal organisations have an easier job abstracting from ascriptive criteria in favour of the formal qualifications required for a position.
This case is an ideal–typical (and thus anonymous) construction on the basis of interviews with couples within the ongoing research project “Gender Differentiation and De-Differentiation of Parenthood,” which has been running since 2013 within the framework of the “Un/Doing Differences” research group at the University of Mainz, funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).
It could be highly illuminating for family research to consult divorce statistics for the reasons given by separating couples. Probably, one would find dominant accounts (such as exploitation and adultery), more idiosyncratic currencies, and completely fragmented reasons for discontent, some of them not even clearly articulable.
This does not settle the precise nature of the reciprocal relationship between two-person togetherness and gender binarism conclusively. It is conceivable that the social meaning of two genders may be socially anchored in the meaning of couple relationships (rather than vice versa). It is also conceivable that polyamory will become more likely as cultural gender differentiation decreases.
This is rather like ascribing ongoing analytical relevance to the identification of lapsed Catholics and Protestants within a mixed population of religious, secularized and newly converted individuals—a case of ‘groupism’ (Brubaker 2004). If we reduce a social relationship that is constituted on the basis of the mutual recognition and development of individuality to its gender composition, we are analysing it like a brothel or a swingers’ club—as an institution for the reciprocal use of genitalia (to put it in Kantian terms).
Sport appears to be the only other field locked so tenaciously into the search for the meaning of gender differentiation. During the 2011 Women’s World Cup, public discourse valiantly mulled over the recognition of women’s football, yet virtually no one considered mixed teams, which would bring an end to the inhibition of competition between the genders and give women the chance to prove themselves superior to men. In the world of sport, people are not yet grappling with one another in a gender-indifferent way, because sport has been mandated to spell out the meaning of gender differentiation.
The theorem of ‘doing gender’ has always had two disadvantages concerning the differential relevance of gender: It projected the high relevance of gender for gender studies onto the object of investigation, despite gender difference being only one kind of classification for members of society (alongside race, ethnicity, nation, religion, age, profession and so forth). Moreover, the conditions under which the mere background relevance of gender actually becomes a focus and a topic of interactions were not specified. Put differently, an important theoretical implication of ‘doing gender’ was simply omitted, namely that of ‘undoing gender’ (Hirschauer 1994: 676–679). The fundamental notion of a practical doing of affiliations and distinctions implies that people may also refrain from doing them. To the extent that they practically perform meaningful distinctions, they may interrupt, abstain from or discontinue this process of performance, and they may deactivate memberships within specific situations or fields.
One indication of this is gender-indifferent pet names like the genderless ‘darling’ (Nübling 2011).
The gender neutral semantic of ‘partnership’ is an indicator for the growing indeterminacy of couples in terms of gender. For the historical shift from ‘companionship’ to ‘partnership’ see Leupold (1983).
Not only is the choice of same-sex partners moulded by the projections of the majority culture (butch/effeminate), but we can also discern ‘calls to order’ and commitments to a prescribed sexual orientation within minorities themselves, when, for example, women in a current relationship with a male are perceived as renegade ‘fake lesbians’.
The gender asymmetric performance of penetrative practices is of high symbolic significance, comparable to that of asymmetric genital circumcision in other cultural contexts.
Of course, this does not mean that a man who finally performed household tasks on an equal basis, or even just extensively, would be perceived by every woman as less attractive. But we should be careful not to underestimate norms of attractiveness. It remains the case that a ‘female protector’ would have a child rather than a husband and aesthetic role-reversals—aggressive women, tearful men, tall women and shorter men, superior sportswomen, and so on—are perceived as virtually unbearable well into the most ‘emancipated’ of milieux. This does not rule out the possibility of historical change: new laws on child maintenance payments, for example, that place a greater obligation on women than hitherto to be self-sufficient following a divorce, might make a traditional division of labour, featuring time off work to raise a family and loss of qualifications, so risky that the economic ‘provider’ would lose value on the relationship market, while the ‘caring man,’ whose responsibility for children means providing time rather than money, might do very well.
A third of the women had no interest in men who earn less than them; see also Buchmann and Eisner (2001).
As Diamond (2008) concludes in her study of the questionable concept of sexual orientation, not only are women less conscious of sexual types than men, but even the concept of ‘bisexuality’ scarcely does justice to their ‘sexual fluidity’ because it upholds the idea of marking certain lifestyles as an expression of a sexual species. If individuals subsume gender affiliation within a range of dimensions of physical attractiveness or personal affection, they are better understood as ambisexual; they relate to gender in an aschematic way (Bem 1993).
This is even clearer in languages such as German, where Mann and Frau are the usual terms for both “man” and “woman” and “husband” and “wife,” or French, in which femme designates both “woman” and “wife”.
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Funding was provided by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Grant No. FOR 1939).
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Hirschauer, S. Gender (In)Difference in Gender (Un)Equal Couples. Intimate Dyads Between Gender Nostalgia and Post Genderism. Hum Stud 40, 309–330 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9431-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9431-y