"You're both women, so which of you is the woman?"
Myths and misperceptions about same-sex couples and household labor
Lately I’ve been in the throes of “reviewing the literature” on queer couples and household labor (more on what such a review entails below). As often happens, the more I learn, the more complicated and nuanced I realize things are. So I thought I’d debunk—or, more accurately, complicate—three misconceptions and overgeneralizations about queer1 and same-sex couples and housework.
Misconception #1: In a same-sex couple, one partner typically plays the “husband/dad” role and one partner typically plays the “wife/mom” role.
One of my lesbian interviewees summed this one up better than I can:
Everybody used to ask [my wife and I] how we were splitting up the wedding [planning] duties...The implication of the question was always like, ‘You're both women, so which of you is the woman?’... Which, we get that a lot. And the answer is: both.
Mic drop! Perhaps the biggest problem with this misunderstanding is that it tries to impose a heterosexual framework onto a queer relationship. The idea that certain tasks bundle together into a “husband” role and a “wife” role is baked into many people’s understanding of family life. So much so that it’s hard to imagine the partner who takes out the trash wouldn’t also be the partner who mows the lawn.
But as it turns out, the pairing of such tasks has more to do with social convention than anything else. Same-sex couples divvy tasks up much more idiosyncratically, on average, than hetero couples do. The tasks in each partner’s purview often include a mix of “traditionally” male- and female-typed chores.
Misconception #2: Gender is irrelevant for queer couples.
An earlier generation of researchers (as well as some commentators in the present day) assumed that if two partners share a gender it will “cancel out,” and gender will be more or less irrelevant to their relationship.
Not quite. For one, having the same gender is no guarantee you’ll experience and express that gender in the same way as your partner. The gender binary obscures considerable variation in how people perform the (supposedly) same identity. As a result, any two women or any two men will “do” gender in distinct ways that may trickle over into their housework patterns.
For another, gender and relational context (whether you’re partnered with someone who shares your gender) interact in complex ways. In one study, Deb Umberson and colleagues interviewed people in gay, lesbian, and heterosexual relationships about how they understood and managed intimacy. Regardless of sexuality, women were more interested than men in minimizing boundaries between them and their partner.2 They felt closest when deep emotional sharing was the norm.
But relationship context mattered, too. In lesbian relationships, the emotional labor of minimizing boundaries (e.g., sharing your own feelings and fears and encouraging your partner to do the same) tended to be reciprocal: both partners did the work. Women in different-sex relationships, meanwhile, often struggled on their own to promote intimacy with limited participation, or even resistance, from their male partner.
Misconception #3: Same-sex couples divide household labor 50/50.
“Heteropessimism” is on the rise in certain circles. And while it’s true that queer couples do a lot of things well, it’s not helpful to paint with too broad a brush. The assumption that all queer couples are egalitarian may be flattering, but it’s also overly reductive.
Yes, the average same-sex couple shares household labor more equitably than the average different-sex couple. Still there are plenty of same-sex couples where one partner does considerably more housework or childcare than the other. Often, differences in power and status related to paid work influence the division of labor: the person who earns more or has a more prestigious job does less of the routine housework.
For parents, partners’ relationship to the children can also shape who does what. In Black lesbian step-families, for example, birth mothers tend to play a more central role in housework and childcare—but in those same couples, caregiving labor also tends to be more highly valued than it is in hetero couples.
A Peek Behind the Research Curtain
An occasional feature in which I attempt to demystify the research process for non-sociologists
If you’ve ever written a term paper, you’ll be familiar with the basics of a literature review: read a bunch of writing on a topic in order to summarize what we—the collective “we”—know about the matter.
In the context of original academic research, the aim is slightly more nuanced. Not only are you trying to summarize a body of research, you’re looking for a way to join it. Imagine entering a crowded ballroom full of people mingling and conversing in small groups.3 Most people with basic social skills will do more listening than talking when they first enter the room. They’ll identify a promising-looking cluster of people, listen long enough to figure out what those people are discussing, and pipe up when they’re clued in enough to add something of value. It’s bad form to repeat what someone else just said or to interrupt an existing conversation with a total non sequitur.
Similar best practices apply to scholarly conversations, though these are carried out in books rather than ballrooms. Academics (like people in general) prize novelty. But you can’t be too novel, or people will think you’re at best irrelevant and at worst unhinged. Better to find some way to explicitly build—in a surprising or creative way—on what’s come before.
Enter the lit review. Efficient reviews start with a specific question. In my case these past weeks, the question was, What do we know about how queer couples (and especially same-sex couples) approach housework and childcare? Everyone has their own tricks for starting a review; my personal favorite is to find a recent article in which some kind soul has conveniently summarized and critiqued the literature on a given topic. These “review” articles are gold mines, because they give you a quick sense of the gestalt of a particular intellectual conversation, cite a whole bunch of specific papers, and point out what’s missing or remains unknown.
Once I’ve got of few of these initial seed sources, my “Papers to Read” file tends to balloon quickly. I track down some citations from the review paper, read those papers, which in turn lead me to additional sources. In a matter of hours, I’ve compiled a 30+ article list.
When staring down such a list, it’s important to remember that comprehensiveness is not the goal (unless you yourself are writing a review article or conducting a meta-analysis). Reviewing the literature is inevitably an exercise in confronting one’s own limitations: you can’t possibly read everything that’s been written, even on a narrow topic. At some point, you call it good enough and move on—knowing that you can, and likely will, return to the literature at some future point, when your questions and contributions have become more refined.
I Endorse
Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter, The Imperfectionist. A passage from the most recent edition, about the problem with always chasing a new productivity “system,” hit hard:
It's not just that the new system or technique doesn't immediately solve all your problems. (Who'd ever have guessed?) It's that it actively seems to drain the feeling of life from your work. "Deep down inside," as Nick Milo put it in a recent email, "'project management' is soul-sucking." We take an area of work we find enjoyable and interesting – if we're lucky to have absorbing work in the first place – then draw a conceptual box around it labelled "project", break it down into actions, slot it into a system of goals… and all of a sudden, it's no fun at all.
If you, like me, have a love-hate relationship with productivity discourse, give Burkeman a go.
The term “queer” is broader than the term “same-sex.” I’ve mostly been reading literature about gay and lesbian couples, partly because they represent the bulk of my own research sample, and partly because they have been studied far more extensively than other groups. I’m including both terms here, though, because some of what I’ve been reading is focused on a broader array of queer relationships.
It may be tempting to interpret this as proof that men and women really are from different planets. But consider, too, how socialization, cultural norms, etc. likely shape this gendered pattern!
I first heard this analogy as an undergrad; to the best of my memory it was inspired by this excellent book.