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Redoing gender through divorce

Skidmore College, swalzer{at}skidmore.edu

Much theoretical and empirical scholarship suggests that in heterosexual marriage, norms for work and love are differentiated by gender. Grounded in an inductive analysis of archival interview data from the 1980s, this article suggests that gendered processes, relatively unrecognized as married people enact them day to day, are identified and revised in retrospective accounts of divorced people. I describe four areas of gender differentiation institutionalized in marriage — breadwinning, housework, parenting, and emotional expression — and offer the concept of "redoing" gender to capture the process of repudiating previous forms of gender accountability. If marriage is a site for "doing" gender, for some people, divorce generates "redoing" in the sense that they change their expectations for masculine and feminine behavior in families.

Key Words: divorce • doing gender • family transitions • gender • sociology

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