According to the perspective developed in this article, widely shared, hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender and their impact in what the authors call “social relational” contexts are among the core components that maintain and change the gender system. When gender is salient in these ubiquitous contexts, cultural beliefs about gender function as part of the rules of the game, biasing the behaviors, performances, and evaluations of otherwise similar men and women in systematic ways that the authors specify. While the biasing (...) impact of gender beliefs may be small in any one instance, the consequences cumulate over individuals’ lives and result in substantially different outcomes for men and women. After describing this perspective, the authors show how it sheds newlight on some defining features of the gender system and illustrate its implications for research into specific questions about gender inequality. (shrink)

Recent research on children's worlds has revealed how gender varies in salience across social contexts. Building on this observation, the author examines a highly salient gendered moment of group life among four- and five-year-old children at a youth soccer opening ceremony, where gender boundaries were activated and enforced in ways that constructed an apparently “natural” categorical difference between the girls and the boys. The author employs a multilevel analytical framework to explore how children “do gender” at the level of interaction (...) or performance, how the structured gender regime constrains and enables the actions of children and parents, and how children's gendered immersion in popular culture provides symbolic resources with which children and parents actively create categorical differences. The article ends with a discussion of how gendered interactions, structure, and cultural meanings are intertwined, in both mutually reinforcing and contradictory ways. (shrink)

This investigation explores how contemporary motherhood is constituted in postindustrial consumer culture through a content and textual analysis of Shape Fit Pregnancy. Using all available issues of the magazine from its inception in 1997 to 2003, the authors first underscore a key tension surrounding pregnant women’s bodies within health and fitness discourse: That the pregnant form is presented as maternally successful yet aesthetically problematic. Second, the authors reveal how contemporary mothers are defined as newly responsible for a second shift of (...) household labor and child care and a new third shift of bodily labor and fitness practices. The analysis examines the way in which the second and third shift are constituted as mutually dependent and reinforcing. Last, the discussion analyzes how this particular fitness text draws on empowerment discourse derived from feminist gains of access to the public sphere while paradoxically inscribing women to the privatized realm of bodily practices, domesticity, and family values. (shrink)