Traditional courtship norms delineate distinct gendered behaviors for men and women based on the model of a dominant, breadwinning male and a passive, dependent female. Previous research shows, however, that as women have increased their access to earned income, there has been a rising ideological and behavioral commitment to egalitarian relationships. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 38 college-educated women, this article explores how women negotiate these seemingly contradictory beliefs in order to understand how and why gendered courtship conventions persist even (...) as heterosexual romantic relationships become more egalitarian. My findings show that while the women reference essentialist beliefs about men’s “nature” to explain their commitment to courtship conventions, they draw on narratives of choice, individualism, and personal autonomy to assert that the symbolic gendering of courtship will not interfere with their desire for an egalitarian marriage. However, women’s behaviors and narratives reinforce notions of gender difference, potentially providing support for other forms of gender inequality. (shrink)

Transgender individuals and families throw existing taxonomic classification systems of identity into perplexing disarray, illuminating sociolegal dilemmas long overdue for critical sociological inquiry. Using interview data collected from 50 cisgender women from across the United States and Canada, who detail 61 unique partnerships with transgender and transsexual men, this work considers the pragmatic choices and choice-making capacities of this social group as embedded within social systems, structures, and institutions. Proposing the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to situate (...) the interactional processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of this understudied group of cisgender women, this work theorizes the liminal sociolegal status of an understudied family form. In so doing, it exposes the increasingly paradoxical consolidation and destabilization of sociolegal notions of identity, marriage, normativity, and parenthood—challenging, contributing to, and extending current theoretical and empirical understandings of agency and structure in twenty-first-century families. (shrink)