The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical (...) reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation. (shrink)

This article examines the politics of reproductive labor in globalization. Using the case of migrant Filipina domestic workers, the author presents the formation of a three-tier transfer of reproductive labor in globalization between the following groups of women: middle-class women in receiving nations, migrant domestic workers, and Third World women who are too poor to migrate. The formation of this international division of labor suggests that reproduction activities, as they have been increasingly commodified, have to be situated in the context (...) of the global market economy. This division of labor is a structural process that determines the migration of Filipina domestic workers. As such, this article also uses in-depth interviews to examine and enumerate the contradictions that migrant Filipina domestic workers experience in their family and work lives as a result of “being in the middle” of this division of labor. (shrink)

“Doing Gender,” West and Zimmerman's landmark article, highlighted the importance of social interaction, thus revealing the weaknesses of socialization and structural approaches. However, despite its revolutionary potential for illuminating how to dismantle the gender system, doing gender has become a theory of gender persistence and the inevitability of inequality. In this article, the author argues that we need to reframe the questions to ask how we can undo gender. Research should focus on when and how social interactions become less gendered, (...) whether gender can be irrelevant in interaction, whether gendered interactions always underwrite inequality, how the institutional and interactional levels work together to produce change, and interaction as the site of change. (shrink)

Theories of reciprocity have been surprisingly gender-blind. We develop a gendered account of reciprocity using qualitative data from Russia. We focus on gifts of unpaid task assistance, where gender differences are particularly visible. In our data, women’s gifts of labor involve greater time and effort than men’s, but women report nonreciprocation, while men do not. Paradoxically, the most onerous gifts are those least likely to be reciprocated. We show how this puzzling finding relates to the gendering of reciprocity. We define (...) four stages of the gift cycle—giving, recognition, reciprocation, and givers’ responses to reciprocation—detailing how each is gendered. We argue that reciprocity is a socially embedded phenomenon that cannot be considered in isolation from gender norms. This insight has implications for research employing reciprocity as a framework, and for debates in relation to issues such as care work and family relations. (shrink)

I argue that a particular epistemological approach, “ecological thinking,” helps to demonstrate that long-term care work is organized transnationally—through health, economic, labor, and immigration policies established primarily by governments, transnational corporations, other for-profit entities, and international lending bodies—to create and sustain injustice against the dependent elderly and those who care for them, and to weaken the care capacities of countries and their health systems, especially those of source countries. An ecological approach also helps to reveal the grounding of global responsibilities (...) and an alternative conception of justice for long-term care and global health equity more generally. (shrink)