What gender strategies do women and men use as it relates to household work?

This week we’re doing gender. Gender deals with our socially constructed understandings of what behavior we interpret as “masculine” vs “feminine”. Gender is different from sex. Sex is the biological makeup of an individual body, particularly as it relates to sexual organs that you are born with (think of sex as the internal plumbing while gender has to do with the behavior performed).

I have assigned two well known readings that investigate gender: The Second Shift by Arlie Hoschschild and Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys by Victor Rios.

Here are the questions:

For the Second Shift:

1) What does Hochschild mean by the second shift?

2) What gender strategies do women and men use as it relates to household work?

3) How does this reading change your understanding of gender?

For Punished:

1) How does Rios study gender in his ethnography?

2) What are the gender practices that Rios discusses?

3) How does Spider “prove his manhood”?

4) Why are Rios’s research subjects caught between a good working class masculinity and hypermasculinity?