Gender Matters: Bringing in a Gender Structure Analysis. A Comment on “Paternal and Maternal Gatekeeping? Choreographing Care-giving in Families” by Tina Miller and “Rethinking Family Socialization to Gender through the Lens of Multi-local, Post-separation Families” by Laura Merla

Barbara J. Risman

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/9087

Authors

Barbara J. Risman University of Illinois at Chicago
Barbara J. Risman is a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She’s the author of Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition (Yale, 1998), edited books, and over two dozen journal articles in venues including American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, and Journal of Marriage and the Family. Her recent book is Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure. Her latest publication (edited with Carissa Froyum and William Scarborough) is a Handbook on the Sociology of Gender which provides up-to-date coverage on every topic within sociology of gender. The American Sociological Association honored Professor Risman with the 2011 Public Understanding of Sociology Award.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/9087

Keywords:

gender, gender as a social structure, inequalities, family, feminism

Abstract

In this comment, Risman suggests that both papers show definitely that gender still matters, but how it matters in families is consistently shifting. Both papers provide glimpses into how new family dynamics both reinforce and challenge gender inequality. Risman presents her theoretical framework of gender as a social structure and applies it to each article to analyze what the research teaches us about these families, and what questions remain unanswered.

References

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Gender Matters: Bringing in a Gender Structure Analysis. A Comment on “Paternal and Maternal Gatekeeping? Choreographing Care-giving in Families” by Tina Miller and “Rethinking Family Socialization to Gender through the Lens of Multi-local, Post-separation Families” by Laura Merla

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