Dennis Marsden

‘Workaholics’ and ‘whingeing women’: Theorising intimacy and emotion work — the last frontier of gender inequality?

In a variety of discourses and empirical studies it has been argued that compared with women, men show more reluctance to express intimate emotion in heterosexual couple relationships. Our paper attempts to theorise this gender asymmetry in intimate emotional behaviour as a sort of ‘emotional power’, within the wider context of continuing gender inequalities of resources and power in society. To the extent that mens role as breadwinner becomes their central life interest (they become ‘workaholics’), women are left with emotional responsibility for the private sphere, including the performance of the ‘emotion work’ necessary to maintain the couple relationship itself. Increasingly womens dissatisfaction in relationships (which men dismiss as unjustified ‘whingeing’) stems mainly from this unequal division. Yet many women still collude with male power by living the family ‘myth’ and ‘playing the couple game’; they perform emotion work on themselves to convince themselves that they are ‘ever so happy really’, thereby helping to reproduce their own false consciousness. This suggests that gender asymmetry in relation to intimacy and emotion work may be the last and most obstinate manifestation and frontier of gender inequality.

Whose Orgasm is this Anyway? ‘Sex Work’ in Long-term Heterosexual Couple Relationships

The growing instability of heterosexual couple relationships has deep roots in socio-economic change. Yet it also stems from the increased media emphasis on ‘the pure relationship’ as the ultimate source of emotional and sexual fulfilment: according to Giddens, pressures from women for ‘the transformation of intimacy’ clash with men’s dominative sexuality and fear of intimate emotion (Giddens, 1992); and Rubin identifies deep contradictions in the search for self-fulfilment through another person: we are left [by media images] with an extraordinarily heightened set of expectations about the possibilities in human relationships that lives side by side with disillusion that, for many, borders on despair. (Rubin, 1991, p. 160)

Can we Research the Private Sphere

In the classic discussion from which this conference took its title, C. Wright Mills (1959) argued that the sociological imagination works on the distinction between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’, giving as one of his examples marriage. Our paper takes up this theme, describing some of the sociological, methodological, philosophical and ethical problems raised by research including our own (Duncombe and Marsden, 1993a, 1993b, 1995a, 1995b) on intimate couple relationships. Our research is in line with the recent theoretical shifts which have focused attention on the nature of interpersonal relationships in contemporary society and have emphasised the need for a greater understanding of the interconnections between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ spheres of social life. There is a new urgency in attempting to research intimate personal experience, in order to resuscitate and re-theorise areas such as changing family bonds and other newer forms of close relationships (Morgan, 1985, 1990; Clark and Haldane, 1990) but also as an essential contribution to broader theories of society (Cheal, 1991; Giddens, 1991, 1992).

‘The Never-ending Story’: Children’s Gaze and the Unresolved Narrative of Their Parents’ Divorce

This chapter will discuss how some young adults fail to come to terms with the ‘never-ending story’ of their parents’ divorce, because inconsistencies in that story prevent them from satisfying their burning desire to discover ‘the truth’ about why their parents split up. The context of our discussion is the changes in demography and divorce legislation which have provoked controversy over whether the children of divorced parents should be viewed as victims – as ‘damaged’ adults-in-the-making – or whether some may grow emotionally through their experiences of ‘family reordering’. In conventional terms, the ‘never-ending story’ of parental divorce might be viewed as a ‘sleeper effect’ that emerges belatedly to damage some young adults’ lives. However, we want to argue that such ‘stories’ can also be seen as processes of narrative construction through which young people actively – although not always successfully – attempt to recreate their identities when faced with the trauma of parental divorce.