Kate Huppatz

Masculinised jobs, feminised jobs and men’s ‘gender capital’ experiences: Understanding occupational segregation in Australia:

Australia features a highly segregated workforce where certain occupational spaces appear to privilege particular gendered dispositions. While research on gender and work highlights the association between occupational segregation and gender inequality, conventional explanations of why men and women continue to be concentrated in different occupations, and in different roles within occupations, can be considered problematic. This article argues that we may be able to achieve a deeper understanding of gendered occupational segregation than previous explanations have offered by appropriating Bourdieu’s concept, ‘capital’. Drawing on qualitative research with Australian workers we explore men’s ‘gender capital experiences’ within masculinised and feminised occupations. The article discusses how male, masculine and feminine embodiments can operate as capitals which may be accumulated and transacted, perpetuating horizontal gender segregation in the workforce but also vertical segregation within occupations. In doing so, we expand the work of feminist Bourdieusian scholars who have reworked Bourdieu’s approach so that gender, as well as class, may be understood as a central form of stratification in the social order.

Class and career choice : motivations, aspirations, identity and mobility for women in paid caring work

This article explores the significance of class for women’s participation in paid care work. It draws on in-depth interviews with female nurses and social workers in order to understand what motivates women to pursue paid caring careers. Using the theoretical tools of Bourdieu, this article explores the career motivations, mobility experiences and aspirations of differently classed nurses and social workers. The research reveals some significant differences between the women who self-identify as coming from working-class backgrounds and those who self-identify as coming from middle-class backgrounds. The article therefore provides a gender/ class analysis of women’s participation in the paid caring field and moves beyond gender analyses of caring work.

Respectability and the Paid Caring Occupations: An Empirical Investigation of Normality, Morality, Impression Management, Esteem in Nursing and Social Work

Abstract Feminised caring occupations like nursing and social work are popularly considered to be respectable occupations for women. This objective of this paper is to investigate the role of respectability in paid caring work by women within nursing and social work. This paper draws on Ball’s conceptualisation of respectability as a heuristic device in the analyses of 39 in-depth interviews with women who work and study in nursing and social work. The paper finds that normality, morality, impression management and esteem are central to the operation of respectability in the paid caring occupations and concludes with recommendations for rethinking the relationship between respectability and these occupations.

An intersectional analysis of women’s experiences of smoking-related stigma

In this article, we explore how young women encounter and counter discourses of smoking-related stigma. Twenty-seven young Australian women, smokers and ex-smokers, took part in interviews. A sub-sample of 18 participants took photographs to document their smoking experience, and took part in a second interview. Data were analyzed through Foucauldian discourse analysis. Four discourses were identified: “smoking as stigmatized,” “the smoking double standard,” “smoking as lower class,” and “smokers as bad mothers.” The women negotiated stigma in a variety of ways, shifting between agreeing, disagreeing, challenging, and displacing stigma onto “other” smokers. These experiences and negotiations of smoking-related stigma were shaped by intersecting identities, including gender, cultural background, social class, and mothering, which at times, compounded levels of stigmatization. It is concluded that tobacco control measures should consider the negative implications of smoking-related stigma, and the potential for women to experience compounding levels of stigma.

The interaction of gender and class in nursing : appropriating Bourdieu and adding Butler

Abstract The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for exploring the ways in which class and gender interact in occupational fields. In recent years, very little research has been specifically concerned with the relationship between gender and class. Much of the literature which grapples with the question of how gender and class interact contains theoretical limitations which appear to stem from a reliance on categorical theories of both class and gender. In this paper it is proposed that, when used in conjunction, the approaches of Bourdieu and Butler provide a framework for exploring class and gender in terms of embodied practice. In order to illustrate the possibilities enabled by ‘appropriating Bourdieu and adding Butler’, the paper suggests ways in which this conceptual framework makes possible the examination of the complex relations between gender and class within one particular area of ‘women’s work’: the field of nursing.

‘It’s one of those “It’ll never happen to me” things’: young women’s constructions of smoking and risk

In this article, we examine how young women make sense of the risks associated with smoking cigarettes. We recruited young women smokers and ex-smokers living in Australia in 2014 and 2015 to participate in semi-structured interviews and a participant-produced photography activity on young women’s experiences of smoking and smoking-related risk. We analysed the data using discourse analysis to examine how young women positioned themselves in relation to smoking-related risk, and how this was shaped by discourses of health, risk and femininity. We identified four dominant interpretative repertoires: ‘the risks of smoking are self-evident’, ‘it’s not going to happen to me’, ‘smoking as a lesser evil’ and ‘smoking to cope with stress and emotion’. Through our analysis, we found that by drawing on these repertoires, participants were able to position the risks of smoking as both acceptable and unacceptable. Participants also made use of several of these repertoires to position anti-smoking messages as ineffective. We place these findings in the context of broader health and risk discourses surrounding young women’s use of smoking to reinforce and subvert representations of ‘respectable’ femininity. We identify ways in which public health approaches could and should be developed to recognise the complexity and contradiction inherent in young women’s lay accounts of smoking-related risk and situate smoking risks in the context of young women’s everyday lives.

Doing and undoing femininities: An intersectional analysis of young women’s smoking:

Previous research has found that young women’s smoking relates to their performance of feminine gender identities. Using an intersectional approach, we explore in this study how young women’s smoking is implicated in the doing and undoing of femininities, as well as other intersecting identities. Discourse analysis was used to examine interviews and a photography activity conducted with young women, both current and ex-smokers. This analysis revealed four culturally dominant repertoires: “cigarettes and smoking styles as gendered”, “smoking as controlling weight”, “smoking as a sexual tool”, and “smoking as compromising appearance”. Young women’s experiences and negotiations of discourse surrounding smoking and femininity were shaped by intersecting social class and sexual identities. These findings can be used to inform the development of smoking cessation interventions which recognise the diversity in how young women perform femininity.

A discipline at the crossroads? Using a gender-inspired paradigm to reposition the sociology of work and employment:

The future of work and employment sociology has been a subject of concern for a number of authors in recent years. Halford and Strangleman, among others, have suggested that work and employment sociology is on the decline, in that it has been disconnected from wider sociology and co-opted by management and business schools. In this article we unpack the debate and look at how it relates to gender and work scholarship. In doing so, we propose that the decline thesis might be overstated. While gender and work sociology has been implicated in the demise of labour process theory, it has also embraced change and strengthened and diversified work and employment sociology. Nevertheless, in this article, we treat the perceived threat as an opportunity to rethink work and employment sociology. We propose a four-themed, interdisciplinary, gender-inspired research paradigm.

Pierre Bourdieu: Health Lifestyles, the Family and Social Class

Pierre Bourdieu is a not a theorist readily associated with the sociology of health, illness and medicine. Bourdieu was very much focused on social class cultures and, while he examined the bodily dimensions of classed experience and the production of knowledge, he was generally unconcerned with health issues. Nevertheless, William Cockerham (2013a:251) observes that Bourdieu has recently become fashionable in medical sociology and his concepts ‘social capital’, ‘habitus’ and ‘lifestyles’ are most popular. Cockerham (2013a) claims Bourdieu’s new-found popularity is an aspect of medical sociology’s recent ‘theoretical turn’, and that his concepts appeal to medical sociologists who wish to move their thinking from ‘methodological individualism’ to focus on the relationship between health and social structures. Bourdieu’s theory is therefore useful for ‘building bridges between mainstream theory and medical sociology’ (Williams 1995:601). Of particular interest for this chapter, Bourdieu theorised lifestyle practices, and his understanding of the ways in which these practices are embedded within and enact class culture helps researchers to explain the prevalence of unhealthy lifestyle practices in an era in which rich nations have unprecedented access to health education.

‘What Have I Done?’: An Exploration of the Ambivalent, Unimaginable Emotions of New Motherhood

First-time expectant mothers are bombarded with all manner of information about what new parenthood is like and how it should be done. These sometimes dialogic, sometimes competing scripts shape expectations but often fall short in adequately preparing mothers-to-be for what is to come. This chapter explores the disunity between pre-birth expectations and the lived bodily experience of new parenthood. Mothers report a range of emotional responses to new parenthood that often do not fit with the dominant romantic narratives that have been constructed around baby making including anxiety, anger, guilt, and grief. The chapter finds that this disconnect between expectations and experience compounds these negative emotions and also encourages women to individualise and pathologise their emotional experiences.