Doing and Redoing Emphasized Femininity: How Women Use Emotion Work to Manage Competing Expectations in College Hookup Culture

AbstractEmphasized femininity plays a key role in maintaining gender inequality. Yet, classic conceptualizations of emphasized femininity render it static and inflexible, and obscure women ’s agency in reconfiguring their gender performances to fit different contexts. Based on interviews with college women in the United States, we demonstrate that when faced with hookup cultures’ expectations of casualness and emotional detachment, women move between two styles of emotion work to either “do” or “redo” emphasized femininity, stretching its boundaries without disturbing the gender hierarchy. In interactions with undesirable men, women do emphasized femininity by displaying emotional sensitivity, while in interactions with desirable men, women redo emphasized femininity by deploying “hegemonic casualness”—performances of emotional disinterest that provide women greater control over social impressions and allow them to construct empowered social images, but ultimately legitimate men’s privileges to pursue women. Our findings highlight women’s creativity a nd agency in navigating gender inequality and demonstrate an underrecognized flexibility within emphasized femininity. We discuss implications for gender theory, conversations around post-feminism, and campaigns that seek to promote gender equality in sexual relations on college campuses.

Source: Sex Roles - January 26, 2022 Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research