Discourses of Agency and Domestic Labor:

Abstract

This article uses the concept of family discourse to investigate the systematic structuring of social relations surrounding parents' gendered—often unequal—family responsibilities and practices. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with parents of young children in dual-earner families, the article presents two ways of analyzing parents' accounts of reasons for their division of labor. First, it focuses on how parents use talk to construct rationalizations, myths, and coping mechanisms. Second, it moves beyond an interpretive approach to examine the discursive constitution of parents' talk, identifying four common discourses that run throughout parents' talk of domestic labor: personal preference; abilities of women versus men; roles and socialization; and natural bonding of mother and child. The author maintains that these not only give material for rationalizations but that by structuring perceptions, they enable parents to ascribe meaning to their action and construct new action from this meaning. Discourses of family surround parents and are commonplace in professional speech, media reports, and many other sources. By analyzing talk as discourse, we can reveal something of the institutional embeddedness of parents' practices and how these reconstitute unequal power relations within families.