Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds

4: Domesticity and the Political Economy of Lesbigay Families

82 4 Domesticity and the Political Economy of Lesbigay Families Christopher Carrington Editorial note: For his book No Place Like Home, sociologist Christopher Carrington observed 52 lesbian and gay families (108 members) in their homes, followed them around town, and then interviewed them about their jobs, their domestic work, and their relationships . For eight of the couples, he spent a week living in their homes. Although the families Carrington studied are not a random sample, he self-consciously sought a sample that would include a range in terms of both social class and race-ethnicity. Of the 108 participants in the research, 63 were predominantly Euro-American, 15 Latino/a American, 15 Asian American, 13 African American, and 2 Native American. The median household income in the San Francisco Bay area, where the study took place, is substantially higher than for the country as a whole. It was about $50,000 at the time of Carrington’s study; the median household income for his study participants was $58,500, somewhat higher but not dramatically so. Household incomes ranged from $24,000 to $230,000 a year, with families from three class groupings (working/service, middle, and upper middle class). Carrington argues that “social class distinctions appear more significant to domesticity than are other distinctions like gender and ethnicity or race. However, because gender, race, and ethnicity are often conflated with class in American society, people often make the mistake of thinking of class-related differences as the product of gender or ethnic/racial differences.” Our excerpt is from chapter 5 of the book; it focuses on the egalitarian myths these couples often believe and present about their domestic lives and the ways these couples actually divide work, both in and outside of the home. The Division of Domestic Labor in Lesbigay Families Sterling never cleaned toilets, he still doesn’t clean toilets; he intends to clean the toilets, but right about the time when he gets to it, I have already cleaned the toilets. —Wayne Osmundsen, 35-year-old social worker The common metaphorical use of laundry, as in the phrase “to air their dirty laundry in public,” connotes several things about actual laundry, most notably a common expectation that dirty laundry should remain hidden. This chapter violates that common expectation, in both a metaphorical and in a literal sense.© 1999 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted from Christopher Carrington, No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life Among Lesbians and Gay Men, chapter 5, pp. 175-206 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Domesticity and Political Economy of Lesbigay Families 83 Stigmatized and oppressed communities often struggle with the menacing question of how to deal with “dirty laundry.” Many lesbian and gay authors feel the need to present ourselves, and our communities, to the dominant culture in ideal terms, a feeling that I have often shared. These portrayals, as opposed to the empirical realities , often reflect the efforts of lesbigay people to provide a respectable image of ourselves in a society often bent on devaluing and marginalizing us. Undoubtedly, the observations made here regarding the division of domestic work in lesbigay families violate the expectation that dirty laundry remain closeted. The public portrayals and presentations of egalitarianism among lesbigay families do not cohere with the household realities that prevail among them. Two components of the research strategy used here expose the gap between public portrayals and empirical realities. First, the use of back-to-back interviews instead of joint interviews produces discrepancies in answers to the most routine of questions about domesticity . As Aquilino (1993) reveals, interviews often produce much higher estimates of spousal contributions to domestic work when the spouse is present than when he or she is not. Second, the fieldwork component of this research offers behavioral observations that reveal significant gaps between what participants say in interviews and what participants do in everyday life. The commitment to the ideology of familial egalitarianism within the lesbian and gay community, and among the subset of lesbigay families, is palpable. Yet the empirical reality for many of these families is something quite different, something much more akin to patterns among heterosexual families (Gerson, 1985, 1993). Moreover, when a particular family achieves something close to parity in the distribution of domestic activities, this almost always occurs under unique social conditions: great affluence, relative impoverishment , or among a distinct minority of couples with significantly diminished senses of themselves as family. In this chapter I examine each of these exceptions and what motivates...