The Incomplete Revolution

Abstract

In a 1985 article, Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne argued that the tendency to treat “gender” as an unproblematized dichotomous variable functioned to contain feminist influence in sociology. Although there has clearly been a revolution in gender studies since that time, there are still whole areas of sociological investigation where this revolution is at best incomplete. One such area involves the literature on the care that adult children provide to aging parents. Using arguments relating to gender-as-performance and hegemonic masculinity, the authors investigate conceptualizations of gender and masculinity in a sample of fifty-eight adult sons who provide care to an aging parent. What emerges from the interviews with these male caregivers is a vision of masculinity that is in some ways quite different from the hegemonic ideal. And yet, like earlier investigators who have studied hegemonic masculinity, the authors also find that the existence of a nonhegemonic vision of masculinity does not threaten the hegemonic ideal.