ABSTRACT
Just as ‘the personal is the political’, there is a politics in personal relationships. Most obviously, this is seen in the distribution of tasks in a domestic relationship as Chodorow (1978) long ago demonstrated: who does the shopping? the cleaning? and so forth. More subtly, there is also a politics in the intimate aspects of relationships, e.g. is emotional work fairly distributed within traditional heterosexual couples (Hochschild 2003)?
