ABSTRACT
Gender relations are a set of social norms, values, conventions and rules that informally or formally regulate the parameters of the practical day-to-day relationships between men and women within a society (Akram-Lodhi 1996). There is however one parameter of gender relations that apparently seems to transcend the myriad and multifaceted complex of gender-based cultural differences that can be found across societies and, as such, can claim the status of a ‘stylized fact’ of gender analysis. That parameter is that there are systemic asymmetries of social power between men and women, to the benefit of men. These systemic asymmetries are constructed on the basis of dominant gender ideologies that emphasize those aspects of life experience that differ between men and women. The power of gender ideology lies most fundamentally in its capacity to conflate the biological with the social and thus render as ‘natural’ the allocation of tasks by gender. Biological sex is a powerful, available metaphor for organizing society, generating a system of symbols which can interact with social institutions to asymmetrically structure relationships between men and women. Biological difference is thus used in the construction of a subjectivity that invests shared experience with different meanings, and in so doing becomes transformed into gender ideologies that shape cultural and social norms and, in turn, affect and effect material practices (Akram-Lodhi 1992a). The most notable material impact of gender ideologies is in the division of labour within the household, where women have a distinct role in performing the caring, maintenance and service activities that can be said to comprise ‘household production’. At its most minimal, these activities can consist of the biologically-necessary tasks of food preparation, child care, sanitation and family reproduction.
