Emotional intimacy and support are deemed vital to most individuals’ sense of relationship quality and satisfaction. Although relationship outcomes are more closely tied with partners’ sense of emotional well-being in their partnerships, most sociological inquiry focuses on how couples navigate instrumental tasks of family work (e.g. household work, childcare, etc.). Examinations of emotional facets of couple relationship remain rare. This dissertation addresses this dearth by presenting an inductively derived analysis of how black heterosexual spouses in enduring relationships (10-40 years) sustain emotional connection. It draws on 75 semi-structured interviews - with relationship professionals (n=12) and 42 black spouses (21 couples) interviewed jointly and individually (n=63) from New York, Cleveland, and Chicago. Using a sociology of emotion lens, it extends Arlie Hochschild’s conceptual framework of emotion management by examining emotion work along four dimensions. First, challenging gender essentialism in extant research, it examines partners’ desires for, perceptions of and approaches to intimacy going beyond a discussion of gender differences to also shed light on overlap between and variation within gender groups. Secondly, it shows how the co-creation of joint emotion strategies to avoid or confront recurrent interpersonal tensions helped couples solidify a shared sense of couple identity marked by different degrees of we-ness. Third, contrary to previous studies suggesting it’s mainly women who do emotion work on themselves to manage dissatisfaction with intimacy, I reveal how both spouses engage in emotion work when connection breaks down. Often, such emotion work often arises due to tensions between the carework of intimacy and pre-existing norms and beliefs around emotional engagement. Finally, probing particularities in black women’s socialization around resilience, I disturb the monolithic portrait of women as intimacy experts in extant research, underlining challenges they face beyond dissatisfaction with male emotionality. By focusing on black couples, the study expands the demographic terrain of qualitative sociological inquiry on emotion work and couple relationships writ large. Finally, by theorizing from the experience of black couples, I disturb trends of taking educated, white, middle class couples as the normative American family, revealing how our conceptualization of emotion work could benefit from better accounting of social positionality. / Sociology
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/17467493 |
| Date | 02 May 2016 |
| Creators | Bickerstaff, Jovonne J. |
| Contributors | Patterson, Orlando |
| Publisher | Harvard University |
| Source Sets | Harvard University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | open |
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