Invisible Labor and Women’s Double Binds: Collusive Femininity and Masculine Drinking in Russia

Abstract

The heavy drinking of alcohol remains primarily a hegemonically masculine ritual worldwide. Yet scholarship has undertheorized women’s practices in shaping the boundaries of masculine rituals, including drinking. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 151 interviews with single mothers, married mothers, nonresident fathers, and grandmothers from diverse class backgrounds, I demonstrate that Russian women perform extensive invisible management labor in attempting to produce responsible men. Constrained by a starkly unequal gender division of domestic labor, wives and mothers engage in varied “patriarchal bargains” as they shape men’s drinking practices, co-producing hegemonic masculinity. Whereas in the Soviet period women also managed men’s drinking, today new gender strategies have emerged. More women are held accountable to a collusive femininity involving both accommodation and resistance, upholding men’s drinking privileges only if breadwinning occurs. As women perform invisible labor, they end up reproducing the conditions that demand this labor from them in the first place. Some women embrace an alternative femininity by becoming single mothers and refusing to manage men’s drinking, especially when men fail as breadwinners. Theorizing collusive and alternative femininities, as well as women’s invisible labor, advances our knowledge of how multiple femininities shape, and may in time change, hegemonic masculinity.

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