Rural medical marriages: Understanding symbolic violence in the social practice of gender
Section snippets
Symbolic violence
Bourdieu (2002) suggests that men's dominance is taken for granted and many women accept their own subordination without realising that such patterns of gender relations are not natural. Instead they are socially constructed and reproduced to make the dominance of men in gender relations seem natural. Bourdieu (2002) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) introduce the notion of symbolic violence which plays an important role in his analysis of domination in general and is integral to understanding
Misrecognition
Bourdieu argues that symbolic violence typically involves ‘misrecognition’ whereby relations of power are often hidden and seen ‘not for what they objectively are but in the form which renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder’ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p.xiii). Actions that subordinate the needs of women constitute ‘symbolic violence’ when they hide power relations at a structural level that restrict women's choices at the level of social practice. Evidence of this is found in
Agents of change
If women demand changes to structural inequities present in current gender relations that reinforce their subordinate status in their relationship, they may risk losing the benefits of their position if the partnership or marriage ends (Tavris, 1992). This suggests that women's complicity to conform may also be shaped by their perceptions of the consequences if they resist. Indeed, the costs are more pervasive because of what women stand to lose socially and economically if they challenge the
Gender as social practice
The notion of gender as a structuring principle can be understood when gender relations that serve the dominant group's interests are reproduced at the level of practice. For many years the majority of doctors in the medical profession were male and a male model of work practice espousing long, irregular working hours was the norm. Such practices were often made possible by the gendered division of labour in the home which allocated the main responsibility for childcare and domestic tasks to
Methods
I chose an ethnographic approach to understand, using a variety of methods, how participants experience and attribute meaning to aspects of their life that influence their decision to stay or leave rural general practice (Spradley, 1979). Ethnography combines the perspective of both the researcher and the researched and requires that the researcher participate in and observe participants' actions and behaviour in everyday contexts rather than in experimental conditions (Hammersley, 1990).
Gathering information
Following university ethics approval, I conducted a pilot project to test interview questions with six GPs and three spouses, all of whom had lived and worked in a rural area. The main research was carried out in a rural Division of General Practice supporting 60 GPs covering an area of 87,000 km2 in Western Australia.1
Analysis
Sorting, analysing and interpreting information effectively began on entering the field. The locations in which GPs and their spouses lived and worked became the backdrop against which ongoing analysis of interviews and fieldnotes and interpretation evolved. Writing field notes constitutes a central focus of ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995) and offers documentation of observations, impressions, interpretations and experiences of people, settings and events (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 1995)
Limitations
Information gathered for this article from GPs and their spouses is localised to a specific rural area and does not offer a comparative analysis with GPs in other rural areas or urban centres.
Findings and discussion: female rural GPs
The dominant social position of male rural GPs enables them to exert their authority and gain consensus for their work practices by subordinating those of female GPs who want to work fewer hours. One rural male GP commented that:
…the female GPs are never there when they need to be, when there is a rush on. There's a bit of a grudge thing because the male GP has to run the jolly practice while females flit in and out like fairy wrens.
At one level, the quotation above paints a picture of a male
Gender relations in the home
The power and high status accorded male GPs in their role as rural doctors and their position as providers for their families often leads to their spouses subjugating their own career aspirations to assume the role of primary caregiver in the home. However, female spouses can also act as agents for change and resist structural constraints in the context of work practices by expressing and acting on their own sense of entitlement to seek occupational fulfilment. Acting as agents, they have the
Gender in a rural setting
Alston (2005) argues that gender is a defining feature of Australian rural community life. However, while dominant expectations of gender relations are open to contestation, their prevalence within the institutional structures and practices in rural communities is normalised rather than resisted, effectively marginalising women in roles outside that of caregiver. Dempsey, 1990, Dempsey, 1992, Dempsey, 1997a research shows that rural marriages are often so ‘palpably one-sided that we are
Resistance to structural constraints
However, resistance does occur, often causing tension when social practice conflicts with structural expectations: some women, while supporting their husband's work, created and maintained an identity separate from that of rural GP's wife. While opportunities to work locally in their chosen profession were invariably limited or non-existent, a reality that often led to frustration, one spouse spent many weeks every year travelling away from home to pursue her career. She had moved to a rural
Multiple masculinities
Male spouses of female GPs who were interviewed for this project also conformed to dominant expectations by earning an income or looking for employment, even if they were the main caregiver. Wise et al (1996), in their study on the extent to which being a rural doctor's spouse in Australia determined their occupation, found that female spouses' lives and activities revolved around their partners' medical practice far more than the lives of spouses of urban GPs which often led to their own
Conclusion
This article has identified how gender, as a structural principle affects social practice. The dialectical relationship between structure and social practice is revealed when conventional gender roles of male and female rural GPs and their spouses are both reproduced and contested at the level of practice in the workplace and in the home. Bourdieu's notions of symbolic violence and misrecognition help in understanding how inequitable gender relations are sustained and recur. A deeper analysis
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