Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Doing Gender Difference Through Greeting Cards: The Construction Of A Communication Gap In Marketing And Everyday Practice., Emily West

Emily E. West

Greeting card communication reflects the highly gendered division of both emotional and domestic labor in American culture. It’s generally thought that American men do not take as much responsibility for sending greeting cards as women, or display competence in this mode of communication, and both survey data and field work with greeting card consumers confirm this overall pattern. For many women, greeting card communication is part of a feminized habitus that includes kinship work as well as routine provisioning for the household. For men, taking an interest in greeting cards can seem like discrediting behavior for heterosexual masculinity, and so …