Gendered Practices: Gender Order, Significant Others, and Parenting

This chapter’s goal is to explore the LATT couples’ gender roles and practices in transnational settings. Differentiating between sex and gender, it explores the historical ‘gender order,’ zooming in on studies-based patterns about some LAT couples’ subversion of this order. It focuses on how LATT upset the traditional gender expectations about the so-called trailing partner, allowing most women more freedom, subverting gendered cohabitation norms (Upton John, 2015), and balancing autonomy and fusion. The overarching concept of transnational feminism, including differences, similarities, and connections across national borders (Mohanty, 2001), is drawn upon to investigate further gender dynamics. Moreover, the social support/ pressure to live together by the “significant others” is discussed. It also demonstrates that non-cohabitation is not a salient issue for the three same-sex LATT couples in the book’s empirical study. Lastly, the Chapter highlights the relatively rare phenomenon of parenting among LATT couples with young children, which is just 20% of the participants in the study.