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Article
Doing Gender Difference through Greeting Cards: The Construction of a Communication Gap in Marketing and Everyday Practice.
Feminist Media Studies (2009)
  • Emily West, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract

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 the belief that “men are bad at cards” circulates as one way of asserting gender difference. The greeting card industry reinforces this gendered view of greeting card communication, incorporating beliefs about gendered communication styles into its marketing, advertising, and card sentiments, and framing cards as a solution to the resulting communication gap. The feminization of greeting card communication illustrates the compulsion to view the world in gendered terms, and its contrast with the telephone, in which the telephone comes to seem the more “masculine” alternative, illustrates elasticity in attributions of gender appropriateness.

Keywords
  • Greeting cards,
  • emotional labor,
  • gender,
  • marketing,
  • ritual communication
Publication Date
September, 2009
Citation Information
Emily West. "Doing Gender Difference through Greeting Cards: The Construction of a Communication Gap in Marketing and Everyday Practice." Feminist Media Studies Vol. 9 Iss. 3 (2009)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/emily_west/3/