This book will return often to explanations of how gender is done to us, or imposed on individuals, via social structures. Connells (2002: 55) defines social structures as ‘the enduring or extensive patterns among social relations’. Chapter 1 outlined Walby’s (1986; 1990) argument that gender is determined and gender inequalities are perpetuated through six
structures: paid work, household production, culture, sexuality, violence, and the state. Alternatively, Connell (2002) argues that is done to us (and by us) via four main structures, which are not always inherently unequal. Thus relations of power, production, emotions and the symbolic create the gender regime which shapes people’s lives. These four dimensions of gender will be expanded on throughout the book. Power features especially prominently in the discussions around how gender relations are bound up with class and racial inequalities. Emotional relations are addressed there, but they and symbolic aspects of gender will be discussed in Chapter 5 which rethinks the relationship between bodies and gender. Many parts of the book, particularly Chapter 7 on class, examine gender as a practice operating on people within production, where that usually means the paid workplace (see Martin, 2003).There are also other things to say about gender as a form of interactive work, something not only done to us, but something that we ‘do’.