Ferree, Myra Marx. 2010. “Filling the Glass: Gender Perspectives on Families.”Journal of Marriage and the Family 72(3): 420-439.
The author uses ‘half-full, half-empty’ as a metaphor to indicate how family studies respond to the development of gender analyses. She argues that the key is how we define GENDER loosely. First, she outlines the things that we have achieved: 1) Family as an institution is where gender is performed, reproduced and sustained; 2) Work-family balance is an important theme, and it is connected to the variation of our understanding of gender historically and politically; 3) Lesbian and gay families have been taken into consideration. Then, she proposes some new perspectives on family studies: 1) Gender can be considered as an institution where persons and groups are organized in meaningful ways, such as mothers opt out workplace or fathers’ overworking puts mother to opt out workplace. 2) Gender entails intersectionality. It is both locational and relational. The author ends up with a comparative discussion of care workin the United States and France. In the United States, the debates on care work center on marketization of care work and its association with social inequality. In France, on the contrary, the state intervention of care work leads discussion to the negotiation over time between (female) employees and employers.
作者用“半瓶水”来比喻当前家庭研究对于性别研究理论的借鉴和运用。她强调关键在于我们如何更宽泛地来理解社会性别(Gender)。首先，她列举了当前家庭研究所取得的成就：第一、家庭被视为社会性别在日常生活中被表演、再生产和维系的场所；第二、工作与家庭的平衡成为一项重要的议题。借助这个平台，我们可以理解社会性别在不同历史阶段、不同政治背景下的转变；第三、同性恋家庭开始慢慢受到关注。接下来，作者又提出了一些家庭研究可以尝试的新方向：第一、社会性别可以被理解为一种社会制度，个人和团体都在这种制度下不断地构建生活的意义。比如说，母亲选择辞职，在家里带孩子等等。第二、社会性别是一个需要放在交叉维度(intersectionality)观察的概念。种族和地域等等变量都应该被纳入进来考虑。作者最后通过比较美国和欧洲的育儿（保姆）行业来比较两者介入角度和关心话题的不同。