'I'm not his wife'. Doing gender and doing housework in the absence of women

Share households composed solely of men are a site in which masculine identities in the home are disembedded from marital ideologies. This allows us to unravel the connections between housework, power and what it means to be a man. The study finds that the domestic labour practices of men who reside with their peers reflect those traditionally associated with husband-hood, although the bases for these interactions, and the associated play of power, differ in the absence of a wife. It is evident that gender continues to be an important organizing principle of domestic labour outside marital homes.