I'll be late tonight

Gender roles, housewives, identity, gender equality, migration

‘I’ll be late tonight‘ is an autobiographical project, made while I was living in a gated expatriate residence in Russia between 2012-2020. In that secluded housing community, hosting expatriates from different countries, men and women performed traditional gender roles, with families being organised around the breadwinner/homemaker model. During the long winters, while the husbands were at work and the children at school, the expatriate women would spend most of their time inside their homes.

Given the patriarchal social structure of the expatriate community, I was trying to make sense of the notion of power in marital relationships and its dynamics, following the changes brought by the family’s migration. As an expatriate woman, the feelings of displacement inherent to the process of migration were exacerbated by the isolating nature of housework and the sense of confinement in the domestic space. 

To some extent, and in many cultures, every wife becomes a housewife and sociologists agree that generally, women make more adjustments for their marriage than husbands do. The expectations are that women will take over the main responsibilities related to childcare and most of the domestic duties, even when they are in paid employment, an inequality that is more prevalent when women become mothers. 

The economic dependency on their partners, coupled with a lack of acknowledgement and value in capitalist society of the role of women as homemakers and stay at home mothers, affect the psychological well being of the housewife. These often unspoken aspects led me to question the extent to which our identities are socially constructed and which are the implications on women's sense of self and identity being primarily identified by their role of wives and mothers. In the particular environment of the expatriate community, the aspirational ideal represented by the hegemonic masculinity was the most socially valued form of gender identity.

The consensual nature of this social mechanism became a central point of my research. I was investigating the idea that the pressure to conform to gendered assumptions and expectations was contributing to women internalising personal codes of behaviour that encouraged the perpetuation of the same gender-biased hierarchy. The projection of perfection extending to femininity, home and an idealised nuclear family made me examine my own constructed identity in relation to others.

'I'll be late tonight' is challenging the myth of domestic bliss and addresses the idea of home as a place of resistance, from a subjective experience, where identities involve a performative, and ultimately isolating act.