Domestic hospitality, gender, and impression management among Danish women

Domestic life and domestic work are often studied in a family setting that only includes members of the focal family unit. However, when opening the home for guests, family life becomes both a back and front stage arena, where guests are relaxed but hosts are not. Being a host includes not only domestic chores, but also ‘doing’ identity, relations and friendship. In this paper we combine Goffman’s work with 13 qualitative interviews from Denmark to investigate domestic hospitality and hosts’ perceptions hereof. Domestic hospitality involves not only ‘putting on a show’, but also extensive preparation and complex assessments of appropriate levels of staging. Such staging depends on occasions, host-guest relations and hosts’ predispositions. We discuss how reflexive and well-educated women, who are aware of their ‘putting on a show’, nevertheless put on such ‘shows’. Even in Denmark which is rather progressive in terms of gender equality compared to other European countries, gender still matters and affects women’s self-conceptualizations in domestic hospitality. It is well-known that people manage the impressions they seek to make and adapt to different types of guests, but the contribution of this article is to pinpoint the extent to which the participants are aware of these processes, and of the fact that they are sometimes almost ridiculous, but still cannot not care.