Abstract
Can men enacting traditional masculine roles support more gender equality at work? Current research on gender performativity strongly revokes this thesis, instead arguing that disrupting the gender binary is the path to equality. We challenge this field assumption with our claim that the literature has yet to sufficiently differentiate between gender binary and gender hierarchy, and thus conflates masculinity with hegemonic expressions of masculinity. Our in-depth case study of women politicians’ work in Tamil Nadu (India) shows how men engage in traditional gender roles to support the emancipatory work of women council leaders. We propose a theoretical distinction between gender binary and gender hierarchy to establish four ideal types of gender performativity. Doing so allows the conceptualisation of currently overlooked gender performativities that are perceived as hegemonic, but are in fact realized in the service of gender equality. Our study also contributes by providing a framework that differentiates two ways of redoing gender: ‘redoing gender and hierarchy’, when the gender binary is disrupted, but not the implicit gender hierarchy; and ‘redoing gender for emancipation’, when the gender binary is preserved, but in service of an emancipatory agenda.