Female breadwinning has recently gained in significance in Germany. This article examines the extent to which female breadwinning is linked to new gender roles, and the impacts the role reversal may have on families’ everyday lives. Qualitative interviews with female breadwinners living in Western Germany were conducted to explore families’ ways of doing gender and doing family as an interrelated process. The research examined, first, the female-breadwinner families’ division of employment and domestic labor and second, the relationship between individual gender self-concepts and factual income arrangements. Some examples of modernization of gender roles and arrangements in everyday life in female-breadwinner families were found, but traditional gender concepts and practices prevailed. The families achieved doing family results comparable to couples with other breadwinning arrangements, but this demanded extraordinary efforts. We reconstructed “practices of normalization,” which couples used to reassure themselves and others of their “normalness” despite their gender-atypical roles.

This conceptual paper introduces key elements of residential multi-locality studies, arguing that a relational and processual analysis helps understand the interplay of mobilities and stabilities and of presences and absences which are typical of the practices of multi-local living. Based on this perspective, research on familial forms of living and on second homes is re-interpreted. It is discussed how these research fields may contribute to progress in residential multi-locality studies and, on the other hand, which of their aspects would be better highlighted through the conceptual lens of multi-locality. The epistemological added value of this perspective is seen in the sensitivity towards the emergence of new forms of living and towards the ways their stability is achieved in spite of distance. This provides deeper insight into the geographies of families in mobile societies and enables a more profound assessment of the significance of residential economies.

Although historically by no means an unknown phenomenon, the social and cultural sciences are rediscovering multi-local living and residence. Research on residential multi-locality focuses especially on practices of multiple local daily life management, appropriations and their contextualisation, attachment, exchange, mobility and interactions between social relationships at different locations. Aside from quantitative approaches, research attempts to open up empirically observable dynamics and new qualities of multi-local life at a deep level. The consideration of the development of multi-local living arrangements in contemporary societies raises conceptual as well as methodological questions, and demands new and revised methods for investigating the phenomenon. After a phenomenological outline of residential multi-locality, the paper formulates requirements to be met by research designs, then outlines, with reference to a study of multi-locality of the family, how the subject may be treated in the framework of qualitative methodology and indicates potentials and limitations of the suggested approach.

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