Home-based telework is a unique arena in which to examine both the performance of emotion and the construction of identity, cultural aspects of human activity that are closely related. Through our research, we consider how men and women construct and enact the roles and identities of professional and parent in this ambiguous environment, where both may be culturally appropriate. Common wisdom suggests that women will privilege their nurturing roles as mothers and men will privilege their breadwinning career roles when home-based telework and parenting co-exist in close temporal and spatial proximity. In the main, this has been supported by our data, yet, through our research, we also found examples of women who chose not to represent and construct themselves as domestic beings, wives, and mothers and instead articulated narratives of professional ambition and success; and of men who chose to articulate narratives of being “family guys,” who were not firmly entrenched within their organizational roles but instead expressed desires to be more hands-on and loving parents. This, we propose, must require substantial emotional work, particularly in reconciling constructions of what it is to be female/male and mothers/fathers with the social and cultural expectations attached to these roles. This led us to consider how men and women cope emotionally and rhetorically with what might be seen as a challenge to the gendered order of society. In this chapter, we examine how identities are constructed, through narratives, using discourse as the building blocks in this process. Discourses make certain ways of thinking and acting possible–and others impossible or costly1–and as such they are part of the “unspoken cultural rules” that dictate the boundaries of certain roles and reveal the behaviors and emotions that are permitted within them. What we seek to discover here is how, or indeed if, legitimacy is achieved when these rules are challenged because although these rules define the culturally and emotionally acceptable ways to talk and conduct one’s self, it is always possible to resist these hegemonic tendencies, at least to some degree. 2 We begin by discussing the emotions involved in home-based telework, and make explicit the ways in which we consider emotion to play a key role in the construction of identities, as both a guiding discourse and