Frontier Politics: Sex, Gender, and the Deconstruction of the Public Sphere

Abstract

Mary Ann Tetreault [*] Some of the most fascinating techniques for differentiating the status of women and men in human cultures are inscribed in the gendered allocation of interior and exterior space. Perhaps the most basic of these divisions of space is accomplished by the sequestration of women and the construction of a spatial metaphor dividing human existence into two spheres, one private, where the women are, and the other public, where the people are. People is the appropriate term in this context because far more than sex consigns some women to their homes and frees others, along with men, to enjoy a larger existence. Rather, categories created by sex/gender systems-hierarchical social, political, and economic orders constructed around a particular vision of the meaning of sexual morphology [2] --provide criteria for locating individual persons. In ancient Greece, perhaps the first human culture to develop a highly articulated ideology around the notion of public and private spheres, biological differences women and men served as the model for a gender-based division of labor, responsibility, and authority, one that categorized citizens according to social role as well as masculinist interpretations of the facts of bio logical sex. It is this complex construction of gender and sex/ gender systems, along with their impact on public life, that I wish to explore in this article. The politics of separate spheres was complex at its origins and, I argue, this complexity persists today, in part because of ideological assumptions about and practices associated with that long-ago division of space. This article employs a concept I call meta-space. The essence of meta-space is its character as a site of overlapping domains between or beyond spaces and places that we generally accept as unambiguously public or private. Meta-space refers not only to geographic locations such as coffeehouses, mosques, class rooms, and shopping malls, each of which displays both public and private characteristics, but also to metaphors that describe similarly ambiguous social, political, and psychological milieux. [3] Consequently, meta-spaces sometimes are seen as part of the public sphere and at other times are regarded as private. Struggles to create, legitimate, and control both spheres (i.e., access to them and behavior in them) constitute some of the actions that define civil society. Actions of this type are proto-political and themselves take place in what Hannah Arendt calls space[s] of appearance: Action and speech create a space the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.... The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and actions, and therefore predates and precedes all for mal constitution of the public realm. [4] Spaces of appearance located between/beyond the public and private spheres are meta-spaces. They are part of the frontier that Isaiah Berlin imagines as forming a boundary separating private life from public authority. [5] In this article I argue that this frontier is less a boundary line than a domain in and of itself. The domain of meta-space expands when gendered definitions of status and rights are under adjustment and people find it difficult to determine exactly what is expected of anyone in any realm, public or private. The Interdependence of Public and Private Spheres The public and private spheres are interdependent domains. Public space requires appearing, another way of saying that this is where individuals put on the faces that they intend to show to others. Private space at its most fundamental is where a person can be without being seen. …