Public and Private Spaces and Relationships

Abstract

This chapter revisits feminist explorations of the relationship between private and public spaces and the gendered significance of being visible, especially within public spaces relating to sexual politics and as part of the project of understanding how power operates in the field of vision. In/visibility is strongly connected to spatiality and temporality, and there are shifting meanings attached to occupancy of and visibility in what is deemed to be the private arena, including the association of women with intimacy and personal relationships and the public spaces of decision making and political action. It is not surprising that one important aspect of sexual politics has been to make visible those on the margins who have often been relegated to the private arena. One example of this which I address in this chapter is some of the silence and invisibility which has marked motherhood and the mother–daughter relationship in western culture, where the mother figure has either been absent or stereotyped within the Madonna whore binary or that of the good and bad mother. In this dichotomy women are either saintly, self-effacing, asexual beings or wantonly selling their bodies with the implication that this is an enjoyable way to attempt to satisfy their limitless sexual urges and not just a job and their means of gaining a livelihood. As was suggested in Chapter 2, heroic narratives more often involve those of masculinity and fathers and sons than mothers and daughters. Even in a sport as physical as boxing, its appeal lies not only in its displays of embodied practices and skills, but also in its heroic stories of disadvantaged men who have escaped the confines of the ghetto and the constraints of economic disadvantage, racism and social exclusion.