The practice of politics: transforming subjectivities in the domestic domain and the public sphere

Abstract

Contemporary politics seems to be characterised by the competing claims of identity groups, and, with opposing groups drawing upon the rhetoric of truth and justice, it has become increasingly more difficult to adjudicate these claims. Recognising the limits of a politics based on established identities, Michel Foucault articulated a political project that sought to develop new forms of experience and subjectivity. In an age when men have been popularly described as coming from Mars and women from Venus, it seems unlikely that gender identities in the private sphere might offer an example for politics in the public sphere. Despite the view that women and men comprise opposing and conflicting identity groups, I propose that gendered domestic practices and subjectivities can be seen as being constantly negotiated and transformed. Using examples from several households, I argue that supposedly fixed and exclusive feminine and masculine subject positions can be made to seem precarious and tenuous, such that the possibility of generating new experiences and subjectivities is ever present. I suggest that this discursive strategy might be drawn upon to destabilise seemingly entrenched subject positions that form the basis of oppositional politics in the public sphere, and to generate new political subjectivities.