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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates, editors. Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere. Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 2004. Pp. xviii, 406. Cloth $50.00, paper $25.00.
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| Decades of feminist scholarship have revealed the concept of two separately gendered public and private spheres of life to be a historical fiction that failed to describe social reality. As historians have shown, social life was never clearly demarcated between a public, male world of politics and economic activity and a private, female sphere of intimate, domestic life. At the same time, the discourse of separately gendered spheres has held tremendous power to shape social behavior, influencing the parameters of citizenship and the nature of rights in Western liberal democratic theory and practice. The same distinction has profoundly influenced the opportunities and rights of men and women in Western economies and has served as the basis of state policies, leading to strong disagreements among feminists about the boundaries of public and private and their practical, policy implications for women's rights and opportunities. For example, although historically, and in the present, some feminists have argued for state intervention to insure equal treatment in employment, to provide maternity leaves, or to reimburse women's care work, others have argued that the state has no place interfering in the private realm to curb women's reproductive choice. |
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These fifteen essays by prominent feminist historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary theorists, address issues such as these and demonstrate the complexity and instability of the meanings of public and private in settings as diverse as Thailand, India, France, China, Iran, and Sudan. An opening essay by Denise Riley points to the permeability and blurriness of public/private, outside/inside distinction and suggests alternative formulations. Part one addresses how the private has infused the public and thereby eroded the boundaries between the two spheres. Wendy Brown examines the relationship between equality and tolerance in liberal thinking by exploring the framing of women's status in terms of "equality," and the status of Jews in terms of "tolerance," in nineteenth-century France. The definition of Jews as a race rather than as a distinct community allowed them to be assimilated as citizens into the French nation within a regulatory framework of tolerance; women in contrast were sexed and thus irrevocably different. Afsaneh Najmabadi investigates another way in which the private |
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Msexuality—infused the public in the historical process of Iranian nation building, and examines the displacement of male homoeroticism in favor of public heterosexuality for men and women as part of the modernizing project of Iranian society. Rosalind C. Morris similarly addresses how private sexual behavior became public in showing how prostitution and political corruption have transgressed the social order of these allegedly distinct domains in Thailand. Prostitution, embodying the commodification (public) of sex and love (private domesticity) produced anxiety about the distinction between "private truth and public performance" (p. 87). Corruption has complicated the distinctions between public political life and the private ties and interpersonal relations on which it (corruption) is based. Melissa Wright presents the fascinating results of her ethnography of an American company in China to show how, in the interests of efficiency and increasing production, employers managed women's "disposability" by regulating women's sexuality and reproduction, obliterating any real distinction between public and private realms. |
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