Page 240 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

A TYRANNY OF INTIMACY? 229

but narrowly focused debates with sometimes only remote reference to
acute and concrete problems (cf. Mitchell and Oakley 1986). Within the
feminist movement it has often led to paralysing antagonisms, with
respect to media strategies for instance expressed as: is the movement
best served by creating its own media or by seeking integration in
existing media?
Recently feminist political philosophers have suggested ways out of
the suffocating grasps of the ‘sameness-difference’ dilemma by pointing
to its historical specificity (Ehlstain 1981, Benhabib and Cornell 1987).
They claim that the dilemma is a philosophical and historical product of
bourgeois society’s distinction between a public sphere populated by
men and a private sphere inhabited by women.
Writing about France, Landes (1988:22) asserts that the eighteenth
century marked a turning-point for women: ‘Public-private oppositions
were being reinforced in ways that foreclosed women’s earlier
independence in the street, in the marketplace, and, for elite women, in
the public spaces of the court and aristocratic households.’ She ascribes
the genesis of the bourgeois public-private distinction to republican
philosophies and policies rooted in a firm aversion to absolutist
practices characterized among other things by stylized discourses and
extreme mannerism. Elite women, through their position as salonnières,
exercised a crucial role in shaping public speech and behaviour
according to the conventions of the absolutist days. The republican
complaint against the decadent and effeminate monarchy thus involved
opposition to the public role of women as well: ‘The metaphor of the
“reign of women” signified the corruption of society at its heights’
(Landes 1988:27). Landes indicates convincingly that an important
dimension of the bourgeois revolution pertained to the representational
styles of the absolutist monarchy—the power of the salonnières and
‘feminized’ public life—by which bourgeois men felt emasculated. She
analyses the work of Montesquieu and Rousseau to argue that the
central categories of bourgeois thought-universal reason, law and nature
—are embedded in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender
difference. ‘In their preferred version of the classical universe,
bourgeois men discovered a flattering reflection of themselves—one that
imagined men as properly political and women as naturally domestic’
(Landes 1988:4). The bourgeois revolution thus banished women to the
home and called men to their natural fulfilment in political life. The
‘natural’ state of society—as opposed to the decadent and perverted
absolutist monarchy—was restored through the revolution. Landes
concludes that modern feminism is an inextricable product of the