Page 25 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

KATHLEEN McHUGH
ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T

ABSTRACT
The title of this article conveys the idea which shapes it: that the
positioning and identities of ‘the one’ and ‘the other’ are affected by the
performance of different social practices. The highly symbolic activity of
cleaning inverts the distribution of groups that would usually be divided
according to the one/other dichotomy, in that gendered, class and racial
others usually clean for their social ‘betters’. This redistribution allows for
a look at the dynamics of social and psychic identification within an altered
or inverted frame. In three different discursive locations—psychoanalytic
theory, feminist film and theory, and advertising and popular culture—I
examine diverse representations and implications of cleaning scenes. Each
scene symptomatically collapses or merges sexual difference with other
social distinctions conventionally marked by the labour involved in
cleaning. As each of these discourses is concerned with articulations of
identity, whether explicitly or critically (psychoanalytic theory and
feminism) or implicitly (advertising and popular culture), these scenes
reveal crucial links between social and symbolic practices and the
vicissitudes of gender identity. In effect, gender emerges as a cleaning
strategy, a representational system that masks or obfuscates the
significance of other social differences.
KEYWORDS
gender, domesticity, cleaning, psychoanalysis, feminism, popular culture

The subject, the ‘one’ I will consider, is the ‘one who cleans’. 1 My interest in
this particular subject, its relation to the activity of cleaning and the dichotomy
thereby posited with its other is twofold. First, the title phrase underscores the
extent to which the construction of a subject 2 is inflected by that subject’s
relation (active or passive) to certain practices or actions. From this point derives
the second, namely that the activity of cleaning inverts the positions usually
inferred by the terms the ‘one’ and the ‘other’. In contemporary theoretical
terminology, ‘the one’ usually designates a position that implies agency, power,