Page 26 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

20 CULTURAL STUDIES

and a normative universalized invisibility that provides the backdrop for the
difference or exception constituted by the disenfranchised or disempowered
‘other’. Those who perform acts of cleaning, however, frequently belong to
groups culturally coded as ‘others’. Women, people of colour, members of the
working class or lower castes tend to do the cleaning for their social superiors.

Rather than focus on the identities of these groups or individuals per se, I would
like to consider the ways in which cleaning practices interact with identity
construction in modern bourgeois thought and culture. An investigation of the
‘one who cleans’ allows us to see the role played by this highly symbolic
cultural practice in diverse constructions of difference—gender, class, and race.
Cleaning, unlike speech, action, or desire (as in, ‘one speaks, the other doesn’t’,
etc.), belongs to a set of activities which confer an agency upon their subjects that
usually lacks status and power. Further, a wealth of ambiguities and
contradictions inhabit both the concept and the act of cleaning itself; linked both
to the sublime and the banal, to social organization and the structuring of the
symbolic, cleaning involves erasure, catharsis and purification, as well as
drudge, monotony and manual labour. When cleaning is successful, it produces
lack as value, but this value frequently does not accrue to the one who does the
cleaning. The paradoxes of cleaning, in terms of agency, status, social and
symbolic import, and material effects have profound consequences on the
identity of the one who cleans.
To illustrate this point, I have chosen various representations and theorizations of
cleaning scenes which demonstrate, in very diverse ways, how the ambiguities
that inhere in the practices and effects of cleaning tend to be absorbed by or
projected on to the identity of the one who cleans. Cleaning practices and their
representations participate in the construction and maintenance of vital cultural
distinctions, like those between nature and culture, inside and outside, public and
private. My contention is that the tropes, narratives, or scenes used to represent
cleaning naturalize these binaries in such a way that they override or obviate
other types of difference. In modern bourgeois culture, the linchpin (and alibi) of
this process is the housewife. While many people clean for a living, only in the
house-wife are these series of binaries wedded together. The presumably
universal symbolic binaries of ‘nature and culture’ and ‘inside and outside’ reveal
their historical specificity when considered in light of the modern configuration
of gendered public and private realms. Unlike others who clean, the housewife
works in the private sphere and does not receive a wage. In ways I will discuss
below, ‘she’ therefore symbolically polices, maintains and coordinates these
binaries through her cleaning practices, and thus effectively embodies their
contradictory juncture. In becoming the impossible figure for these
contradictions, the woman/wife becomes the enigma of a modern opposition,

Cultural Studies 11(1) 1997:17–39© 1997 Routledge 0950–2386