Page 27 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 21

that of gender, which in our culture tends to predominate over all others. Thus
other differences—class, race, ethnicity, sexuality—are often subsumed within
the more cleanly (constructed as) universal dichotomy of gender difference.
Gender itself operates as a cleaning strategy, an analytical category whose
seeming ubiquity and obviousness tidies up, restores order to much more messy
social identities.
Most of the cleaners with whom I will be concerned are white women. As
Angela Davis points out, ‘Although the “housewife” was rooted in the social
conditions of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, nineteenth century ideology
established the housewife and mother as universal models of womanhood’ (1983:
229). The process I will trace through several diverse examples concerns the
problematic construction of a white, middle-class, heterosexual femininity that
has often been taken as the feminine per se. Because I wish to trace the links
3
between cleaning, modern identity and gender construction, and the
mystifications of other differences, I will limit my consideration to
representations of housewives and maids in three different discursive locations:
feminist alternative film, psychoanalytic theory and popular media. Each of these
discourses concerns articulations and constructions of identity, whether explicitly
or critically (feminist film and psychoanalytic theory) or implicitly (advertising
and popular culture). I will begin with a contemporary film that illustrates the
paradoxical effects of cleaning on the character of the one who cleans.

Scene 1:
The Central Character: Gender and cleaning

Where there is dirt, there is system…. When we honestly reflect on
our busy scrubbings and cleanings…we know that we are not mainly
trying to avoid disease. We are separating, placing boundaries.
(Douglas, 1966/1988)

The Central Character, a short experimental film by Canadian filmmaker
Patricia Gruben, visually demonstrates the way in which cleaning practices and
the space these practices maintain affect the character of the person who cleans:
specifically, the director examines a contemporary housewife’s role in the
maintenance of the liminal social space of the home, a space riddled with
ambiguity. Symbolically constituted as cultural border or boundary, the home
serves as a margin between areas constructed as ‘culture’ and areas designated as
culture’s other—the ‘natural’ world. The activities that cultural convention
dictates should be performed in the home relate to the body and to the provisions
of physical necessity. As the place where we presumably eat, drink, defecate,
rest, have sex and seek shelter, the home is linked with activities coded as
physical and ‘natural’. Yet it also figures as a sign of civilization and its distance
from nature; as Oscar Wilde remarked, ‘If Nature had been comfortable,