Page 30 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

24 CULTURAL STUDIES

we examine popular representations of cleaning and femininity using the insights
provided by Gruben’s film, we can see that gender, though it appears to
constitute a clean opposition, does not do so at all.

Scene 2:
Dangerous domesticity and the role of e/liminators

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but
what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders,
positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.
(Kristeva, 1982)

The ‘feminine’ embodies what must trouble and ultimately disrupt any opposition
—the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite—and this ‘trouble’ reveals
itself readily in popular advertisements containing cleaning scenes. These
scenes, invariably representing a middle-class milieu, illustrate the perverse
parallels insistently constructed between cleaning as a practice, with certain
symbolic effects, and feminine gender construction as signification, with kindred
effects. These perverse parallels surface in representations of the housewife’s
character and sexuality.
As a result of the imperatives of purity inferred in various aspects of housework,
the housewife is placed in what Mary Douglas would call a ‘dangerous’ cultural
position. In order to clean, to separate, to keep dirt (nature) out, the housewife
must ‘get her hands dirty’, do the ‘dirty work’. As a cultural cleaning agent, she
must come into contact with and handle the very pollutions she protects others
from; she therefore runs the risk of being tainted with them herself. But she must
also avoid being too clean, or becoming overzealous and maniacal. Mary Douglas
remarks that

the quest for purity is pursued by rejection…when purity is not a symbol
but something lived, it must be poor and barren. Purity is the enemy of
change, of ambiguity and compromise…it is an attempt to force experience
into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not
amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into
contradiction.
(1966/1988:161–2)

Traces or symptoms of the housewife’s liminal and paradoxical role surface in
advertisements for cleansers, soaps, dishwashing liquids, or floor-cleaning
products. The same contradictions or paradoxes noted in Gruben’s film as
implicating the central character—between inside and outside, between ‘nature’
and ‘culture’—shape the character of these products. In a television
advertisement for an air freshener, three housewives move respectively through a