Page 34 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

28 CULTURAL STUDIES

and slovenly housewifery or with frigidity and obsessive orderliness. 7 Indeed,
these associations have been so reinforced in our culture that representations of a
woman’s deficient or excessive housekeeping immediately suggest her excessive
or deficient sexuality. As the advertisement discussed above demonstrate, codes
of personal cleanliness and sexuality are bound up with the diverse chores of the
housewife, infusing cultural constructions of her sexuality with hygienic concerns
—a ‘slut’ is both a slovenly housewife and a promiscuous woman. The
housewife’s role as cleaner becomes associated with her role as sexual partner. The
concerns with cleanliness that inform her occupation or work are mirrored,
perversely, symptomatically, in her sexuality and her body. Cleaning, a practice
involved with the articulation of boundaries, marks the confusion, the lack of
differentiation (between labour and libido) that haunts this body.
A host of contradictory imperatives shape the modern, white, middle-class
housewife’s identity, and thus (constructed and contrived) conceptions of
women, overall: be clean, but not too clean; be natural, but not too natural; be
cultivated and polished, but not too cultivated; be sexual, but not too sexual.
These contradictions can be seen as deriving, at least in part, from the woman/
wife’s cultural role as a cleaner or preserver of boundaries. It seems then that her
function, in both her practices and in the construction of her identity, is to serve
as an e/liminator. As an entity (a universalized gender figure) who absorbs and
embodies the contradictions of symbolic borders or boundaries, the idea of ‘the
Woman’ incorporates and thereby effaces the liminal—the threshold or margin
that dirties the clarity of distinct oppositions, the imbrication or connection that
confuses or mixes the parties to any difference.
The modern entity ‘Woman’ has a history inseparable from the industrial
revolutions, the coincident social and psychic separation of public and private
spheres, and the rise and triumph of the middle class over an aristocratic social
order. The contemporary ideological and symbolic operations of the gender
binary discussed above can only be understood in this historical context. Nancy
Armstrong cogently outlines this point:
We are taught to divide the political world in two and to detach the
practices that belong to the female domain from those that govern the
marketplace…. In actuality, however, the changes that allowed diverse
groups of people to make sense of social experience as these mutually
exclusive worlds of information constitute a major event in the history of
the modern individual. It follows, then, that only those histories that
account for the formation of separate spheres—masculine and feminine,
political and domestic, social and cultural—can allow us to see what this
semiotic behavior had to do with the economic triumph of the new middle
classes.
(1987:9–10)