Feminist theories on the separation of the private and the public: looking back, looking forward.

This article discusses the development of feminist theories concerning the separation of public and private spheres. It reconstructs the critique of a dichotomization of both concepts and applies newer problematizations, for example the concept of experience, to the earlier dictum of the women's movement that the private/personal is political. This analysis of discourses concerning private life and the public sphere is devoted not only to a historical reconstruction but it also casts a glance into the future, into a transformed cultural and media landscape, and poses questions as to the role of the private in the public sphere and beyond, as to whether the public sphere would have to protect privacy. (UW)

**********

The topic of "private/public" has been actively debated in various scholarly discourses for many years. Since Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and even prior to it, this debate has intensely preoccupied the women's movement and feminist research. In this essay I shall try to present the focal points of the discussion that has been going on for more than three decades and has emerged from various disciplines and theoretical traditions, and to relate these points to each other. What I have in mind is not only a historical reconstruction, but at the same time an attempt to develop a feminist concept of the public and private sphere that integrates more recent and older studies.

The critique of dichotomies continues to be of fundamental importance to this issue. A look into the past will show that we are by no means talking about a new invention of postmodern theory. On the contrary: the disintegration and crossing of boundaries have always been central themes, particularly of feminist discourse concerning the private and public sphere. Whether the debate was about characterizing the private as the political, creating alternative public spheres, or the disintegration of the private sphere under the influence of the mass media and the resulting need to protect the private sphere, the central question was always how boundaries could be dissolved. These debates are not only extremely productive for research, but also continue to represent an important point of departure for linking feminist theory and political practice.

By deconstructing the dichotomization of private and public, feminist theory critiques an understanding of politics that holds on to a separation of the two spheres, assigns gender-specific connotations to them (male or female), and by implication orders them hierarchically. By being assigned to the private sphere--so claims the analysis--women's lives and work are, to a large degree, made invisible, while their experiences, interests, forms of organization, and action are excluded as not worthy of politics.

This exclusion of women from the political public sphere, which is coded as male, was one of the first central themes examined by feminist historians in the 1970s and 1980s. They pursued a double perspective: on the one hand, they forcefully tackled the problem of naturalizing and polarizing gender roles in bourgeois society (Hausen), critiqued the resulting marking of the private sphere as "woman's realm," in which work is performed out of love (Bock/Duden), and reflected on the way boundaries between the private and public are drawn in the context of patriarchal power structures (Lerner). On the other hand, this historiography reconstructed many instances where women had crossed boundaries, and it was able to illustrate by numerous examples that the exclusion of women from the public sphere was by no means a general fact, although, to be sure--and this needs to be emphasized--it was a constant component of the aims and objectives of male power.

Another very fundamental critique of dichotomizations was developed at a later point within feminist debates about the disintegration of the category of gender (Butler; Landweer and Rumpf). If the sex/gender distinction is dissolved into gender, and if even the body's materiality is declared to be a fiction that is created only by the gaze that constitutes meaning, is controlled by, and controls discourse (so the arguments go), then both the system of two sexes and the categories of private and public lose their relevance in the end. Thus feminist postmodern thought, beyond discourses of equality and/or difference, introduces new positions and ways of thinking.