Rereading Public and Private: The Dichotomy that is Not One

This is one of the fundamental senses in which we are social beings: our ontological status as intentional agents depends on the conceptual equipment that we bring to experiencing the world, and we acquire and learn the use of that equipment in learning our language. And because, in western culture at any rate, we apprehend a great deal of our social world by distinguishing things that are public and things that are private, how those concepts are structured necessarily informs not only what we ourselves say and do but also what responses to our actions we expect from others, how we assess their actions, and so on. ²

But Is the Dichotomy of Public and Private Not Obvious?

This article explores how the dichotomy of public and private is structured and how it influences international relations (IR) theory/practice. I take as my first starting point the assertion that the binary of public and private is a foundational dichotomy of Western thought, ³ and that it has profound significance for political scientists and feminists. The former have constituted their field of study by reference to the public sphere of politics and power brokering. The latter have criticized the relegation of women and femininity to a depoliticized realm of "private life" and familial relations. Both communities struggle with the question of how economics fits into this binary framework.

My second starting point is that foundational dichotomies are both conceptually and politically problematic. Conceptually, the structure of dichotomies (posing mutually exclusive, opposing, and polarized terms) promotes thinking that is static (unable to acknowledge or address change), reductionist (unable to accommodate the complexities of social reality), and stunted (unable to envision more than two opposing alternatives). ⁴ Because social life is dynamic, complex, and multi-faceted, thinking that relies on reductionist dichotomies encourages inadequate analyses. Politically, foundational dichotomies privilege the first term at the expense of the second, and their deployment implicitly or explicitly valorizes the attributes of the first term. Because foundational dichotomies--culture-nature, reason-emotion, subject-object, mind-body, public-private--are gendered, action that relies on dichotomies privileges that which is associated with masculinity over that which is associated with femininity. ⁵

My third starting point is that feminist IR, in spite of a dramatic increase in publications and conference visibility, remains foreign to mainstream IR. More specifically, while "woman" as an empirical referent has gained visibility, feminist claims that gender is an analytic category (that infuses foundational dichotomies) remain poorly understood. In the latter sense, "all of social life is gendered," ⁶ hence, the dichotomy of masculine-feminine orders not only our subjective identities but also the concepts that structure our thought (for example, private-public, certainty-ambiguity, autonomy-dependence, hard-soft, ) and the practices that structure our options and activities (for example, statemaking-homemaking, paid-unpaid work, science-humanities). So understood, gender is decidedly "not a synonym for women," ⁷ but a structural, pervasive feature of how we "order" social life. And taking gender seriously involves much more than the important but limited project of "adding women in."

I make these points not as an introduction to reviewing their underpinning arguments yet again, but to situate what follows in the context of literatures that cannot be addressed here. ⁸ Rather, in this article, I assume these starting points and move directly to the discussion of public and private. The core of my argument is that the public-private dichotomy is not one: it does not describe two spatially separate spheres, ⁹ functionally independent activities, or categorically opposed interests. Continued unreflective reference to public and private, however, both invokes their relationship as dichotomous and obscures the gendered political effects of deploying the terms. In support of these claims, and to explore their implications, I first offer a brief history of the dichotomy, which suggests both its pedigree in the Western tradition, and how the drawing of its boundaries is...