Men [sic] build a universe built upon the erasure of the bodies and contributions of the bodies of women/mothers and the refusal to acknowledge the debt to the maternal body that they owe. They hollow out their interiors and project them outward, and then require women as supports for this hollowed space. Women become the guardians of the private and the interpersonal, while men build conceptual and material universes. This appropriation of the right to place or space correlates with men's seizure of the right to define and utilise spatiality that reflects their own self representation (Grosz in Boys 1999:198).
The space of the "private and the interpersonal" is most regularly the domestic interior that is identified with women. The domestic space is identified with women by virtue of its antagonism with the world of public affairs. Without the necessary faculties of an originating will, moral individualism, or reason that characterise the classical masculine subject, the role of femininity is institutionalised as a prop for the masculine universe.
Thus, " 'she' must be no more than the path, the method, the theory, the mirror for the subject that leads back, via a process of repetition, to the recognition of (his) origin"
(Irigaray 1991:65, emphasis in original). A mirror is merely a reflective surface. 'Woman' thus stands in as a mute reflection of 'man'; 'space' to his 'time'. By the same token, 'home' becomes a necessary condition for the promulgation of masculine energies in the world at large.
2.3.i Doubling up the domestic body
The ubiquity of 'woman' with the private, domestic sphere in classical cultures re- emerged most clearly in the modern city whereby the 'proper', domesticated woman was constructed in opposition to the abject 'public' woman, who was marked as a whore. In the modern city, the flaneur, or disinterested observer who roams the streets at ease, is a decidedly male figure whereas the unaccompanied female is again marked as a 'cheap' and licentious whore. Matters of civic interest were not deemed suitable for the 'proper' woman, who is again instituted as homekeeper and maternal figure. In the context of contemporary urbanisation, the gendered divisions between public and private space are still apparent. It is generally frowned upon for women to move about alone in public, as this is seen as an indication of her sexual availability (reiterated in the 'blaming the victim'
scenario in rape discourse). Thus, the domesticated, maternal woman remains a morally intelligible female figure whilst the 'public woman' is subject to gender-biased scrutiny-
Suffice to say, the domesticated female is not given to public cultural contribution and commentary, which in effect means that 'woman' is represented but not self- representative, she takes up space— she is space, but does not author it. Here again we have the problem of agency and authorship, for the domesticated, spatialised female body is by definition incapable of aesthetic contribution. If women seize upon masculine discourse and reproduce its violent dichotomies by uncritically taking on traditionally masculine roles of conquest and domination (over space), the masculine standard remains entrenched and the constitutive division between private and public space is maintained.
The question remains as to how the problematic relationship between time, space and identity can be shifted.
Irigaray (1991:65) suggests that it is only by turning to a consideration of the sexually specific female body that we may begin to reinterpret the female body not as a flat, reflecting surface or space for the masculine standard, as has been seen in the relationship between public-masculine and domestic-feminine spaces, but as upon the curved surface of the speculum. The speculum represents a doubling that is, as Irigaray (1985a) says, not unrelated to the female sex. This concept of 'doubling' challenges the exclusive dichotomies of the mastering divisions between time and space, public and private. Let us look at Irigaray's thinking further in relation to the idea of the domesticated female body.
Irigaray's image of the gynaecological mirror, the speculum, as a trope for reworking the symbolic 'woman' locates difference in the female body, that is, women are seen to be different in and of themselves and not only in comparison to men. This argument could be viewed as operating at the level of feminist ontology, but as I understand it, the doubling of the speculum is infinite in that there is no singular origin, self or woman to be spoken of. So then, Irigaray's theory does not preclude the deconstruction of the discursive structures of domesticity, rather it shows up the fundamental premises (maternal body/blood) that support the transcendent rationality of the generative paternal figure.
As far as Irigaray's concept of 'doubling' or difference is concerned, this is pertinent to broader arguments in this thesis, and of course relates back to the discussion of subjectivity in Chapter One, for I contend repeatedly in that Chapter and beyond it that, in order for the symbolic contract to be transgressed, exclusive dichotomies between masculine/feminine, language/flesh and indeed time/space will need to be thought through, that is, the threshold be transgressed. This transgression can be thought of as a kind of fold, or doubling of surfaces/spaces. In this sense, the gendered division between public and private space can be recuperated critically as a point of social and economic intersection: a fold, rather than a division, where gender politics operates in tenuous relation, open to change. Of course this is not a new contention, indeed it harks back to the second-wave feminist mantra of 'the personal is the political', which was rooted in an interrogation of the gendered power relations between the domestic, private sphere and public life.
Clearly, one of the dominant spatial relationships that have defined the female body is the domestication of women in terms of their biological function and their social role in this sphere (as wives, mothers and daughters). It will be seen in the discussion of the selected performance artists that the division between the domestic interior, the private 'self and public discourse is interrogated and transgressed, for it is a division that maintains strongly the female body as a spatialised object.