190 Gendered Spaces

5.10 IrIS MarIon YoUnG

‘house and home: feminist Variations on a Theme’*

For millennia the image of Penelope sitting by the hearth and weaving, saving
and preserving the home while her man roams the earth in daring adventures,
has defined one of Western culture’s basic ideas of womanhood. Many other
cultures historically and today equate women with home, expecting women to
serve men at home and sometimes preventing them from leaving the house. If
house and home mean the confinement of women for the sake of nourishing
male projects, then feminists have good reason to reject home as a value. But it
is difficult even for feminists to exorcise a positive valence to the idea of home.
We often look forward to going home and invite others to make themselves at
home. House and home are deeply ambivalent values […]
On the one hand, I agree with feminist critics such as Luce Irigaray and
Simone de Beauvoir that the comforts and supports of house and home histori-
cally come at women’s expense. Women serve, nurture, and maintain so that
the bodies and souls of men and children gain confidence and expansive sub-
jectivity to make their mark on the world. This homey role deprives women of
support for their own identity and projects. Along with several feminist critics,
furthermore, I question the yearning for a whole and stable identity that the
idea of home often represents. Unlike these critics, however, I am not ready to
toss the idea of home out of the larder of feminist values. Despite the oppres-
sions and privileges the idea historically carries, the idea of home also carries
critical liberating potential because it expresses uniquely human values. Some
of these can be uncovered by exploring the meaning-making activity most typi-
cal of women in domestic work […]
Luce Irigaray makes explicit the maleness of Heidegger’s allegedly universal
ontology. [See Heidegger, section 2.2 in this volume.] Man can build and dwell
in the world in patriarchal culture, she suggests, only on the basis of the mate-
riality and nurturance of women. In the idea of ‘home,’ man projects onto
woman the nostalgic longing for the lost wholeness of the original mother. to
fix and keep hold of his identity, man makes a house, puts things in it, and con-
fines there his woman, who reflects his identity to him. The price she pays for
supporting his subjectivity, however, is dereliction, having no self of her own.
Irigaray writes about the association of house and home with a male longing
for fixed identity in a timeless tone. The property acquisition she describes men

* In Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 134–64.
 house and home: feminist Variations 191

as engaging in as a means of substituting for the lost mother, however, is prob-

ably best thought of as characteristic of bourgeois society, whose values became
hegemonic in the twentieth century in the West, and increasingly in the world.
Thus I explore the specific attachment of personal identity to commodified
houses and their contents, in order to find another angle of critique of the long-
ing for home […]
Like Irigaray, Beauvoir describes women’s existence as deprived of active
subjectivity because their activity concentrates on serving and supporting
men in the home. Unlike Irigaray, however, Beauvoir materializes this ac-
count by reflecting on the sexual division of labour. Because she accepts a
dichotomy between immanence and transcendence and identifies all of wom-
en’s domestic labour with immanence, however, Beauvoir misses the cre-
atively human aspects of women’s traditional household work, in activities I
call preservation.
That aspect of dwelling which Heidegger devalues thus provides a turning
point for revaluing home. Preservation makes and remakes home as a support
for personal identity without accumulation, certainty, or fixity. While preserva-
tion, a typically feminine activity, is traditionally devalued at least in Western
conceptions of history and identity, it has crucial human value […]
Beauvoir is surely right that the bare acts of cleaning bathrooms, sweep-
ing floors, and changing diapers are merely instrumental; though necessary,
they cannot be invested with creativity or individuality. She is wrong, how-
ever, to reduce all or even most domestic work to immanence. Not all home-
making is housework. to understand the difference we need to reconsider
the idea of home, and its relation to a person’s sense of identity. Home enacts
a specific mode of subjectivity and historicity that is distinct both from the
creative-destructive idea of transcendence and from the ahistorical repeti-
tion of immanence […]
Preserving the meaningful identity of a household or family by means of the
loving care of its mementos is simply a different order of activity from washing
the unhealthy bacteria out of the bathroom. As Beauvoir rightly says, the latter
is general, the abstract maintenance of species life. The former, however, is spe-
cific and individuated; the homemaker acts to preserve the particular meaning
that these objects have in the lives of these particular people. The confusion
between these acts and the level of immanence is perhaps understandable, be-
cause so many activities of domestic work are both simultaneously. The home-
maker dusts the pieces in order to keep away the molds and dirts that might
annoy her sinuses, but at the same time she keeps present to herself and those
with whom she lives the moments in their lives or those of their forebears that
the objects remember […]
192 Gendered Spaces

Thus the activity of preservation should be distinguished from the nostalgia

accompanying fantasies of a lost home from which the subject is separated and
to which he seeks to return. Preservation entails remembrance, which is quite
different from nostalgia. Where nostalgia can be constructed as a longing flight
from the ambiguities and disappointments of everyday life, remembrance faces
the open negativity of the future by knitting a steady confidence in who one is
from the pains and joys of the past retained in the things among which one
dwells. Nostalgic longing is always for an elsewhere. Remembrance is the affir-
mation of what brought us here […]
We should not romanticize this activity. Preservation is ambiguous; it can be
either conservative or reinterpretive. The same material things sometimes carry
the valences of unique personal identity and status privilege […] Homemaking
consists in preserving the things and their meaning as anchor to shifting per-
sonal and group identity. But the narratives of the history of what brought us
here are not fixed, and part of the creative and moral task of preservation is to
reconstruct the connection of the past to the present in light of new events, re-
lationships, and political understandings […]
A chain of recent interlinked essays elaborates an argument that feminists
should reject any affirmation of the value of home. Biddy Martin and Chandra
Mohanty launched this discussion in their reading of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s re-
flections on growing up as a privileged white woman in the American South.1
teresa de Lauretis then commented on Martin and Mohanty, enlarging their
insights about the connection between home and identity.2 Most recently
Bonnie Honig criticizes what she perceives as a privileged position of with-
drawal from politics that the idea of home affords, and she enlarges de Lauretis’s
ideas about decentred identity and feminist politics.3
All these essays express a deep distrust of the idea of home for feminist poli-
tics and conclude that we should give up a longing for home. Although I agree
with much in their critiques […] I argue that while politics should not succumb
to a longing for comfort and unity, the material values of home can nevertheless
provide leverage for radical social critique. Following bell hooks, I shall suggest
that ‘home’ can have a political meaning as a site of dignity and resistance. to
the extent that having a home is currently a privilege, I argue, the values of
home should be democratized rather than rejected […] hooks reverses the
claim that having ‘home’ is a matter of privilege.4 ‘Home’ is a more universal
value in her vision, one that the oppressed in particular can and have used as a
vehicle for developing resistance to oppression. As long as there is a minimal
freedom of homeplace, there is a place to assemble apart from the privileged
and [to] talk of organising; there is a place to preserve the specific culture of the
 house and home: feminist Variations 193

oppressed people. The personal sense of identity supported in the site and
things of a homeplace thus enables political agency […]
Even if people have minimal shelter of their own […] they need a certain
level of material comfort in their home for it to serve as a place of identity-
construction and the development of the spirit of resistance that hooks dis-
cusses. In this way having a home is indeed today having a privilege.
The appropriate response to this fact of privilege is not to reject the values
of home, but instead to claim those values for everyone. Feminists should
criticize the nostalgic use of home that offers a permanent respite from politics
and conflict, and which continues to require of women that they make men
and children comfortable. But at the same time, feminist politics calls for con-
ceptualizing the positive values of home and criticizing a global society that is
unable or unwilling to extend those values to everyone […]
Home is a complex ideal, I have argued, with an ambiguous connection to
identity and subjectivity. I agree with those critics of home who see it as a
nostalgic longing for an impossible security and comfort, a longing bought at
the expense of women and of those constructed as Others, strangers, not-
home, in order to secure this fantasy of a unified identity. But I have also ar-
gued that the idea of home and the practices of home-making support personal
and collective identity in a more fluid and material sense, and that recognizing
this value entails also recognizing the creative value of the often unnoticed
work that many women do. Despite the real dangers of romanticizing home, I
think that there are also dangers in turning our backs on home.

NOtES

1 Biddy Martin and Chandra talpade Mohanty, ‘Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got
to Do With It?’ in teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies / Critical Studies
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 191–212.
2 teresa de Lauretis, ‘Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical
Consciousness,’ Feminist Studies 16 / 1 (1990): 115–50.
3 Bonnie Honig, ‘Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,’ Social Research
61 / 3 (1994): 563–97.
4 bell hooks, ‘Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,’ in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural
Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 41–9.