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Ann McClintock

Ann McClintock. “’Massa’ and Maids”. Articulation. Articulation of class, gender, race

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Ann McClintock

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  1. Ann McClintock “’Massa’ and Maids”

  2. Articulation • Articulation of class, gender, race • Gender: an articulated category, constructed through and by class (feminine women vs masculine women), just as gender is used as a regulatory discourse to manage class (working class women unrefined, not at home) • Class and sexuality managed and policed by discourse on race • Analogue b/w working-class women and black men; b/w prostitutes and blacks (dangerous criminality); b/w slum and colony

  3. East End

  4. Triangulation Gender/Class/Race

  5. Class structure of the household • class anxieties • construction of binary types of womanhood • middle-classness possible only because of female labour • social formation of Victorian middle-class life: imperialism integral to middle-class-ness • Imperialism and the cult of domesticity

  6. Social history of the family through a psychoanalytic framework • Figure of the nurse/mother: unwaged upper class woman vs waged working class woman • Female domestic workers, largest category of workers outside of agriculture (late 19th c) • Complex power relations—with the children (emotional dependence; sexual and psychological dominance); with the employers • Doubled image of Victorian womanhood—not just an aesthetic feature, but based in psycho-social reality (critique of Gilbert and Gubar) domestic work carried on mostly by women (largest labour category after agriculture) • Family as site of a sexual economy; class structure of the household; material division of women by labour and class • Social power relations: maid/child/adult • “threshold figure”: site of anxiety

  7. Freud’s nanny • Freud’s elision of his nanny, a shadowy figure (theory); ousted from his theory of Femininity • Yet played a formative role; intimate functions (memory) • The historical role of working class women • Women seen as object choices, not in terms of social identification

  8. City/body • the city; mapped as feminine space/body • city full of women/working class: nursemaids, milkwomen, streetsellers, prostitutes • Munby as flaneur; fluid identity, assured through power • walking as imperial genre (mastery); optics of truth: empiricism cf. museum and exhibition hall; • spectacle of the poor working woman in the city, those who did menial work • rustic contrast to surrounding urban elegance

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