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THE
NEW PRIVATE SPHERES
19-30 July, 1999
Course Directors:
Kim Lane Scheppele
(University of Pennsylvania)
Miglena Nikolchina (Program on Gender & Culture, CEU)
Resource Persons:
Susan Rubin
Suleiman (Harvard University, Boston, USA)
Larissa Remennick (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel)
Jack Goody
Juliet Mitchell (University of Cambridge, UK)
Irina Novikova (University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia)
Orshi Drozdik (independent scholar and artist)
Marie-Luise Angerer (University of Bochum, Germany)
Overview
In the gender studies summer university
program, we hope to introduce participants to the latest scholarship in
what might be thought of as “intimacy studies.” Questions of gender
inevitably get personal, and in our summer course, we hope to explore the
exploding literatures on the history and construction of subjectivity,
intimacy and private life. Throughout the social sciences and
humanities, there has been a renewed interest in the way in which the very
things about ourselves that we think of as most unique and personal are
also shared and social. It is this theme which we will explore in
the summer school.
Our course aims to introduce faculty
in humanities and social science disciplines in the post-soviet world to
new scholarship in this field by bringing a set of the crucial authors
on these topics who have been defining the agendas on scholarship in Western
Europe, North America, and the Post-Soviet World to teach together at the CEU.
Course description
Much attention has been paid to
the public aspects of the “transition” in the post-soviet world.
These recognizably “public” aspects include the democratization of governments,
the move to markets, the establishment of the rule of law, the new conceptions
of citizenship. Much less attention has been paid to private life
and the way in which it have been changing. Private life includes,
among other things, the system of emotions, the construction of family
life, the constitution of subjectivities and the regulation of intimacy.
As gender studies specialists, we are concerned with the dynamics of private
life and with providing people with the tools to understand the changing
dynamics and understandings of what is happening in the private spheres.
The summer school will focus on that problem.
What are the new private spheres
in the post-soviet world? It is hard to understand this without seeing
them in conjunction with the changes in public spheres. Under state
socialism, the private sphere was not what it was in capitalist economies,
precisely because the public sphere was not a liberal or bourgeois public
sphere. State socialism represented a contamination of the public
sphere by official ideologies, along with the devaluation of all forms
of public activity. It was not at all the highest valued arena of
life, which idealized portrayals of liberal regimes portray the public
sphere as being. Instead, in the public spaces, people were often
what they were expected to be or only what it was safe to be, rather than
what they wanted to be or what they might have wanted to stand for.
Under state socialism, one’s job was rarely a source of identity, the way
it has often been in capitalist economies. Under state socialism,
citizenship and politics were liabilities (or at best, opportunities for
opportunism) rather than something that defined one’s sense of self.
Instead, in the state socialist period, the private sphere was the place
where you could be who you really were, with family, with friends, with
close social networks, with those whom you trusted. The private sphere
was the only one that mattered, at least as far one’s “real life” was concerned.
The private sphere carried the weights of identity, support, gratification
and safety.
In the literature on the public/private
distinction growing out of liberal societies, the public is more highly
valued and coded male. The private is less highly valued and coded
female. But in state-socialist societies the evaluation was, if anything,
reversed and the gendered nature of the split less clear -- or at least
less studied. If neither men nor women could realize their highest
aspirations in the public sphere, then such things were left to the private
places that the regimes would tolerate. And it was both men
and women who inhabited those private spheres.
The private spheres of friendship
and family, loyalty and decency were also affected by the ideologies of
the public sphere under state socialism. In particular, scholarly
traditions focusing on these subjects remained underdeveloped in the soviet
world. Psychoanalysis was either officially discouraged or discredited.
Studies of sexuality re-emphasized the traditional lines between acceptable
and deviant moralities. As a number of writers about the state
socialist period have noted, the state had plenty of images of the good
public man and woman, but few images of the subjectivity within.
What legacy has this left?
How should we think differently about the public/private distinction once
we examine its different dynamics in developing democracies?
Our course focuses on the way
in which private spheres have been conceptualized in social, psychoanalytic,
literary and political theory. We will look at the existing
scholarship on these questions, which often does not explicitly note the
dynamics noted above since most of it was written under the assumptions
of a liberal political regime. That gives much space for our summer
school to begin to define new scholarly agendas in this area.
Course Contents
The summer university on the New
Private Spheres will focus on four themes, each of which will be addressed
in a series of seminars given by the leading international authorities
on the subject. The themes are:
Theme I: The Construction of
Subjectivities/The Deconstruction of Identities
Theme II: Gender and Intimacy
Theme III: The History of Private
Life
Theme IV: Gender and Psychoanalysis
Participants are expected to attend
all four courses over the two-week period.
Outcomes
Participants will be asked to
write a short research proposal for a project that would grow out of the
themes in the course. The course director and resource persons will
work with the participants to help them find a topic that would make sense
for them to write about. Of course, in just two weeks, participants
will not be able to actually carry out the project. We believe, however,
that the process of writing a short research proposal will be helpful in
getting the participants to think about the ways in which the summer university
themes are connected to their own research agendas.
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