공사영역에 대한 여성인류학의 문제제기 : 비교문화적 논쟁

• 영문명: Cross - Cultural Controversies Over Public / Private Division
• 발행기관: 이화여자대학교 한국여성연구원
• 저자명: 김은실(Kim Eun-Shil)
• 간행물 정보: 『여성학논집』제13집, 379~404쪽, 전체 26쪽
• 주제분류: 사회과학 > 여성학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 1996.12.01

영문 초록

Since the 1970s the oppositional model of public and private has been widly used to discuss the lower status of women cross-culturally. The concepts of public and private entered into feminist studies primarily through the works of cultural anthropologists. It was especially Michelle Rosaldo who suggested the oppositional model between domestic and public domains as a way of explaining women's lower status in a wide variety of historical and social settings. This article examines the way in which Rosado's model of public/private division has been discussed in the Western feminist studies particularly in feminist anthropology and reviews its theoretical and methodological debates for cross-cultural settings. Rosaldo, in her 1974 articled, escribed the relationship between women's lower status and public and private model as follows: Sexual asymmetry is universal based not in terms of biology per se but in terms of the fact that a good part of a woman's adult life is spent giving birth to and raising children in most societies; that because of these responsibilties women participate relatively less than men in public life; that this leads to a differentiation of domestic and public spheres of activities; and that such structural differentiation affects men's and women's relative psychological, cultural, political and economic experiences in given societies. From this fact, women and men's universal social arrangement are organized into public and private domains and sexual asymmetry is constructed. Rosaldo made some points about this; first, in all known societies male activities are more highly valued than female activities; second, universal sexual asymmetry is a culturally legitimated; third, though women exert important pressures on the social life of the group, they generally do so through informal influence and power rather than through formal authority. Therefore, women's status would be lowest in those societies where there is a firm differentiation between domestic and public spheres of activity and where women are isolated from one another. Rosaldo's model has had much influences upon many women scholars in 1970s and the early 1980s. At the same time, however, various criticisms against this model have been advanced. Many feminist scholars including anthropologists who carried their own fieldworks in various cultures argued the universal applicability of Rosaldo's model by problematizing the universalality of women's subordination in variour cultures; the Western-centric epistemological and methodological assumptions of the public and the private which have derived from the Victorian social thought; and the identification between the concepts of woman and motherhood. They also pointed out theoretical and cenceptual vagueness about this model by questioning the way in which the divisions are organized and the concepts of power, anthority, and woman are constructed in various cultures. Upon these responses to her original formulation, Rosaldo herself examined her domestic/public model and reposited her model as a tool to problematize the political relationship between public and private, and gender relations as well. Rosaldo, in her 1980 article "The use and abuse of anthropology," reasserted the significance for the public status of women's reproductive role as the basis of the public and private divisions. She argued in her article that the vast majority of opportunities for public influence and prestige were all recognizead as men's privilege and right in all known human groups. She criticized women scholars who emphasized situations in which women enjoyed the use of power because that this kind of works reinforced the idea of gender differences as essential attributions to men and women. She also stated that this kind of work neglected the fact that what we had to do was to change the world in which men and women utlimately lived together. Particularly upon the Marxist feminists who emphasized the w

목차

Ⅰ. 서론 : 여성의 종속적 지위와 공사영역 논의의 등장

Ⅱ. 미셀 로잘도의 공사영역 모델과 여성의 지위

Ⅲ. 공사영역의 모델을 둘러싼 다양한 비판들

Ⅳ. 로잘도의 재고찰 : 공사모델의 정치적 함의

Ⅴ. 결론에 대신하여

참고문헌

Abstract