You-me Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender,Park Race, and the Question of Separate SpheresandGayieWald

0'n 20 June 1996, the regents of the University ofCalifornia approved a now infamous resolution mandating that as of1 January 1997 the university would be forbidden to consider "race,religion, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin" in admitting stu-dents.' The issue of "race-based preferences"—the deliberately pro-vocative phrase adopted by those opposed to affirmative action—wasultimately put to California voters, who in November 1996 voted topass Proposition 209 by a margin of fifty-four to forty-six percent. Theeffect of this initiative, ostensibly designed to boost the percentage ofstudents gaining admission solely on the basis of academic achieve-ment, has been immediate and chilling. A report about admissionsto University of California law schools released in the spring of 1997shows a radical drop in the number of African Americans admitted,down from 104 in 1995 to 21 in 1996. The group that so far has prof-ited most dramatically from the new California policy is Caucasians,despite widely held expectations that Asian Americans would reapthe greatest benefits. Ward Connerly. the African American regentwho led the effort to promote passage of the resolution, told the LosAngeles Times that he "welcomed" such reports. "We are too politi-cally correct to reach the conclusion; they are not as competitive to belawyers and doctors. If we really want to help those black and Latinokids, we will give them some tough love and get them channeled backinto being able to compete. " ̂

We begin with these facts, at once familiar and dizzying in theirimplications, because the complex scenario they point to raises issuesthat we explore in this essay: access to public institutions; whose

American Literature, Volume 70, Number 3, September 1998. Copyright © 1998 byDuke University Press.

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interests are represented within the public political sphere; the figu-ration of race and gender and their pitting against one another (sinceit often goes unremarked that afiirmative action has also benefitedwhite women); media representations that pit socially beleagueredand socially legitimated minority groups against one another; andthe privatization of certain interests and needs under a "tough love"policy that has little to do with love and even less to do with justice.

We raise the following questions; How does minority literaturerepresent the boundaries between public and private spheres in theUnited States? How do these boundaries reinforce and overlap classand gender lines? How does the nation-state participate in dictatinghow these boundaries are drawn? Rather than assuming that literarytexts unproblematically refiect reality, we want to pay close attentionto their strategies of representation. We want to ask how the pri-vate and public spheres are imagined and figured in these texts, howfemale subjects negotiate their positions both in and between pub-lic and private spheres, and where and how literary texts locate andrepresent the political and economic power that shapes, inscribes, andsometimes nullifies the hopes, fears, and desires of female subjects.

In what follows, we explore these issues through an analysis oftexts by two African American and two Asian American writers: AnnPetry's The Street (1946), Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha (1953),Cynthia Kadohata's The Floating World (1989), and Chang-rae Lee'sNative Speaker (1995). In looking at these texts, we explore the re-lation between the public sphere and the simultaneously privatizedand publicized subjectivities of black and Asian women. Our choice ofthese novels is strategic at a number of levels. Most importantly, theyenable us to conduct an investigation of how the separate spheresmodel is constitutive of gender and race discourses, and to do so interms that insist on the historical specificity of our own endeavor aswell as the object of our investigation. Both sets of texts were pro-duced at moments of perceived crisis in the discourses of race, gen-der, ethnicity, nationality, and labor—crises that subsequently foundsocial expression through the reordering of public and private. It isthrough the lens of such reorderings that these novels elucidate theparticular plights of poor women of color—both "native" populationssuch as African Americans, who under segregation were explicitlydenied citizens' rights within the formal public sphere, and immigrantpopulations of Japanese and Korean Americans, whose citizenshipstatus has been subject to anxious scrutiny and policing speculation.

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The novels by Petry and Brooks, written in the aftermath of WorldWar II, explicitly and implicitly portray the (re)domestication ofwomen workers confronting the return to the nationalized domesticsphere of male citizen-soldiers. Both Tlte Street and Maud Martha areprimarily concerned with the everyday struggles and aspirations ofpoor African American women. These women are not simply victimsof domesticity, and their modes of access to the public sphere arenot simple either, sometimes entailing psychological or physical viola-tion. Juxtaposed, respectively, against a romanticized representationof the black masses and the figure of the masculinized soldier-citizen,Petry's and Brooks's protagonists find no easy solutions to the prob-lems posed by their inability to gain meaningful control over theterms of their publicity or privacy.

The novels by Lee and Kadohata address the issues of immigra-tion, nationality, citizenship, and domesticity in the context of theshifting boundaries between internal and external national territo-ries and public spheres. These novels were produced during the late1980s and early 1990s, another period of crisis, when anti-immigrationsentiments were being fueled by collective anxiety about limited re-sources and job opportunities for "legitimate" subject-citizens. InNative Speaker, an acclaimed novel about the formation of a KoreanAmerican subjectivity, Chang-rae Lee deftly portrays the way his pro-tagonist Byongho is shaped and defined by a sense of secrecy andshame concerning his difference; Asian looks, immigrant parents whodon't act like normal parents, and, most importantly, his compromisedmale sexuality vis-à-vis his white wife Lelia. The shadowy figuresof Korean American women disrupt Lee's narrative, which mostlyconcerns itseff with the legitimation of a male immigrant subject inthe public sphere. Tucked away in the hyperfeminized private spheresanctioned by both traditional Korean ideals of domestic women andthe U.S. belief in Asian American self-sufficiency ("they don't askfor social welfare"), these women are denied any meaningful accessto the public sphere. In The Floating World, Kadohata's protagonistOlivia lives through the period immediately following World War IItrying to negotiate both a domesticized femininity and a public Japa-nese identity. During the war the public definition of Japanese Ameri-cans as Japanese—and thus the enemy—keeps Olivia and her familyfrom taking root as "Americans." Their position as noncitizens issignified in their failure to gain access to the private sphere.

By juxtaposing these two sets of texts from very different eras in

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postwar US. history, we intend to critique not only the binary logicof separate spheres but aiso the binary iogic of race that persistswithin the popular imagination even as iate-twentieth-century demo-graphic shifts, combined with the emergence of new identity cate-gories sucb as biraciai or multiraciai. cieariy signal the inadequacy ofa black-white model. The juxtaposition of African American and AsianAmerican texts presents particuiar opportunities for undermining thefetishistic separation of black and white racial spheres without re-treating to easy (that is. romanticized) notions of hybridity. As eventssuch as the 1992 Los Angeies uprisings and the murder triai of 0. J.Simpson iiiustrate, even within the most patentiy hybrid sociai sce-narios, biackness can be made to function as a metaphor for race, notonly obscuring the racialization of other U.S. minority popuiations butkeeping pubiic discourse iocked within the dominant logic of blackand white. At the same time, the representation of bitter antagonismsbetween different raciaiized minority popuiations—another productof the L. A. uprisings, in which conflict between Korean American andAfrican American pubiics was naturaiized as the product of intrac-tabie cultural differences—has the effect of reinscribing raciai polarityby reproducing a rhetoric of whites and others. By focusing on the ani-mosities between Korean Americans and African Americans, pubiicdiscourse in efíect reinforced a binary between the minorities miredin scuffies and whites who iook on and reguiate. The difficuity ofthinking outside a racial binary has important impiications for how weorganize knowiedge in educationai institutions—as wefl as in the pub-iic sphere constituted through media representation. For exampie,in high schooi and coiiege ciassrooms. on American flterature syl-iabi, and in anthoiogies of American iiterature, African American andAsian American texts are often reiegated to and anaiyzed within sepa-rate spheres or lumped together under the potentiaiiy triviaÜzing anddeiegitimizing rubric of minority iiterature.

Over the course of the iast two decades the notion of separate and dis-tinct spheres of sociai, cuiturai, and economic life—a private sphereencompassing domestic iife, "symboÜc reproduction," and the "mod-ern restricted nuclear family" and a public sphere of "material re-production, political participation, debate, and opinion formation"^—has been subject to rigorous and thoroughgoing critique, so much so

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that scholars have begun to question the usefulness of such a model.Some of the most trenchant of these recent critiques have come fromfeminist critical theorists, who have argued that the separate spheresmodel naturalizes bourgeois male subjectivity even as it seeks todemonstrate that the bourgeois subject (understood as male, liter-ate, and landed) is the historical product of complex social changeswrought by European modernity and modernization. Nancy Fraser,for example, has carefully criticized Jürgen Habermas's influentialwork on the public sphere and on the historical emergence of a public-private distinction in several essays, finding it methodologicafly andideologically complicit with women's relegation to the less privileged,or private, side of the binary.̂ Complementing and extending Fraser'swork, a number of feminist cultural historians and literary scholarshave shown that gender cannot be tidily or consistently mapped ontothe separate spheres model, as earlier work had suggested. Contend-ing that the public and the private have never been wholly separateand that women's power cannot be adequately gauged according tothe degree of women's exclusion from the public sphere (at least asconventionally defined), these scholars have established that even inthe nineteenth century—the era, in the United States, of the publiclycelebrated cult of domesticity and true womanhood—women wereimportant social actors within various public arenas, including ladies'anti-slavery and temperance societies, organizations of working-classwomen, and popular literary culture.^

The relation of such recent feminist work to an orthodox separatespheres model is perhaps best characterized as critically collabora-tive — attentive to the model's utility (particularly for historicizing andde-universalizing key terms such as domesticity and the family) and, atthe same time, wary of its status as an ideological production largelysilent about, and therefore potentially recuperative of, women's sub-ordination within patriarchal gender hierarchies. As Kathy Peiss ob-serves, although the separate spheres model "might seem consignedto the dustbin of historiography," nevertheless it "has retained itssalience for feminist cultural historians as an ideology that organizesand gives meaning to social experience, a social construction that iscontested and renegotiated over time. "̂ In other words, the fact thatthe separate spheres model is a social construction does not negatethe notion that public and private are sociafly real insofar as theystructure the terms of social agency and inclusion, the formation of

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social identities and subjectivities, and our capacity to imagine alter-native or competing narratives of the social. The past few decades ofcritical analysis point to the emergence of a scholarly consensus aboutthe need to deconstruct the hierarchical binary of an orthodox sepa-rate spheres model and to replace it with one that acknowledges thatpublic and private are not stable, unchangeable, or natural polarities.Acknowledging the social pliability of separate spheres demands thatwe stay alert to how the distinction between public and private hasbeen maintained through legal, cultural, and economic discourses.But it also obliges us to investigate the modes by which various publicinterests have tacitly or explicitly challenged these discourses, eitherby constructing alternative publics or by imagining different ways ofcirculating and distributing power between public and private.

A strict separate spheres analytical framework, with its fetisbiisticand reductionist separation of the public and the private, obscures cru-cial questions about mobility and agency across socially constructedlines of difference. The terms public and private have born, and con-tinue to bear, the inscription of ongoing struggles around questionsof access to social power, where power is a function of one's loca-tion within a social geography of separate spheres. Our emphasis onmobility and access here is strategic as well as practical, given theintimate link between social subordination and social immobility. Tocite one concrete example: even for the nineteenth-century bourgeoiswhite female subject for whom the notion of a separate and safe pri-vate sphere has most relevance, the consequences of a discourse ofseparate spheres have never only or primarily centered on women'scotifinement to the private, or on the putatively inverse relation be-tween female domesticity and modes of access to masculine publicpower.̂ Just as it imagines femininity as a lack of agency, the public-private model imagines masculinity as an ability to access both thepublic and the private. As Fraser puts it, "in both spheres womenare subordinated to men. "̂ For those who have not enjoyed the privi-lege of crossing the line or benefited from separate spheres, accessto public sites of power is typically accompanied by self-mutilation,sacrifice, or loss.

Alongside the fact that the private sphere has been as exclusionaryas the public to the "less deserving," we also need to realize thatwomen's coveted entrance into the public sphere may follow a patri-archal script rather than liberating them from patriarchal restraints.As Doreen Massey argues in Space, Place, and Gender:

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Many women have had to leave home precisely to forge their ownversion of their identities, from Victorian Lady Travellers to MinnieBruce Pratt. Moreover, in certain cultural quarters, the mobilityof women does indeed seem to pose a threat to a settled patriar-chal order. Whether it be the specific fact of going out to work innineteenth-century England or the more general difficulty . . . ofkeeping track of women in the city. The relation to identity is againapparent.''

It is certainly true that for some women (especially those with classprivilege) leaving home has been liberating. It is also true that anopportunity to become a worker rather than a domestic woman hasenabled some working-class women to explore the possibility of de-fining themselves in a nonsexualized way, on the assumption thatby eluding the ruthless sexualizing of their bodies they will becomeless vulnerable to violation and violence. Yet the possibility of womenposing a threat to a patriarchal order when they emerge from theprivate sphere has been more than anticipated in most modern formsof patriarchy. This threat has been exaggerated and used to justifythe confinement of women to the domestic sphere as well as the ex-ploitation and persecution of working women. Hence the efficacy ofpatriarchy is predicated upon its ability to weave in and out of theboundaries between the private and public spheres while maintainingthe mirage of separate spheres in which men and women hold theirown kinds of power.

Given the centrality of questions of mobility to a discussion ofseparate spheres, it is surprising that issues of race and ethnicityhave figured so infrequently in recent feminist critiques of Haber-masian social and cultural theory. It is obvious that the public sphereis implicitly and explicitly racialized as well as gendered—that is,normatively defined as masculine awd white, and accessed via a privi-leged relation to patriarchal and white supremacist discourses.^" Nine-teenth-century abolitionist writers were explicitly concerned withelaborating the ways that the boundaries of public and private wereconstituted by and through discourses of race as well as gender.Eager to debunk the cult of true (white) womanhood, abolitionist au-thors took great pains to demonstrate that the sexualized violenceassociated with public rituals such as slave auctions and with thepublic symbolism of white racial authority (most notably, the cowhidewhip) thoroughly permeated the private sphere. In their accounts of

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domestic bondage, writers such as Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wil-son took great care to portray bourgeois white women not merely asthe victims of domestic enslavement but as the powerful overseers oftheir households, as adept at enforcing the rule of racial and class su-periority as the plantation overseers charged with enforcing the willof the slaveholding master. Not only does the conventional bourgeoisdistinction between public and private fall away in the face of suchhistorical evidence, but it is clear from such examples that the subjec-tive value of public and private is radically contingent upon gender,race, ethnicity, and citizenship. In short, such examples invalidate thepresumption of a necessary or essential coupling between terms likepublicity and citizenship, privacy and safety}^

Contemporary feminist scholars have elaborated, extended, andamplified these nineteenth-century critiques of the public-private bi-nary and its relation to the racialized and sexualized division of labor,bringing their insights to bear on the experience of twentieth-centuryimmigrant and migrant female workers of color. "Black women's ex-periences and those of other women of color have never fit [theprivate-public] model," writes Patricia Hill Collins in Black FeministThought. "Rather than trying to explain why Black women's workand family patterns deviate from the alleged norm, a more fruitfulapproach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and familythemselves. " '̂ Angela Davis's Women, Race, and Class takes just suchan approach, noting that while black women have been able to circum-vent many of the conditions of patriarchal domesticity through theiroutside work, this work has itself been privatized, relegated to theprivate sphere of white middle-class women's homes. "In 1910, whenover half of all Black females were working outside their homes."Davis writes, "one-third of them were employed as domestic workers.By 1920 over one-half were domestic servants, and in 1930 the pro-portion had risen to three out of five. "̂ ^ As Davis demonstrates, theprivate sphere of middle-class white women's domesticity was con-structed through the use of the labor of working women of color, espe-cially black women. Hence white middle-class women's privacy anddomestic comfort were dependent on the "outside" labor of women ofcolor, whose public sphere of work was white middle-class women'sprivate sphere.

Asian immigrant women also found it much easier to assume theidentity of a worker when they remained within the domestic sphere.

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Hence tiieir entry into the pubiic sphere of work was compromisedfrom the very beginning, since the moment they began to work asdomestics, they were even more thoroughly defined as private beingsthan when they worked in tbeir own homes; in middle-class whitewomen's private spaces, they were rendered invisibie. As EveiynNakano Glenn writes:

For racial-ethnic women, then, empioyment in domestic servicebecame a iong-term proposition, not a temporary expedient. Theirconcentration in domestic service in turn reinforced their degradedstatus in society. They came to be seen as particularly suited for,and only suited for, degraded work. Raciai-ethnic status and occu-pational position became more or iess synonymous badges of inferi-ority. The biack cleaning woman, the Mexican maid, the Japanesehousecleaner. became stereotyped images that helped to rational-ize and justify their subordination.'""

The pubiic and private spheres are thus not separate for these womeniaborers but deliberately and persistently superimposed. As a con-sequence, the identity of raciai-ethnic women within the public iscompromised by the demand that they maintain their private (that is,degraded) identities even in the pubiic sphere.

When contemporary feminist discourses assume a facUe binaryiogic, tbeir potentiai to dismantle patriarchal definitions and regu-lations of women is seriously compromised. Women who don't fiteasiiy Into the conventionai gender polarities of pubiic and private—for exampie, women who are not victims in easfly recognizable waysbecause they are not confined to the private sphere, or who areperceived as workers with access to the pubiic—become, in effect,mascuiinized. That is to say, these women's access to the pubiic be-comes a structural alibi for their invisibility as women. At the sametime, and in a compiementary way, feminist critique that works todestabiiize the public-private binary by mapping gender onto it ineffect renders gender the priviieged, and hence pubflc, term of anaiy-sis at the expense of issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Quiteliterally, once gender is recuperated from its position of invisibiiitywithin tiie Habermasian paradigm and made part of a pubiic feministsciiolarly conversation about separate spheres, terms like race andnation are rendered invisibie and hence privatized. Additive strate-gies of bringing such terms together within a critique of the separate

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spheres model inevitably transcribe and reinscribe the binary logic ofpublic and private—the very logic such analyses propose to critique.In effect, the binary logic of public-private becomes the operativeprinciple of such an additive model, in which previously privatizedterms are added on to already existing models, leaving the modelsthemselves intact. Instead of producing analyses that make visible theinterconnectedness of terms like race and gender, the binary analyticof public-private initiates a process in which these terms eventuaflyannul one another.

Such theoretical difficulties lend further urgency to the questionof whether the distinction between public and private spheres is ulti-mately another solid thing that will melt into air. Our goal in thefollowing literary explorations is not necessarily to transcend thepublic-private distinction but to make these categories more histori-cally responsible and more responsive to the needs of subjects whohave been marginalized by the separate spheres model. By "margin-alized" subjects we mean those who do not have the authority tonegotiate the shifting boundaries of public and private and are un-able to mobilize the discourse of publicity and privacy to articulatetheir needs, wishes, and rights. Such authority is necessary if thesesubjects are to acquire autonomy over the way they are representedwithin the public sphere. Representation in this context is not mereabstraction; nor is it an issue only within the public sphere. Rather,representation has its own real power; it is in fact the means thatthose with power use to assert it within both the public and privatesphere.

Ann Petry's The Street and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, despitethe half century that separates their publication, both offer opportuni-ties to investigate the fragile boundary between the public and privatespheres, a boundary drawn and redrawn according to the allegedneeds of privileged social groups. For the female subjects in Petry'sand Lee's narratives, the private sphere in which they are trapped isalways already inscribed and saturated by the violent racialization andsexualization of their identities, bodies, and labor. In particular, thefascination by and aversion towards the ruthlessly sexualized bodiesof these women, exemplified by the real and threatened sexual vio-lence against them in the private, domestic sphere, reinscribes public

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perceptions and definitions of these women. Furthermore, femalesubjects of color in both novels are complicit with as well as victim-ized by the myth of bourgeois respectability and domesticity thatprohibits them from reaching out to alternative communities and puh-lic spheres. Reading Petry's The Street alongside Lee's Native Speakerallows us to reevaluate the paradigm of linear historical develop-ment in light of women's negotiations with the public sphere. Whydoes Petry's protagonist in The Street share so much of the isolation,despair, hope, and fantasy of Ajuma in Lee's Native Speaker?

The Street, Ann Petry's best-selling novel about a poor unmarriedblack mother living in Harlem in 1944, is primarily concerned withthe ways in which racism, poverty, and the patriarchal sexualizationof women condition the opportunities and experiences of its pro-tagonist, Lutie Johnson. From its opening description of a blusteryNovember wind to its closing image of snow settling on the "grime,""garbage." and "ugliness" of the New York streets, the novel char-acterizes Lutie's social and natural environments as assaultive.'^ Theopening scenes find Lutie searching for an apartment for herself andher young son Bub, but it becomes clear that domesticity offers noprotection from the social; rather, domestic spaces are those thatinteriorize the violence of the outside world.

Lutie and Bub's cramped, dark, and suffocating apartment is a farcry from the houses that look to Lutie "like something in the movies"(38). The physical deterioration of the apartment not only mirrorsLutie's emotional deterioration as she worries about her ability topay the rent and protect Bub (without child care, these two tasksare sometimes mutually exclusive), but it also represents the interi-orization of "urban decay," the cumulative effect of inadequate urbanplanning, population migrations, declining infrastructure, and large-scale economic deprivation. "The Street" enters Lutie's home in morethan one way, however. Bob Jones, a fellow tenant and supervisorof the building where she lives, embodies the interiorized, domes-ticated threat of sexual objectification and violation that conditionsLutie's experiences on the outside—at work, in the nightclubs whereshe occasionally sings, and on the city streets themselves, it wouldnot be overstating the case to say that Lutie's everyday experienceis defined as the attempt to avoid rape. Treated as if her body werepublic property, especially by men. Lutie finds little solace, privacy,or protection from sexual abuse in being able to afford a "room of

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her own. " What privacy Lutie does have, moreover, bears the imprintof her powerlessness; it is a privacy imposed rather than chosen, anisolation Lutie suffers as a result of not having a public of her own,a community that might offer her emotional nurturance and physicalprotection.

Earah Jasmine Griffin suggests that Lutie could discover sucb alife-sustaining tonic in the voice of her grandmother and hence, met-onymically, in a community of black female kin who are also survivorsof racism and patriarchy.'^ Such sources of community are. however,closer to home than Lutie's grandmother. They also lie in the variouswomen—also black and also poor—who occupy Lutie's apartmentbuilding, especially Min, the woman who lives with Bob Jones andeventually musters the will to leave him. Petry makes clear thatLutie's desperate attachment to an imagined ideal of bourgeois re-spectability hinders her ability to connect in meaningful ways withother women (and men). Although The Street is typically character-ized as a naturalist novel in the tradition oí Native Son (1940), Petryresists depicting Lutie as a passive victim of environment and cir-ctmistance. Ironically, it is Lutie's fidelity to the American Dreamof meritocratic reward for individual effort—a dream exemplified inU.S. national mythology by Benjamin Frankfin-that binds her to thestreet. Walking home with her groceries one evening, Lutie comparesherself to Franklin, insisting—despite the fact that 116th Street inHarlem is not "Philadelphia a pretty long number of years ago"—that"if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and could prosper,then so could she" (64). Insofar as Lutie's American dream enshrineswealth rather than social justice as the privileged object of individualambition and the measure of civic virtue. The Street suggests. Lutieis ideologically trapped, complicit with the social forces that oppressher and whose power lies largely beyond her control. While racism, inLutie's experience, materializes as an all-but-unavoidable instrumentof white social control—"Streets like the one she lived on were noaccident. They were the North's lynch mobs" (323) —Lutie is never-theless responsible for her investment in the ideology of an Americandream that professes to be gender- and race-neutral.

Petry's calling the urban milieu a Northern lynch mob is tellingbecause it renders in material form immaterial, invisible ideologies.Indeed, "The Street" of the novel's title refers not to a particulargeographical location but to a single, determining environment that

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makes obsolete conventional distinctions between outside and inside,street and home, sacred and profane. And although black womenwere frequently the victims of Southern lynchings, Petry's metaphorincludes and even centralizes black male subjects within the circleof her analysis. Lynching, as a performative spectacle, is intended tobe read as a double-edged threat to masculinized African Americansubjects: first, as a violation of their physical integrity; and second, asthe feminization of their bodies (male or female) so that they can besexually assaulted and violated. Thus the trope of lynch mobs revealsthe moment when Petry herself privileges the masculinized render-ing of Lutie's plight and suffering, and privatizes the issue of genderLutie's narrative is folded into the larger narrative of racial violencethat doesn't read Lutie as a gendered subject. Similarly, when Lutieinspects the name on the mailboxes of her future residence, she en-visions herself as one facet of a collective subjectivity—a figure of theblack masses:

She leaned over to look at the names on the mail boxes. Henry Lin-coln Johnson lived here, too, just as he did in all the other housesshe'd looked at. Either he or his blood brother. The Johnsons andthe Jacksons were mighty proUflc. Then she grinned, thinking whoam I to talk, for I, too, belong to that great tribe, that mighty mightytribe of Johnsons. (6-7)

The Street ends on a bitterly ironic note, as Lutie Johnson flees NewYork, leaving her son Bub to fend for himself in reform school. Petry'sultimate "solution" to her protagonist's struggle to discover a tolerablemeans out of poverty is to offer her movement without the promiseof mobility, choice without the promise of agency. In a parodie rever-sal of the slave-narrative trope of emancipatory flight from Southernenslavement to Northern freedom, or of the migration-narrative tropeof movement from rural Southern poverty to urban opportunity,'^ Lu-tie manages to flee domestic entrapment on a Chicago-bound trainthat "roar[sl into darkness" (436). This is hardly the Utopian free-dom of the road envisioned a few years later by Jack Kerouac andNeal Cassady, whose novels celebrate and enshrine the fantasy ofa masculinized American mobility predicated upon the evasion of adomesticating and entrapping feminine and upon the assumption ofwhite male entitlement to inhabit the public spaces of others. How-ever dystopian The Street's vision of the road for a penniless and

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unmarried African American woman in the late 1940s. Lutie's escapefrom the suffocation of the urban street at the end of the novel never-theless substitutes for the certainty of imprisonment for the murderof Boots Smith, the egotisticai henchman of the powerfui siumiordJunto. The specter of imprisonment—tbe uitimate expression of statepower over the individual—hangs heavily over the novei, aithough itsthreat never materializes."*

In Native Speaker, it is not the specter of imprisonment but the real-ization of confinement that uitimateiy defeats the immigrant femalesubject. The maie protagonist, Byongho, recoflects the arrivai of aKorean woman in his domestic space after his mother's death:

I waiked outside. A dim figure of a woman stood unmoving in thedarkness next to my father's Chevroiet. . . . Beside ber were twosmall bags and a cardboard box messfly bound with the twine.When I got closer to her slie lifted both bags and so I picked upthe box; it was very heavy, fuli of glass jars and tins of pickiedvegetables and meats. I realized sbe had transported homemadefood thousands of miles, all the way from Korea, and the stench ofoverripe kimchee shot up through the cardboard flaps and I nearlydropped the whoie thing. . . . This woman, I couid see, had deeppockmarks stippling her high, fleshy cheeks, like the scarring froma mistreated bout of chickenpox or smaflpox. and she stood muchshorter than I first thought, bareiy five feet in her heeied shoes. Herankies and wrists were as thick as posts. She waited for me to turnand start for the house before she followed severai steps behindme. I was surprised that my father wasn't waiting in the doorway,to greet her or hoid the door, and as I walked up the carpeted stepsleading to the kitchen I saw that the food and drink I had preparedhad been cleared away.'̂

This woman, wbo is to replace Byongho's mother, has just arrivedfrom Korea and been transported from the airport. As Byongho'sfather iater expiains, she has been imported as part of a pian for thefamily's "move-up," a pian that inciudes moving into a "big house andyard" in a ritzy neighborhood.

It is not mere coincidence that the acquisition of a private resi-dence, a prominent marker of class mobiiity for Asian American im-

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migrants in particular, is planned to occur shortly after the arrivalof the woman. In both tbe Korean and American patriarchal imagi-nation, the private sphere wifl not have been fully attained until thephysical domestic space is complemented by always available femalelabor and sexuality. In the context of the immigrant domestic sphere,the burden on women can be two-fold because they are also requiredto retrieve and recreate the domestic rituals associated with Koreandomesticity. The woman in Lee's text knows only too well what'sexpected of her: she has risked the scrutiny of customs officers andbrought Jars of Kimchee and pickled meat all the way from Korea. Inthe name of preserving national culture—a project sometimes toutedas patriotism and sometimes evoked as simple nostalgia—Korean im-migrants' versions of nationalism exact an unreasonable amount ofwomen's labor. Female immigrants in the Korean American commu-nity are thus assigned the role of the preserver of national traditionsand spirits within the private sphere. Relegated to this role and thissetting, such immigrant women do not have the mobility that allowsaccess to the public sphere where political, economic, and culturalpower are negotiated and distributed. They are also burdened by theshame and self-hatred that Korean immigrants harbor towards thepart of their Koreanness that refuses to yield to "real" Americanness.In Native Speaker, the woman's pockmarked face, embarrassinglyshort stature, and ankles and wrists "thick as posts" not only betrayByongho's loathing of her but also anticipate and legitimate her rele-gation to thorough isolation in her own space until the end of thenovel, when she makes her debut in the outside world on a hospitaldeathbed.

This woman's place even within the domestic sphere is firmly de-fined at the moment of her arrival. She knows that she won't begreeted by the patriarch and that she doesn't deserve the "food anddrink" Byongho would normally serve other male guests. As a sym-bolic gesture and an economic principle, Byongho shouldn't performany kind of labor for the woman. The much touted Asian hospitality,which regulates the privatized yet formal exchange between the pub-lic and private spheres, is easily overridden by patriarchal rules con-cerning labor and class in the domestic sphere.

Once the woman has been established in the domestic sphere, theprotagonist understands "that her two rooms, the tiny bathroom ad-joining them, and the kitchen and pantry [constitute] the sphere of

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her influence" (65). Despite Byongho's facile reading of her area ofinfluence according to the separate spheres model, he senses that shedoesn't assume authority over her own body, let alone the domesticsphere in which she labors: "Sometimes I thought she was some kindof zombie. When she wasn't cleaning or cooking or folding clothesshe was barely present; she never whistled or hummed or made anynoise, and it seemed to me as if she only partly possessed her ownbody, and preferred it that way" (65). Byongho dimly perceives thatthe woman's body has itseff been co-opted and incorporated into thestructure of the domestic sphere, so that she cannot assume full au-thority over it. Rendered identical to her domestic labor, the womanhas no access to cultural, political, or "economical" encounters withAmerican society. She doesn't watch television ("she always turnedthem [soap operas] off after a few minutes") or go shopping by her-seff (Byongho's father would "take her to the mall and buy her someclothes and shoes"). She is never properly named in the text butremains throughout "Ah-ju-ma, " a Korean name for a woman of no sig-nificance (similar to "Auntie" in the U.S.) and is never interpellatedby the outside world. Whether it is true that she "preferred it thatway" remains unclariñed and unclarifiable because the reader nevergets a glimpse into her consciousness. Denied interiority, "Ah-ju-ma"occupies a curious (but predictable in representations of domesticworkers) mode of hyperprivatized existence in which she has noaccess to individualized subjectivity.

Thus Native Speaker, which is mainly concerned with the KoreanAmerican male protagonist's sexual anxiety vis à vis his white wifeand with his agony over his privatized identity, early on introducesthe reader to a Korean woman who leads her entire life within a highlyclaustrophobic domestic sphere. The issues raised by the main plotof the novel—immigrant subjectivity, cultural interpretation of theAmerican public sphere, and publicity and access to political power-have to be read against the backdrop of the numberless and namelessAh-ju-mas. During the current period of perceived crisis, when im-migrant communities feel beleaguered by anti-immigrant sentimentsand legislation, Korean immigrants' negotiations of the botmdaries ofthe public and private spheres in the United States, especially withrespect to their needs and rights (to be educated, to work, and soon), tend to be carried out in masculinized terms that persistently

Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres 623

make invisible women working in the domestic sphere and ignoretheir desires and needs.

Unlike both The Street and Native Speaker, Gwendolyn Brooks's MaudMartha focuses explicitly on the protagonist's gendered subjectivityin the context of her negotiation of minority status within the U.S.public sphere. Maud Martha's desires and needs are presented to thereader in an unequivocally gendered form, particularly through theinteriorized expression of her hopes as a mother and her fantasiesas a domestic sexualized woman. The final pages of the novel, whichnarrates Maud Martha's development from childhood to adulthood(defined through marriage and childbirth), find Maud Martha opti-mistically contemplating both the end of World War II and her ownpregnancy. Not only will U.S. soldiers soon be returning home and lifereturning to "normal." but "in the meantime, she was going to haveanother baby."^" Brooks's juxtaposition of these two events—the onestaged within the hypermasculinized public sphere of war, the otherwithin the private sphere of Maud Martha's own body—draws ourattention to both the midcentury masculinization of national citizen-ship and the ways that women were both accorded and denied accessto the privileges of such citizenship because of their sexuality. Al-though black soldiers participated in all American wars. World War IImarked the moment when African American men began to organizepolitically around the war effort to demand their rights as citizens. Inearly postwar civil rights discourse, full citizenship for black men was(re) imagined as a reward for their wartime contributions, as blackcivil rights leaders successfully mobilized collective outrage that Afri-can Americans who had defended democracy abroad (that is. in thepublic sphere of war) could not enjoy the fruits of that democracy intheir home country. Such slogans were not only effective in rallyingpeople on the battlefield of civil rights, which could now be reinter-preted as the war at home in language that conflated the public andprivate spheres; these slogans were also instrumental in publicizingblack struggles for citizenship as struggles to defend black mascu-linity. Whereas African Americans had always understood segrega-tion and the various limitations imposed on black enfranchisement asaffronts to their constitutionally guaranteed rights as citizens, these

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outrages were now reconfigured in gendered terms, specifically as in-sults to black manhood. The modern civil rights movement was thusinitiated in the collective imagination, at least in part, through a dis-course of the citizen-solider that conflated issues of race, masculinity,and publicity, while using these issues to foreground the denial of fullcitizenship to black men.

The end of World War II produced a demand for two parallel re-orderings of the public-private divide. On the one hand was a gen-dered demand that women of all races step aside to allow men to re-sume their roles as workers and citizens; on the other was a racializeddemand that blacks be accorded full citizenship rights in recognitionof the wartime contributions of black men. But where were blackwomen's desires for citizenship and mobility within and between theseparate spheres being represented? On what imaginary battlegroundwithin the newly masculinized discourse of civil rights were blackwomen's civil rights to be fought for? Or, as Maud Martha says toherself at the end of the novel, "What, what, am I to do with all ofthis life?" (178). It is significant that this question, like most of MaudMartha's questions and observations, remains unvoiced to others inBrooks's text. From childhood on, Maud Martha has struggled to ac-cess publicity in the socially sanctioned way—by attaining "proper"femininity, like that of the "pale and pompadoured" women displayedas icons of black female "achievement" on the covers of the Negropress, or like that of her sister Helen, who has the requisite "longlashes, the grace, the little ways with the hands and feet" (3). Theprivatization of Maud Martha's subjectivity—given formal expressionin the novel as an unrelenting narrative interiority—operates in atleast two ways. Denied entrance into the public sphere as a legitimateworker because of her gender, she is also refused entrance throughher sexuality because of her race. As a black woman and "a thingof ordinary allurements" (20), Maud Martha cannot mobilize norma-tive beauty culture in the interests of her own power, and she thusfalls back upon reproduction as a way of producing and proliferatingher"seff."

If we define daily experience in terms of its publicity, then it couldbe said that very little happens to Maud Martha. She grows up, at-tends school, goes out on dates, marries, moves with her new husbandto an apartment, establishes her identity as a wife, and has her first

.̂ ^ Of course, Maud Martha's experience is more than just a col-

Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres 625

lection of the events that construct women's biographies within theparadigm of marriage and reproduction. Maud Martha's conclusionposes more questions than it answers. In the novei's finai Une, Maudeagerly anticipates future movement—"tbe weather was bidding herbon voyage" (180)—yet it is unciear whether she wifl ever be ableto construct the imagined or wished-for mobiiity that might providea way out of her kitchenette apartment. The promise of a child maybe joyful, but there seems Iittie likelihood that maternity will producethe conditions necessary for an escape from the domestic. Rather,Brooks's novei hints that Maud Martha's subjective interiority wiflcontinue to be reflected in her confinement to iiterai interiors—theword "confinement" resonating at the novei's end with its nineteenth-century associations with chfldbirth. It seems more likely, in otherwords, that as in Petry's novei the actuai experience of domesticitywfli continue to have a doubie effect on Maude Martha's subjectivity,ieading her simuitaneously to rejoice at the thought of men "backfrom the wars!" and to domesticate her own ambitions.

Cynthia Kadohata's The Floating World, iike Maud Martha, is situ-ated at the postwar moment when nationai identity and distinctionsbetween pubiic and private spheres are being reordered.^^ We ciosethis section with Kadohata's novei because it is a contemporary workthat iooks back at an eariier period of crisis with an eye towardunderstanding contemporary crises such as vioient anti-immigrantsentiments and poflcy-making. It also provides a means of expioringan aiternative modei of female subjectivity that reconfigures the re-iations among work, domesticity, and sexuality. How do we imaginean immigrant woman who is not reiegated to the domestic sphere orrendered publicized and vuinerabie in the public sphere? When doesshe assume autonomy over her body and work in both the pubiic andprivate spheres? How does she achieve the discursive and poiiticaiauthority necessary to negotiate the boundaries of her privacy andpubiicity? The Floating World offers a possible refiguring of the pub-lic and private spheres tbat neither reiegates women of color to theprivate sphere nor makes them vuinerabie by pubiicizing them.

The Floating World's protagonist and narrator. Oflvia, grows up intransit, as it were, foilowing her parents as they iook for work andsociai and emotionai stabflity:

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We sometimes traveled in the Pacific states with one or two otheryoung Japanese families, heading for jobs the fathers had heard of.We moved often for three reasons. One was bad luck—the busi-nesses my father worked for happened to go under, or the next jobwe headed to evaporated while we were in transit. Also, it could behard even into the fifties and sixties for Japanese to get good jobs.Nothing was ever quite the position my father felt he deserved.The third reason was that my parents were dissatisfied with theirmarriage, and somehow, moving seemed to give vent to that dis-satisfaction. It was hard to leave our homes, but once we startedtravefling, a part of me loved that life. . . . I remember bow fine itwas to drive through the passage of light from morning to noon tonight. (4)

The perspective of the young Olivia is retained in this passage, whichpresents the family's predicament as stemming from three disparatecauses: inscrutable "bad luck" in keeping jobs, the accident of theirJapanese identity, and conflict within the family. The three causesroughly coincide with the difficulties Japanese immigrants had to dealwith in postwar America: the economic crisis brought on by slowereconomic growth, the racializing nationalist discourse that definedJapanese Americans only as Japanese, and the reconfiguring of gen-der relations within the family. TTie Floating World can be read as anarrative of the process by which the adult Olivia reinterprets theseseemingly unrelated factors to reach a deeper understanding of eachdomain and to attain a holistic view of her own social reality thattakes into account how a crisis in the US. economy fuels exclusionarynationalist sentiments, how the pressure to assimilate puts strain onthe most private and intimate relationships, and how changes in em-ployment patterns in the public sphere and rituals and gender roles inthe private sphere influence one another.

The constant traveling of Olivia's family undoubtedly reflects theiruprootedness and social instability. Yet the evocation of fine momentswhen the family drives "through the passage of light from morningto noon to night" suggests that there is more to this recollection thanthe narrator's nostalgia for her childhood. Learning to make a homeout of motels and cars, Olivia also moves flexibly across the imaginedboundaries between public and private spheres. Far from idealizingthis freedom^ however, the text shows us Olivia struggling with a

Gender. Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres 627

claustrophobic sense of confining family ties. The fact that familymembers have no stable links to the outside world seems to inten-sify their interdependency and their sense of estrangement from thelarger world. Nevertheless, Olivia's experience and her understand-ing of the shifting boundaries between public and private empowersher to shape and define her identity as a gendered worker-subject. At ahatchery in a little town in Arkansas. Olivia learns about workers' soli-darity as well as their exclusionary politics and their cruelty towardpeople they perceive as misfits or deviants. In the end. she opts toleave her family and the hatchery in order to carve out a space whereshe can draw the boundaries for her privacy and her public existenceas a worker.

Traveling to repair and restock the vending machines in the Pacificstates where she used to travel with her parents. Olivia reckons withthe ghost of her father (Jack) and her own past life, which has beendefined by him and what he represents; family legacy, disillusion-ment, racialized subjecthood, and patriarchy. After she has situatedher father as a worker "as young as herseff" and has "worked silentlytogether" with him (159), she feels that she can move on; "The dryair smelted faintly of gasoline. I still had another stop, and for a mo-ment I began to worry about my work and forgot about Jack. I triedto calculate from the night sky what time it was, but then I gave up.It didn't matter; it was high time I left" (161). This final paragraphof the novel, despite its inevitably visionary nature, doesn't merelylevel out the conflicts and contradictions surrounding gendered andracialized subjectivities and the public discourses that represent andregulate them. Olivia's sense of resolution here has more to do withholding her ground as a second-generation immigrant-worker-womansubject than with a facile reconciliation with the outside world. Herachievement of mobility and freedom attains significance only in thecontext of carefully represented conflicts in both the public and pri-vate spheres. It goes without saying that not every immigrant womancan free herself from racial and gender conflicts by becoming a seff-employed caretaker of vending machines. Yet through the portrayalof Olivia's struggle to attain autonomy and mobility, the novel allowsus to take a critical look at the ways racism, the family, patriarchy,and concepts of immigrants, women, and workers define and shapeone another.

Kadohata's The Floating World attempts to explore the possibili-

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ties available to an Asian American female subject seeking to defineherself outside the ruthlessly sexualizing and racializing gaze of thedominant culture. We are not arguing that the liberating potential thatthe text imagines should be the model for all minority cultures. To doso would be to lapse into the binary logic of whites and minorities thatindiscriminately lumps together the varying aspirations and ambitionsof different minority publics. Rather, we are interested in performinga consciously limited yet focused reading of a cultural text that ad-dresses the issues surrounding public and private spheres, women'swork, and female sexuality. We do so with a view toward finding apiece of the puzzle we need to put together in order to understandthe collective imagination of raced and gendered subjects underlyingour legal discourses and daily rituals. Ultimately, the puzzle can-not be completed with only those pieces provided by the stories ofAfrican Americans and Asian Americans; pieces from the stories ofHispanic American women. Native American women, and others arealso needed.

Nancy Fraser begins her article "What's Critical about CriticalTheory?: The Case of Habermas and Gender" with Marx's defini-tion of critical theory as "the self-clarification of the struggles andwishes of the age."^^ In her subsequent argument for the need tomake the issue of gender central in our understanding of the separatespheres model, she fails to explore the relationships and the possibledistinctions between struggles and wishes. What if the concept ofstruggles implies a privileged relation to the public? And what if theconcept of wishes implies privatized desire? How do we link theseterms when struggles are waged at the level of wishes, as is the casein the texts discussed here? Wishing well and struggling well mustnot be relegated to separate spheres but must instead support oneanother within a dialectical relationship. By looking at the national-ized and masculinized public sphere in the United States from theperspective of women of color who must negotiate a skewed and un-even relationship with it. we have attempted to address questionsconcerning citizenship, family, labor, mobility, and agency. Althoughwe have attempted to bring these texts into conversation with oneanother, we are not constructing a linear narrative that follows anoptimistic trajectory from Lutie's sense of entrapment to Olivia's de-

Gender. Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres 629

parture. Rather, we have attempted to scrutinize the narrativizationof both the struggles and the wishes of African American and AsianAmerican female subjects.

The juxtaposition of these two sets of texts enables us to be his-torically specific about the ways that immigrant and native minoritypublics^'' differently negotiate the challenge of gaining power andrecognition within and across the public-private binary. Our analysisreveals that the discourse of separate spheres organizes these groupsdialectically. African Americans are still the most visible minoritygroup in American society, whereas Asian Americans' presence isoften obscured, the product of an imaginative amnesia that derivesfrom the tenacity of the black-white polarity. In media representa-tions, Asian Americans typically earn publicity through sanctionedforms of economic or cultural achievement (including assimilation);by contrast, African American "failure" is relentlessly publicized andspectacularized through media accounts of black crime and poverty(as in Petry's text). Within a culture that fetishizes the mobility ofthe impoverished but hardworking immigrant (to the disadvantage ofAfrican Americans, for whom immigration is less likely to figure asa part of American experience), Asian Americans are widely laudedfor taking care of themselves. As Native Speaker makes clear, AsianAmericans are socially rewarded as the model minority because theirproblems remain private—in this case, are unloaded onto the backsof economically vulnerable Korean American women. African Ameri-cans' problems are, by contrast, revealed in the full glare of the mediaspotlight, where the most impoverished citizens are not only subjectto withering and hostile public scrutiny but are represented as pre-senting their problems to a weakened and vulnerable welfare statethat they, in their helplessness and poverty, victimize.̂ ^ Because pub-lic institutions have historically been more progressive in allowingblack participation, they have been relatively dependable sources ofblack employnnent; hence African Americans have traditionally foundwork as social workers or teachers, in post offices and federal gov-ernment offices, and in the military African Americans confront theparticular injustice of having labored to build the American nation andyet being relegated to the status of noncitizens, a condition so absurdthat W. E. B. DuBois coined the phrase "double-consciousness" todescribe it.̂ ^ Automatic linkage of the terms worker and citizen issimilarly denied to Asian Americans, who are on the one hand seen

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as modeis of industry contributing to the heaith of the U.S. economyand on the other perpetuafly denied recognition as fufl citizens. AsianAmericans have come to occupy modei minority status in part be-cause of the beiief that tbey are willing to work without demandingthe civic reward for work—recognition as citizen-subjects. One of thesupposed merits of Asian-Americans is that they are not interested inrunning for office and do not vote.

It is significant that whiie African Americans and Asian Ameri-cans are seen as inhabiting, respectiveiy, pubiic and private positionswithin the U.S. popuiar imagination of race, both groups are feminized(in tbe sense of being marked under the sign of the feminine). In-deed, it is under the rubric of gender—and, in particuiar, of women'slabor—that the reiation of these differentiy racialized pubiics is besteiucidated. Although it is more common for the piights of Latinasand African American women to be iinked (perhaps because of AsianAmericans' status as the modei minority), in fact both Asian Americanand African American women have served as important sources ofU.S. domestic iabor, where sexuai violence is often a consequence oftheir domestication and sexuaiization. It comes as no surprise, there-fore, that immigrants (often coded as Asian) and weifare mothers(often coded as biack) today define the terrain upon which the mostrecent poiiticai assauits on pubiic resources have been waged.

Bryn Mawr CollegeGeorge Washington University

Notes

The regents didn't stop with university admissions but extended theresolution to cover decisions in hiring and contracting. Thus what wasiargely represented in the media as a student issue also directly af-fects iabor.Kenneth R. Weiss. "UC Law Schools' New Rules Cost Minorities Spots."Los Angeles Times, 15 May 1997.Nancy Fraser, "What's Critical About Critical Theory?: The Case of Ha-bermas and Gender, " in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Genderin Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,1989), 119.Fraser. "What's Criticai about Critical Theory?" and "Rethinking thePublic Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing De-

Gender. Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres 531

mocracy." in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapo-lis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 1993). 1-32.

5 See Kathy Peiss, "Going Public: Women in Nineteenth-Century CulturalHistory, " American Literary History 3 (winter 1991) : 817-28; and Mary P.Ryan. "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Cen-tury America, " in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 259-88.

6 Peiss, "Going Public." 817.7 For an argument that nineteenth-century bourgeois women exercised

considerable infiuence and power despite their relegation to the private,see Ann Douglas. The Feminization of American Culture (New York:Knopf, 1977).

8 Fraser, "What's Critical about Critical Theory?" 119.9 Doreen Massey. Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minne-

sota Press, 1994), 11.10 Michael Hanchard makes a similar point about the domain of the public

sphere in Brazil in "Black Cinderella?: Race and the Public Sphere in Bra-zil." in The Black Public Sphere, ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 171.

11 In a provocative reading of the Senate Judiciary Committee's confirma-tion hearings of then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Frasersimilarly observes that "categories of privacy and publicity are not simplygendered categories; they are racialized categories as well. Historicallyblacks have been denied privacy in the sense of domesticity. As a re-sult, black women have been highly vulnerable to sexual harassment atthe hands of masters, overseers, bosses, and supervisors. At the sametime, they have lacked the public standing to claim state protectionagainst abuse, whether suffered at work or at home" ("Sex. Lies andthe Public Sphere: Some Reflections on tbe Confirmation of ClarenceThomas." Critical Inquiry 18 [spring 1992]: 606). Despite the potential ofthese insights into the interarticulation of race and gender to complicatethe separate spheres model. Fraser is left at the end of the article call-ing, somewhat defensively and resignedly, for additional work: "In anyevent." she notes, foreclosing further discussion within her own essay,"we need more work that theorizes the racial subtext of categories ofprivacy and publicity and its intersection with the gender subtext" (606).

12 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 47.

13 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981),237-38.

14 Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Issei, Nisei, War Bride (Philadelphia: Temple Univ.Press, 1986), 5.

15 Ann Petry, The Street (1946; reprint, Boston: Houghton Miiïlin, 1974), 1-

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2. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically in thetext. See also Barbara Christian. Black Women Novelists: The Developmentof a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 1980).

16 See Farah Jasmine Griffin, "Who Set You Flowin'?": The African-AmericanMigration Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).

17 Within the African American slave narrative tradition, the trope of theslave's flight to freedom is well known. On images of mobility in blackmigration narratives, see Griffin, "Who Set You Flowin'?"

18 Particularly for African American men, prison is a public institution thathears the traces of a dialectical relation both to the street and to home. Inprison, not only individuality but actual citizenship is eviscerated, whilethe individual is reconstituted through new discourses of punishmentand rehabilitation. Moreover, while the disciplinary norms of state pris-ons demand the radical elimination of individual privacy (in shared cellsand bathroom facilities, activities that would be designated private onthe outside are made public and collective), prisons mediate the publicityof African American "deviance."

The threat of imprisonment is prefigured in the text when Lutie, alive-in domestic for the Chandlers, a wealthy white family, is presentone Christmas morning when Jonathan Chandler commits suicide in theliving room. From this incident Lutie learns not only that violence per-meates the private lives of white elites, but more importantly that wealthand status confer the power to enforce a nominal separation of privateand public affairs.

19 Chang-rae Lee. Native Speaker (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 62. Furtherquotations from this novel will be cited parenthetically in the text.

20 Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (Chicago: Third World Press. 1993).180. Further quotations from this novel will be cited parenthetically inthe text.

21 Students reading the novel for the first time in an introductory AfricanAmerican literature course have often complained that they are put offby Brooks's modernist style and are "bored" because "nothing happens"in the plot.

22 Cynthia Kadohata, The Floating World (New York: Ballantine Books,1989). Further quotations from this novel will be cited parenthetically inthe text.

23 Fraser, "What's Critical about Critical Theory?" 2.24 In "Sex. Lies and the Public Sphere," Nancy Fraser makes an enabling

distinction between the word communities—which falsely implies con-sensus and univocality within groups—and publics—a term that indi-cates heterogeneity and retains the implication of unity-through-struggle(611).

25 See Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Har-vard Univ. Press, 1988). Ironically, Fraser's reading of Clarence Thomas's

Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres 633

confirmation hearings overlooks the fact that this and other recent highlymediated juridical spectacles (such as the Rodney King beating andSimi Valley trial, and the murder trial of O. J. Simpson), which haveoften been falsely touted as facilitating public discourse about race andcitizenship, attest to the generally intense public scrutiny that attachesto minority (particularly African American) attainments and failures—especially failures.

26 According to W. E. B. DuBois: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness. . . . One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro;two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring idealsin one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being tornasunder" (The Souls of Black Folk 11903; reprint. New York: Penguin,19891, 5).

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