Ann McClintock “’Massa’ and Maids”

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

East End

Triangulation Gender/Class/Race

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

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 19 th 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

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

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