IRRADIACIÓN COMBINADA CON OTROS TRATAMIENTOS POSCOSECHA

Today, in m any W estern societies, home is taken to be a constitutive elem ent in the presentation of the self. It is also taken to be a backstage region (Coffman, 1956), a showcase for the w orld as weU as a shelter against it (Frykman and Lofgren, 1987).

The very idea of home m W estern societies is built up against that of the public space (Cieraad, 1999); it is commonly referred to as the 'w ithdraw al into the domestic sphere' (Kaufmann, 1988): the idea that 'there is no place like home', th at 'hom e is w here the heart is'; the idea, in brief, that home is a 'place a p art' (M artin and M ohanty quoted by Jackson and Moore, 1995, 13). Some, Hke Forty (1986), see this notion of home as 'a place for anything b u t w ork', as the p ro d u ct of the industrial revolution, of the removal of w ork from home to factories and offices and the ensuing transform ation of the household from a production unit to one defined by consumption. It is true th at in England for instance, since the end of the 18th Century and over the 19th Century, the m iddle class home has become increasingly separated from the workplace (Davidoff and Hall, 1995) just as much as the bourgeois house in France (Segalen, 1996) or the middle class house in Sweden (Frykman and Lofgren, 1987). Following Philippe Aries, m ost authors, however, see the emergence of the current ideas about home, about 'home sweet home', as being related to

changes in the emotional and psychological structure of family relations. For instance, in England, current ideas of home are related to changes in the ideas of domesticity within bourgeois circles (Hall, 1985; D avidoff and Hall, 1987; 1995). In Sweden, they relate to the emergence of "farmlism' among the middle class: a family-centred lifestyle dedicated to the 'cult of love' w hich is founded on the couple, the caring parents and domestic comfort (Frykman and Lofgren, 1987). The separation of the hom e and the outside w orld is a gendered one. It relates to an opposition between w hat has traditionally been considered the female and the male spheres, and to the subordination of the former to the latter as the works of Davidoff and Hall (1987, 1995) in England illustrate.^ From the end of the 18th Century in England, women were excluded from work. Their innocence, their virtue and their purity, those same qualities th at were taken to make them unfit to work outside home m ade them suited to the management of home (Forty, 1986). Hence, men had to care about public life, the commercial and the business spheres, whereas women became the heart of the home and their family (Hall, 1985). As such, motherhood and housekeeping were recognised as occupations at the middle of the 19th Century, the 1851 census in England recognising the status of housewife (Hall, 1985). This opposition betw een the inside and the outside also bears religious connotations. The English Evangelist at the end of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th Century nurtured the belief that men and women were bom to occupy different spheres. For H annah More, an 18th Century Evangelist theoretician, the biological constitution of each sex was the expression of the difference of their destiny. The province of the m an was to find the means of supporting the home; that of w om an w as to make the home an enjoyable place (Davidoff and Hall, 1987). According to More, w ho is

In her discussion of the 19th Century English domestic ideal, Marcus (1999) stresses that this vision of middle-classes everyday life has been questioned by feminist scholars. She recalls D avidoff and Hall's work w hich showed that the term 'separate spheres' masks the asymmetry of a division in w hich men had full access both to the public realm and to the comforts and pleasures of home. She also cites the work of Gallagher (1985) w ho questioned the very division between private and public, as w ell as that of Poovey (1988) w h o demonstrated that such a division relied on gender differences that could never be sustained. In other w ords, Marcus points out that the situation w as more complex in practice. Having said that, I am interested here in the discourse, not the practices.

quoted by Hall (1985), for a w om an the quest for success in the m an's sphere w as thus taken to be the negation of the tasks and duties assigned to her by God. H all insists that this gendered opposition between the private and the public spheres was also shared by the M ethodists and the Baptists as well as the U tilitarians who, after Bentham, considered the separation of the public and the domestic spheres as de facto more than a m oral issue.

From the 19th Century, home became a source of moral welfare: it provided protection against social anomie, illness and aggression. It w as kept separate from the public realm of business, vice and squalor (Davidoff and Hall, 1995). It came to be seen as the only place where authentic feelings could be displayed. It came to stand for honesty, truth and love (Forty, 1986). It w as m ade virtuous, the place where virtue would be nurtured (Davidoff and Hall, 1987). More importantly, according to Frykman and Lofgren's (1987) formula, 'femina dom estica', women became the guardian of home as well as the guardian of its virtues; the production of 'homeyness' being a w om an's work. Even though there exists no similar historical account of the developm ent of the notion of home in C anada and in the Province of Quebec, there are good reasons to believe that the situation described in England, Sweden and France applies when we examine the works on alcohol, gender and the home. Krasnick W arsh's (1993) discussion of women and alcohol in C anada, for instance, allows us to draw some parallels. She recalls the responsibility devolved upon woman, at the end of the 19th Century, during the Temperance Movement, to preserve the home against the threat of alcohol; a responsibility clearly related to the protection of the virtues of home. As N adeau, M erder and Bourgeois (1984) emphasise, the 'sacred space' of home needed to be protected from the corruption of the external world.

This domestic cult which is in fact a cult of sexual difference, evolved along the lines of the conception of the w om an's body. At the heart of the home lay a wife, a mother, the 'angel of the house'. Home came to be seen through the

m etaphor of w om an's body. A nd the w om an was expected to care for her hom e as m uch as she cared for herself (Forty 1986,104). In fact, since the 19th Century, "it is the personality of the mistress", as Elsie de Wolfe (quoted by Forty, 1986, 104) p u t it, "that the house expresses". W om an's status w as thus elevated to the m astery of the domestic sphere, b u t it remained contained w ithin it (Davidoff and Hall, 1987). Thus, w om an's virtuosity laid in her 'containm ent' in the sphere to which she belonged "like the p lan t in the p o t", as Loudon, a 18th Century ideologue, argued. That is

thoroughly domesticated, particularly endearing and capable of receiving especial regard (Loudon, quoted by Davidoff and Hall, 1987, 190,191). The opposition between home and the public sphere is still an im portant feature of W estern domesticity. It remains a biased opposition relating to ideals of genders. C hapm an and Hockey (1999), for instance, acknowledge that until the 1960s it was accepted w isdom in Britain th at the home was a w om an's dom ain, a place to which men returned from their 'n atu ral' preserve, the public w orld of work. They emphasise how m en's experience of em ploym ent has changed dramatically since the 1970s w ith the challenging of Hfe-long careers, unemployment and temporary work. They also recognise th at w om en have a greater place on the labour m arket outside the home. However, they point out that equality between sexes in employment or in the domestic sphere is far from achieved, that women continue to undertake m ost of the domestic w ork, not to speak of the physical and imaginative w ork, as A ttfield, (1995) and H unt (1995) p u t it, perform ed in order to create a home environment for the family group.

Feminist critique have also stressed how the idea of home is itself gendered (Chapm an and Hockey, 1999); how this place long viewed as the place for women has typically been built and designed by men w ith m en's interests in mind (W atson, 1986. See also RendeU, 2000, on w om en's practice of architecture); how, in practice, home is far from opposed to w ork for women.

how it is still the w om an's workplace (Harris and Pratt, 1993). They em phasised how there is often very little space for privacy and retreat for w om en w ithin the hom e (Madigan and M unro, 1999); how hom e is still a space of confinement for women (Duncan, 1996; Duncan 1981; Loyd, 1981) as weU as an oppressive space in m any instances (Munro and M adigan, 1993). In fact, the feminist critic opens up a broader discussion of privacy an d privatisation; an idea deeply embedded in W estern political theories of freedom and sovereignty, the idea that home is where one can do w hatever one w ants. Privacy is a concept that patterns and legitimises the exclusion of outsiders (Chapm an and Hockey, 1999). It is also frequently employed to construct, control, discipline, confine, exclude and suppress gender and sexual differences and preserve traditional patriarchal and heterosexist power structures, as Nancy Duncan (1996) puts it; the differences betw een private and public spaces encoded in Law are also deeply rooted in North-American and British cultures. As such, for feminists critics such as Duncan, it is clear then that private and public distinctions rem ain gendered and that

the designation of the home as private space limits the role of political institutions and social movements in changing pow er relations within the family (Duncan, 1996, 131)

For Duncan, so-called 'private issues' such as domestic violence need to be 'deterritorialised' in a Deleuzian sense (Vergely, 1993), namely freed from any bounded logic because domestic and intimate relations remain political relations. Home, in other w ords, cannot be seen as a space w hich is beyond the gaze of the public w orld (Chapman and Hockey, 1999).