Principio de Legalidad

Alternatively discussed as imaginaries, social imaginaries, and collective and individual imaginaries, the imaginary as a social construct explores the ways representations of others appear within publics and cultures (Gaonkar, 2002; Castoriadis, 1994). Asen (2002) articulated two approaches for scholarship invested in the imaginary debate: individual and collective imaginaries. Individual imaginaries examine the influence of the imaginary on individuals within that culture; Lacan, drawing heavily from Althusser, explained the imaginary as the way in which individual people interpret and understand their relationship to their lived experience (Jameson, 1977). Likewise, feminist sociological scholarship theorized the internal nature of the imaginary as the relationship between women and their own gender performance (Irigaray, 1985b; Whitford, 1986; Ingraham, 1996). Collective imaginaries, meanwhile, imply a public process; “interlocutors engage in processes of imagining about people they regard as similar to and different from themselves, and the processes and products of the collective imagination are accessible to others” (Asen, 2002, p. 349-350). Public sphere theory uses the social imaginary to explore the ways populations underrepresented within public spheres are represented within those spheres (see Asen, 2002; Calhoun, 2002; Taylor, 2002). The social imaginary constitutes social roles and expectations by providing a sense of who we are and what we should expect from others, thus legitimizing common practices into normative behaviors (Taylor, 2002). The social imaginary therefore contributes to the public/private dichotomy by examining how the public sphere understands, characterizes, and defines the private sphere.

The power of social imagining engages the representational power of discourse to assign meaning and define attitudes towards those imagined representations through their portrayal as natural, universal, and objective (Asen, 2002; Hutcheon, 1989). Societal representations manifest both visually and verbally; Gatens (1996) argued the imaginary is “ready-made images and symbols through which we make sense of social bodies and which determine, in part, their value [and] their status” (p. viii). Asen (2003) defined these images and symbols as “verbal images,” or imagined images invoked by written and spoken discourse dependent upon “shared perceptions” which structure the ways people understand segments of the population different from

themselves that “invoke and reconfigure social norms and hierarchies” (p. 286-7). Those representations thus replace underrepresented populations within public discourse of gender, silencing gender performances outside those chosen as representative by public discourse, by portraying the represented gender performance as innate and universal.

The social imaginary acts as a constraint on private action by defining expectations of the private within the public sphere. Since populations excluded from the public are present in public discourse primarily, if not solely, in the social imaginary, representations of these populations will represent the sphere of their existence; meaning, these representations define a concept of private within public discourse. Therefore, while actions in the private sphere may differ from those represented in the public sphere, those variations are silenced by a lack of representation in public discourse. As the social imaginary defines expectations of gender performance, alternative gender performances are silenced by the social imaginary. Those aspects of women’s lives that fall outside of acceptability as defined by the social imaginary are ignored; as the social

that fall outside of public standards of acceptability and therefore alternative possibilities for gender roles and performance are silenced by the imaginary.

For Lacan (1975), the imaginary is the assumption that external representations, i.e. a mirror, signifies identity. He argued we internalize these external stimuli to understand and define ourselves as one complete entity. The illusion of the imaginary is in this assumption that we embody these outward representations; the subject is imprisoned in her inability to

distinguish herself from images which represent her. While Lacan believed the mirror stage moment at which this imaginary contains the most power for self-determination and

understanding, introducing the variable of gender to the equation changes the formula.

Feminist theorists build upon Lacan’s conceptualization of the imaginary to explore the power of representations of gender in women’s ability to self-determine and therefore the importance of the imaginary in understanding social place and gender across the lifetime. The male imaginary of gender and identity is inevitably hierarchical, creating tension between gender categories (see Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b; Whitford, 1986; Ingraham 1994). Ingraham (1994) followed Althusser’s imaginary as “relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1971, p. 109) and argued the imaginary conceals the operation of social structures and silences analysis of organizing institutions while defining its social mandates as naturally occurring and prohibiting our ability to question their nature or occurrence (p. 203-4). The illusion of the imaginary is the resulting assumption that gender difference is biological fact.

The social imaginary thus provides a provisional answer to the quandary of the post-war housewife, as opposed to other minority groups post-war. As the social imaginary defines acceptable roles, it also silences differences and alternative performances of those roles. Groups considered subversive or nonconformist within the social imaginary, such as the post-war

African-American and homosexual populations discussed above, may have more freedom and opportunity to perform outside social norms and expectations because the imaginary expects them to; as it defines social expectations, it defines those populations expected to rebel against social norms. The social imaginary is therefore a useful concept by which to understand the confines of housewife as gender performance because it defines the ways public representations constrain the private lives and behavior of these women even if they do not accept or claim representation. Like Asen (2002), I use the social imaginary as a critical concept by which to investigate the ways women appear within Fifties public spheres. However, social imaginary scholarship traditionally focuses on how the social imaginary defines those populations which rebel against society, like the “welfare queen” of Asen’s (2003) analysis. My analysis instead of analyzing how the social imaginary ostracizes a particular population explores the creation of the ideal in the social imaginary. This project thus analyzes popular culture artifacts from the Fifties to explore the ways the social imaginary defines women’s nature to position her as in need of supervision and protection: understand the way social use of the imaginary perpetuates the illusion of representation: and expose the fraying of the imaginary that creates a bridge for populations to publically argue against it.

The home represents these social structures which create the assumption of gender as biological fact. The home is a problematic concept for feminist theory as the representative site of patriarchal oppression. Designed and built by men, the home contains and constrains women’s movements and performance and defines standards for social acceptability (Tange, 2004).

Irigaray (1992) argued men use women as mirrors to reflect their own identity, and building a home, as well as placing a woman within it, reflects a man’s social standing (see also Wittig, 1980). Thus the home and its housewife are the husband’s material possessions to demonstrate

his importance and value to society. However, the home is more than merely a marker of class standing. The home is not a feminine space simply because men place her within it. Rather, the home is so closely related to the feminine because building a home is man’s attempt to

physically recreate the security of the maternal bond (see Irigaray, 1992; Young, 2005, p. 123- 130). Marriage creates family, and therefore in marriage, men find the security of family. Women’s role in childbirth positions her as maternal nurturer, which encourages viewing her position in society as one of security and nurture. The Fifties home offered security and refuge from social anxieties for both men and women (May, 2008). For women, this security is a refuge from society, as the isolation of the role of housewife physically distances the housewife from social concerns (see Ferguson, 1989, 1991; Bartky, 1990). For men, the security is emotional, represented by the family the home contains, as a recreation of his maternal attachment (see Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b; Wittig, 1980).

The home as the natural environment of the housewife is the physical manifestation of its woman’s role and character. Tange (2004) analyzed the Victorian home as a visual

representation of respectability that maintains class and gender identity. The post-war era demonstrates how the home also visually establishes and defines gender identity. Post-war volumes of Good Housekeeping include blueprints to introduce young couples to the variety of housing designs available for suburban development. These articles explain the benefits of each home based on the type of mother the housewife wants to be; for example, kitchens at the rear of the home allow mothers to allow their children free rein of the yard while being able to monitor their play and prepare the evening meal at the same time. The physical layout of the home, then, enables the woman of the home to embrace and fulfill her role as mother. These architectural discussions define the home as feminine, and in particular a reflection of the woman at its heart.

Thus the home is the external representation women are encouraged to internalize to define and understand their own identity.

The Fifties housewife today is a stereotypical representation of the repressed lives of post-war women. As such, the Fifties housewife erases difference in each woman’s lived

experience by emphasizing similarities. Historical scholarship thus approaches discussions of the Fifties housewife by verifying the stereotype as representational lived experience (see Matthews, 1987; Lopata, 1971; Harvey, 1994; Bernard, 1975) or delineating the ways in which the

stereotype fails to fully account for the lived experience of Fifties women (see Coontz, 2000; May, 2008; Meyerowitz, 1994; Rosenberg, 1992). Investigating representations of the Fifties housewife within its original context, in post-war popular culture, allows for an analysis of how the concept of housewife becomes the dominant gender representation of an era, and thus an exploration of the housewife not as stereotype, but as a cultural reaction to post-war anxieties. As such, this dissertation examines representations of gender and gender performativity within Fifties popular culture to understand how the housewife as a social imaginary uses the anxiety and prosperity of the age to position women outside the public sphere. As the dominant gender performance, the social imaginary defines acceptability standards for housewife that obscures individuality, providing the security of conformity as well as nostalgic security that connects the suburbs to a collective imagined past. I argue the concept of housewife as a part of the social imaginary explains how the concept of the housewife comes to culturally represent all women and no women simultaneously. Exposing the illusory nature of the representativeness of housewife allows post-war women to find a space in which to create a community which can begin to fight the imaginary of housewife.