Feminist strategy reverses public-private hierarchy as a political move

Evidence

In the interest of the effectiveness of the women’s movement, emphasis is often placed upon a reversal of the public-private hierarchy. This is because in ordinary sexist households, educational institutions, or workplaces, the sustaining explanation still remains that the public sector is more important, at once more rational and mysterious, and, generally, more masculine, than the private. The feminist, reversing this hierarchy, must insist that sexuality and the emotions are, in fact, so much more important and threatening that a masculist sexual politics is obliged, repressively, to sustain all public activity. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 281

Categorization

• XREF: The reversal is itself an instance of strategic deployment — political reversal of hierarchy without metaphysical belief in the reversal, parallel to strategic essentialism. — connects to: The personal is political inverted into the political is personal as feminism went postmodern — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 865; Decline of mediating institutions privatises stress into the domestic sphere — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2107