A Semiprivate Room

Abstract

Joan Scott titled the 2000 conference where the papers collected in this issue of differences were initially presented together “Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of Public and Private.” The work of the participants repeatedly stressed the uneven, wavering, mutable quality of those boundaries, the phantasmatic nature of our obsessive reinvestments in their regularity and regeneration, and the uncanny power that the binary public/private has to make things of interest simply disappear, as Judith Butler observed. The semiprivate room is one such lost site: though it insistently emerges in multiple forms, it repeatedly slips out of view as the powerful opposition of private to public is reinscribed. The semiprivate figures neither an inside, nor an outside, but the conscious practice of drawing boundaries in a field neither the private nor the public can anticipate or guarantee.1