Domestic Sphere

With regard to labor, the term domestic sphere usually is used to refer to two quite different arenas of social life: the nation-state and the home. With regard to the nation-state, the term is used in contradistinction to those events or processes that take place in the foreign sphere or international realm. Hence, trade union policy may be categorized as that which applies domestically and that which applies overseas. In such use of the term, the nation-state is privileged and its boundaries serve as a kind of spatial marker between the domestic and nondomestic spheres. Two issues arise, however, with regard to this conceptualization of the domestic sphere. First, it assumes that the nation-state[Page 115] is in fact a relatively coherent spatial entity whose boundaries circumscribe particular absolute spaces (e.g., the spaces of France vs. those of Italy). Yet contemporary processes of economic globalization challenge this assumption, such that the phenomenon whereby a company such as General Motors produces parts in Mexico for its vehicles assembled in the United States sometimes make it quite difficult to determine where the domestic sphere ends and the nondomestic sphere begins. Second, a strict division of planetary space into the domestic sphere (i.e., the space “within” each nation-state) and the nondomestic sphere (i.e., the global/international space beyond any individual nation-state) relies on an areal view of geographic scale—that is, a view in which scales such as the “national” and the “global” are seen to contain different absolute spaces of varying size. If, however, the scales of social life are seen not as hierarchies of discrete areal units but instead as ropelike or capillary-like and connected in much the same way as a spider's web, it becomes much harder to determine what is “inside” the nation-state (i.e., what the domestic sphere is) and what is “outside” it (continuing the analogy, we might ask where a spider's web begins and ends and what it encompasses). Nevertheless, and despite such issues, the view of the domestic sphere as that which relates to things occurring within the boundaries of various nation-states still has wide commonsensical appeal, even if the nation-state's boundaries seem more porous today than at past historical moments.

The second way in which the term domestic sphere is used in the geographic literature is with regard to activities taking place within the home, whether these are paid (e.g., industrial homeworking) or unpaid (e.g., child rearing). In this regard, a number of writers have sought to make a distinction between “labor” and “work”—a distinction that has bearing on the activities taking place in the home and that also is common in European languages (e.g., ponein and ergazesthai [Koine Greek], laborare and facere [Latin], lavorare and faticare [Italian], travailler and ouvrer [French], trud and rabota [Russian], arbeiten and wirken [German]). Thus, 17th-century philosopher John Locke delineated between “the labor of our body and the work of our hands,” with labor being the activity through which humans purposively create property out of the world that nature has provided—a delineation that can tend toward seeing labor as a public activity and work as a private one conducted within the home. Karl Marx, on the other hand, defined labor as activity that helps generate surplus value within the capitalist system, with all other types of activity being seen as work. For her part, 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt differentiated between those biological processes necessary to sustain life (labor) and human activity (e.g., art) that has no utilitarian purpose but is an end in itself through which people freely pursue self-realization independent of biological necessity (work). In Arendt's view, then, work is associated with freedom and labor is associated with biological requirements.

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