ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the terms public and private in the last three senses, offering a critical and gendered interpretation of the boundaries between the collective space of citizenship and sociability and the individual space of intimacy and gender inequality. It also discusses that the idealization of a private life, with connotations here of the family, intimacy, and the self, has been formed by the changes that have occurred in public life. The struggles for equality, which, historically, were to be seen in the public sphere, have had a fundamental impact on the gender relationship, altering the design of the public/private dichotomy. The chapter discusses the idea of a tyrannical intimacy that negatively contaminates public life and is more and more subordinated to the psychologization processes arising from individualism. From a gender perspective, this vision would be critical of the alleged privatization of life because ultimately this process turns men into more femininized beings moving away from traditional masculine citizenship.
