Extreme Domesticity
Extreme Domesticity

Author: Susan Fraiman

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0231543751

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Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticity vindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.

Domesticity
Domesticity

Author: Bob Shacochis

Publisher: Trinity University Press

Published: 2013-11-12

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1595341900

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Bob Shacochis, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, and National Book Award winning-author of such books as Swimming in the Volcano, Easy in the Islands, and The Next New World, hones his nonfiction skills in this tour de force romp through the worlds of eating and eroticism. Domesticity is an irreverent exploration of the sweet and sour evolution of the enduring romance between author and lover. In this relationship, Shacochis stays at home and cooks, all the while reflecting on the ups and downs of a romantic partnership, the connection between heart and stomach, and how the crazed lust of youth evolves into inevitably settling down and, well, simply making dinner. Shacochis's delectable musings on monogamy, emotional and physical separations, dogs, career changes, the stress of the holidays, the aesthetics of food, moving, sex and seafood, friendships, writings and the angst over who is going to do the dishes are deftly folded into seventy-five recipes, half of them of the author's own creation. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is Shacochis's celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is a celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point, a "prose stew" of audacious candor, a culinary valentine for lovers of literature.

Homeward Bound
Homeward Bound

Author: Emily Matchar

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 145166544X

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An investigation into the societal impact of intelligent, high-achieving women who are honing traditional homemaking skills traces emerging trends in sophisticated crafting, cooking and farming that are reshaping the roles of women.

Negotiating Domesticity
Negotiating Domesticity

Author: Hilde Heynen

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780415341394

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A series of essays to challenge and stimulate, examining the links between gender, domesticity and architecture from a number of different perspectives and disciplines.

Domesticity at War
Domesticity at War

Author: Beatriz Colomina

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2007-01-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262033615

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When American architects, designers, and cultural institutions converted wartime strategies to new ends, the aggressive promotion of postwar domestic bliss became another kind of weapon. In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture—not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity—going from missiles to washing machines—American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller's words, turning "weaponry into livingry."This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss—suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories—went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody. Colomina examines, with interlocking case studies and an army of images, the embattled and obsessive domesticity of postwar America. She reports on, among other things, MOMA's exhibition of a Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU), a corrugated steel house suitable for use as a bomb shelter, barracks, or housing; Charles and Ray Eames's vigorous domestic life and their idea of architecture as a flexible stage for the theatrical spectacle of everyday life; and the American lawn as patriotic site and inalienable right.Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text, and one book of illustrations—most of them in color, including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, and more.

James Fenimore Cooper versus the Cult of Domesticity
James Fenimore Cooper versus the Cult of Domesticity

Author: Signe O. Wegener

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2005-04-05

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0786421282

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Between 1820 and 1860 a set of established cultural values deemed the "Cult of Domesticity" sought to shape the private and public lives of individuals in a rapidly changing American society. Promoting the ideals of conformity in religious, domestic and personal development, the cult was particularly concerned with maintaining a status quo of piety, purity, obedience and domesticity in 19th century female behavior. While a number a female writers responded through literature to the social standards they were urged to emulate, the prominent male writer James Fenimore Cooper reacted as well, addressing the predominant cultural climate through texts that establish women as an integral part of the plot line. This book provides a comprehensive discussion of James Fenimore Cooper's view of family dynamics and explores his attempts to simultaneously present and critique the forces shaping the social development of the nation. The study places 10 relevant Cooper novels within the context of popular literary works by 19th century writers Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner and Maria Cummins to demonstrate how Cooper approaches issues of Victorian domesticity and how his representations compare to those crafted by the contemporary women writers. Opening chapters discuss why Cooper chose the women's fiction genre as his vehicle and present an overview of the "Cult of Domesticity" in fiction and nonfiction, delineating the origins and effects of 19th century domestic life. Remaining chapters address the role of the mother, the father and the central daughter figure in domestic fiction.

American Domesticity
American Domesticity

Author: Kathleen Anne McHugh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1999-03-25

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0195352726

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From the cult of domesticity to the Semiotics of the Kitchen, housekeeping has been central to both constructing and critiquing the role of women in American society. Frequently domesticity's style has been to make invisible the labor that produces it, allowing woman to be asserted or argued about in universal terms that downplay race, class, and material relations. American Domesticity considers this relationship in representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts. While the domestic is usually conceived of as the antithesis of the public, economical, and political, Kathleen McHugh demonstrates how domestic discourse established the terms within which the most crucial national issues--the market economy, universal white male suffrage, slavery, the construction of racial difference, consumerism, spectatorship, desire, and even feminism--were conceived, assimilated, and understood. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the book investigates the historical roots of domestic labors invisibility in widely circulated didactic housekeeping manuals written by Lydia Child, Catherine Beecher, Mary Pattison, and Christine Frederick. It then considers how pedagogical discourses became entertainment discourses, their focus shifting from the silent era of film to the twilight of the classical period. The book concludes with an examination of the return of a pedagogical impulse within feminist film production concerning domesticity, comparing it to the concurrent rise of feminist film theory in the academy. Looking at this wide range of print and film texts, McHugh traces the outlines of a discourse of domesticity that claims to be private and universal but instead brokers difference within the public sphere.

Women, War, Domesticity
Women, War, Domesticity

Author: Nicole Huang

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2005-03-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9047406931

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This book studies a burgeoning middlebrow culture championed and sustained by a group of women writers, editors, and publishers who began their careers in Shanghai in the early 1940s when the city entered into an era of total occupation by the Japanese.

Elasticity in Domesticity: White Women in Rhodesian Zimbabwe, 1890-1979
Elasticity in Domesticity: White Women in Rhodesian Zimbabwe, 1890-1979

Author: Ushehwedu Kufakurinani

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-11-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 9004381120

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In Elasticity in Domesticity: White women in Rhodesian Zimbabwe, 1890-1979 Ushehwedu Kufakurinani examines the colonial experiences of white women in what was later called Rhodesia. He demonstrates the extent to which the state and society appropriated white women’s labour power and the workings of the domestic ideology in shaping white women’s experiences. The author also discusses how and to what extent white women appropriated and deployed the domestic ideology. Institutional as well as personal archives were consulted which include official correspondence, diaries, personal letters, newsletters, magazines, commissions of inquiry, among other sources.

New Fathers? Contemporary American Stories of Masculinity, Domesticity and Kinship
New Fathers? Contemporary American Stories of Masculinity, Domesticity and Kinship

Author: Helena Wahlström

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2010-10-12

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1443825948

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What do novels such as Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World, and Jayne Anne Phillips’ MotherKind have in common with films such as Smoke and Mrs Doubtfire? This study explores the intersection of masculinity and domesticity in contemporary film and literature. It argues that these texts, produced since the 1990s, address with some urgency the notion of “new fatherhood” in the United States. They offer explorations of the idea that American fatherhood around the turn of the twenty-first century is changing, and they problematize the legitimacy of “new fathers” and “alternative families” in a national culture where the “old” patriarch and the nuclear family still often loom large in the imagination of many Americans.