Domesticity At War

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.

This study demonstrates that such literary divisions as war novel and domestic novel limit readers' understanding of the ways these categories rely on and respond to each other. Haytock argues that gender creates an ideological context through which both domesticity and war are viewed and understood; issues of home and violence are intricately related for U.S. authors who wrote about the First World War. Haytock explores what war and domestic texts represent in light of the deconstructionist said in its cultural and historical context and seeing what is not said. Readers take food, shelter, and clothing for granted, and yet the way we treat them is part of what allows us to define ourselves as civilized. In war novels and domestic novels by Temple Beiley, Ellen, Glasgow, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, John Dos Passons, Thomas Boyd, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, the idea of home and domestic rituals contribute to the creation of war propaganda, the soldier's experience of war, and the home front's ability to confront the war after the fact. This approach helps literary criticism reject the separation of men's and women's writing, particularly but not only their writing about war.

"Stephen Vider considers how the meanings of domesticity shifted for gay men and lesbians from the late 1960s to early 1980s, from a site of supposed isolation or deviance, to a source of identity, community, and pleasure. His manuscript reveals the multiple uses, appeals, and limits of domesticity for LGBTQ people in the post-World War II period, in their efforts to make social and sexual connections, and to appeal for expanded rights and freedoms. For example, the 1970s witnessed an efflorescence of gay communal households that proved to be seedbeds for alternative modes of domesticity, using the privacy of domestic space to achieve broader social and political changes. Vider brings a novel perspective to gay identity and culture, examining domesticity as a meeting point between practices and discourse, the local and national, the private and the public"--

In the years of reconstruction and economic boom that followed the Second World War, the domestic sphere encountered new expectations regarding social behaviour, modes of living, and forms of dwelling. This book brings together an international group of scholars from architecture, design, urban planning, and interior design to reappraise mid-twentieth century modern life, offering a timely reassessment of culture and the economic and political effects on civilian life. This collection contains essays that examine the material of art, objects, and spaces in the context of practices of dwelling over the long span of the postwar period. It asks what role material objects, interior spaces, and architecture played in quelling or fanning the anxieties of modernism’s ordinary denizens, and how this role informs their legacy today.

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.

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

The results of a collaborative research project by the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, this collection explores the role that scholars and universities play in shaping and defining culture, and how teaching and research institutions are changing in response to international movements and social forces. 7 photos.