Domesticity

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.

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.

Taking English culture as its representative sample, The Secret History of Domesticity asks how the modern notion of the public-private relation emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Treating that relation as a crucial instance of the modern division of knowledge, Michael McKeon narrates its pre-history along with that of its essential component, domesticity. This narrative draws upon the entire spectrum of English people's experience. At the most "public" extreme are political developments like the formation of civil society over against the state, the rise of contractual thinking, and the devolution of absolutism from monarch to individual Subject. The middle range of experience takes in the influence of Protestant and scientific thought, the printed publication of the private, the conceptualization of virtual publics -- society, public opinion, the market -- and the capitalization of production, the decline of the domestic economy, and the increase in the sexual division of labor. The most "private" pole of experience involves the privatization of marriage, the family, and the household, and the complex entanglement of femininity, interiority, Subjectivity, and sexuality. McKeon accounts for how the relationship between public and private experience first became intelligible as a variable interaction of distinct modes of being -- not a static dichotomy, but a tool to think with. Richly illustrated with nearly 100 images, including paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and a representative selection of architectural floor plans for domestic interiors, this volume reads graphic forms to emphasize how susceptible the public-private relation was to concrete and spatial representation. McKeon is similarly attentive to how literary forms evoked a tangible sense of public-private relations -- among them figurative imagery, allegorical narration, parody, the author-character-reader dialectic, aesthetic distance, and free indirect discourse. He also finds a structural analogue for the emergence of the modern public-private relation in the conjunction of what contemporaries called the "secret history" and the domestic novel. A capacious and synthetic historical investigation, The Secret History of Domesticity exemplifies how the methods of literary interpretation and historical analysis can inform and enrich one another.

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.

In the home the intricate relations between architecture, gender and domesticity become visible. Negotiating Domesticity investigates the many and complex themes evoked by the interconnections between these terms. Topics covered include famous as well as less well-known architectural examples and architects, which are explored from sociological, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches. The authors explore the relationships between modern domestic spaces and sexed subjectivities in a broad range of geographical locations of Western modernity. This richly interdisiplinary work presents architects and postgraduate students with an in-depth exploration of domesticity in the modern era.

This work considers American representations of domesticity and domestic labour over the last two centuries in historical, popular and feminist texts. The author asserts that the political power and effectivity of the idea of "normative domestic femininity" cannot be overestimated.

In Elasticity in Domesticity Ushehwedu Kufakurinani demonstrates how and to what extent the domestic ideology shaped the colonial experiences of white women in Rhodesia.

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.