Extreme 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.

The book aims to broaden understanding of the diverse positions and meanings of motherhood by investigating understudied and marginalized mothers (rural itinerant, African American, and Irish Catholic American) between 1920 and 1960. Fuelled by anxieties around feminism, a perception of men’s loss of status and masculinity, racial tensions, and fears about immigration, "antimaternalism" discourse blamed mothers for a wide range of social ills in the first half of the 20th Century. Mothering, Time, and Antimaternalism considers the ideas, practices, and depictions of antimaternalism, and the ways that mothers responded. Religion, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and immigration status are all analysed as factors shaping maternal experience. The book develops the historical context of American motherhood between 1920 and 1960, examining how changing ideas – scientific motherhood, time efficiency, devaluation of domesticity, racial and religious bias - influenced the construction and experiences of motherhood. This is a fascinating and important book suitable for students and scholars in history, gender studies, cultural studies and sociology.

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.

Spot-on, often satirical, always insightful, contributing editor of The American Mind and mother of a brood, Peachy Keenan argues that the only way we can save our families, ourselves, and the world—even California!—is by embracing our inner domestic extremists, and sweeping failed notions of third wave feminism and identity politics nonsense into the garbage can of history. In This House We Believe Parents Are the Bosses of Their Kids Babies Are Good, More Babies Are Better Two Sexes Are Plenty Your Career Is Overrated Feminism Is How the Unpopular and Undateable Cope with Life Mainstream American Culture Destroys Families We Are Going to Win We’re in a culture war, and Peachy Keenan is not taking prisoners. This raucous new book is her rallying cry for normal people stuck in the foxholes and appalled by the status quo. Mothers and fathers, regular American families, men and women, can win this battle together. But a lot of ground has been lost. For decades, we stood around and watched as feminists and progressives steamrolled through our institutions— those formerly robust, now comically inept, pillars of civilization like our government, our schools, and, crucially, our families. With matchless insight and devastating humor, Peachy Keenan makes the case for domestic extremism—turning away from the diseased offerings of the elites, the media, Hollywood, your child’s school, and Big Tech, and embracing a more human way of life. The life-changing magic of domestic extremism will spark joy and help you build a legacy that will enrich the lives of your (many) descendants.

Feminism as a method, a movement, a critique, and an identity has been the subject of debates, contestations and revisions in recent years, yet contemporary global developments and political upheavals have again refocused feminism’s collective force. What is feminism now? How do scholars and activists employ contemporary feminism? What feminist traditions endure? Which are no longer relevant in addressing contemporary global conditions? In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars reflect on how contemporary feminism has shaped their thinking and their field as they interrogate its uses, limits, and reinventions. Organized as a set of questions over definition, everyday life, critical intervention, and political activism, the Handbook takes on a broad set of issues and points of view to consider what feminism is today and what current forces shape its future development. It also includes an extended conversation among major feminist thinkers about the future of feminist scholarship and activism. The scholars gathered here address a wide variety of topics and contexts: activism from post-Soviet collectives to the Arab spring, to the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment, feminist art, film and digital culture, education, technology, policy, sexual practices and gender identity. Indispensable for scholars undergraduate and postgraduate students in women, gender, and sexuality, the collection offers a multidimensional picture of the diversity and utility of feminist thought in an age of multiple uncertainties.

By carefully conceptualising the domestic in relation to the self and the photographic, this book offers a unique contribution to both photography theory and criticism, and life-narrative studies. Jane Simon brings together two critical practices into a new conversation, arguing that artists who harness domestic photography can advance a more expansive understanding of the autobiographical. Exploring the idea that self-representation need not equate to self-portraiture or involve the human form, artists from around the globe are examined, including Rinko Kawauchi, Catherine Opie, Dayanita Singh, Moyra Davey, and Elina Brotherus, who maintain a personal gaze at domestic detail. By treating the representation of interiors, domestic objects, and the very practice of photographic seeing and framing as autobiographical gestures, this book reframes the relationship between interiors and exteriors, public and private, and insists on the importance of domestic interiors to understandings of the self and photography. The book will be of interest to scholars working in photographic history and theory, art history, and visual studies.

This book works to complicate and push against common arguments that the Western from its inception is an anti-feminist genre. By focusing on representations of women professionals in Westerns, it shows that women in cinematic and televisual Westerns sometimes do acquire agency and empowerment in the private and public realms, despite our culture’s tendency to gender the former as feminine and the latter as solely masculine. The study reviews the relationship of these progressive Westerns to both explicit and latent feminist ideologies relevant to their times, as the films evolved from the 1930s to the twenty-first century.

Over the last few decades and from across a spectrum of centrist political thought, a variety of academic disciplines, and numerous public intellectuals, the claim has been that we need to empathize more with marginalized people as a way to alleviate social inequalities. If we all had more skill with empathy, so the claim goes, we would all be better citizens. But what does it mean to empathize with others? How do we develop this skill? And what does it offer that older models of solidarity don't? Why empathy-and why now? Rereading Empathy takes up these questions, examining the uses to which calls for empathy are put in the face of ever expanding economic and social precarity. The contributors draw on a variety of historical and contemporary literary and cultural archives to illustrate the work that empathy is supposed to enable-and to query alternative models of building collective futures.