Fraiman Extreme Domesticity

A View from the Margins
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-54375-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Reihe: Gender and Culture Series

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fraiman, Susan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Doing Domesticity
1. Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye
2. Behind the Curtain: Domestic Industry in Mary Barton
3. Domesticity Beyond Sentiment: Edith Wharton, Decoration, and Divorce
4. Bad Girls of Good Housekeeping: Dominique Browning and Martha Stewart
5. Undocumented Houses: Histories of Dislocation in Immigrant Fiction
6. Domesticity in Extremis: Homemaking by the Unsheltered
Conclusion: Dwelling-in-Traveling, Traveling-in-Dwelling
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Susan Fraiman is professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her Columbia University Press publications include Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003) and Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1994).