Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity 9780367009915, 081333425X

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Burning Down the House

Burning Down the House Recycling Domesticity

Edited by Rosemary Marangoly George

Edited by Rosemary Marangoly George

ISBN 978-0-367-00991-5

www.routledge.com  an informa business

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Burning Down the House

Mother, daughter, maid, South Africa, 1988. Copyright© 1997 Rosalind Solomon.

Burning Down the House Recycling Domesticity edited by

Rosemary Marangoly George

Routledge El ~~

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1998 by Westview Press Published 2018 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1998 by Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burning down the house : recycling domesticity I edited by Rosemary Marangoly George. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8133-3425-X (hardcover) 1. Family. 2. Home. 3. Sex role. I. George, Rosemary Marangoly. HQ518.B85 1998 306.85-dc21 ISBN 13: 978-0-367-00991-5 (hbk)

98-9570 CIP

Contents Acknowledgrnents

1 Recycling: Long Routes to and from Domestic Fixes, Rosemary Marangoly George

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PART ONE ON THE ROAD: NATIONS, EMPIRES, TEXTS, HOMES 2 Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism, Nancy Armstrong 3 Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home,

Rosemary Marangoly George

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47

4 Modernism and Domesticity: From Conrad's Eastern Road to Stein's Empty Spaces in the Home, Amie Parry

75

5 Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame, Gayatri Gopinath

102

PART TWO DOMESTICITY: REDRAWING URBAN SPACE 6 Reconstructed Identity: Spatial Change and Adaptation in a Greek-Macedonian Refugee Neighborhood, Dayana Salazar

127

7 Counterparts: Dubliners, Masculinity, and Temperance Nationalism, David Lloyd

150

8 Repetition and Unhousing in Nawal El-Saadawi, Aparajita Sagar

170 v

Contents

Vl

9 Fast Capital, Race, Modernity, and the Monster House, Katharyne Mitchell

187

PART THREE NOSTALGIA, MODERNITY, AND OTHER DOMESTIC FICTIONS 10 Dishing Up Dixie: Recycling the Old South in the Early-Twentieth-Century Domestic Ideal,

Kimberly Wallace Sanders

215

11 Domestic Renovations: The Marriage Plot, the Lodging House, and Lesbian Desire in Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, Siobhan Somerville

232

12 "Homesick for Those Memories": The Gendering of Historical Memory in Women's Narratives of the Vietnam War, John Lowney

257

13 Domesticity and the Demon Mother: A Review Essay of Sorts, Ann duCille

279

PART FOUR BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE: DREAMING, REVISING, BURNING 14 Feminists Are Modern; Families Are Indian: Women's Magazines and the Politics of Modernity, K. Srilata

301

15 In a Neighborhood of Another Colar: Latina/Latino Struggles for Home, Susan Sanchez Casal

326

16 Home, Houses, Nonidentity: Paris Is Burning, Chandan C. Reddy

355

17 The Squat, the Tearoom, the Urn, and the Designer Bathroom: Citing Home in Ken Loach' s Riff Raff, Maurizia Boscagli

380

About the Editor and Contributors fu~

399 4M

Acknowledgments My greatest debt is to the exceptional scholars who have contributed their work to this collection of essays on domesticity in a global context. Together they have shaped a thoughtful and thought-provoking reassessment of what domesticity signifies in several geographic and disciplinary locations at the close of this century. This book has been a while in the making, and I would especially like to thank the contributors for their immense patience during the publication process. Laura Parsons, my editor at Westview, has been most helpful in bringing this project to completion. I would like to thank Laura for her deep commitment to this book, for her forthrightness, and for her resourcefulness. The labor of others in the editorial and production teams at Westview /HarperCollins is also gratefully acknowledged. I would especially like to thank Kathleen Christensen for her outstanding copyediting work on this project. Permission to reprint Nancy Armstrong's essay from the Yale Journal of Criticism and Rosemary Marangoly George's article from Cultural Critique is gratefully acknowledged. Rosalind Solomon kindly gave us permission to use her powerful photograph as the frontispiece of this book. It is a telling essay in its own right. I wish to thank several of the contributors, who made helpful suggestions on editing such a volume: John Lowney, Nancy Armstrong, Aparajita Sagar, and Ann duCille. I would especially like to thank Michael Ryan for his enthusiasm for and critical input into this project at its various stages. And finally, I would like to thank S. G. Badrinath, whose constant support allows me the luxury of questioning the comforts of conventional domestic arrangements.

Rosemary Marangoly George

vii

Chapter One

Recycling: Long Routes to and from Domestic Fixes ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

These [houses] are now good only to be thrown away like old food cans. -Theodore Adomot

My immediate and somewhat flippant response to Adorno's used-can dilemma is to urge recycling. In the west, recycling has become one of the prime late-twentieth-century means of responding to an overwhelming sense of a steady decline in the quality of (domestic) life. The recycling passion that has now gripped the United States is a result of the growing consciousness of the enormity of the amount of natural resources needed to sustain the high order of domestic consumption and to maintain the "basic" comforts of the average middle-class American home. 2 But champions of recycling seem nowadays to promise not just a world with renewed resources for future generations but also an unscathed domesticity to match. What is promised to future generations as a by-product of responsible recycling (smart use of planetary resources) is continued domestic pleasures of an order currently enjoyed only in select circles-pleasures such as woodburning fires, limitless biodegradable cleaning supplies, and recreational fishing. In a metaphorical sense, recycling has become the solution to the problem of dealing with a concept, domesticity, that still supplies inordinate amounts of pleasure even after its organizing logic has gone awry. The pleasures of the domestic are so deeply entrenched as to seem "natural" -necessary to our physical and mental well-being, regardless of the 1

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unsavory specifics or the labor involved in setting up these "comfort zones." Witold Rybczynski, the author of the popular 1988 book Home: A Short History of an Idea, asserts: "Domestic well-being is a fundamental human need that is deeply rooted in us, and that must be satisfied."3 There is a general aura of wholesomeness about the domestic that is never abandoned, even when specific domestic arrangements are discarded. Patriarchal notions of the family and the home are seen as coterminous and in sharp decline the world over. Of course, those on the conservative right in the United States who lament the demise of the patriarchal nuclear family also mourn the loss of the pleasures of the domestic, which, in their view, cannot exist outside the working fatherhomemaking mother-2.0 children formula.4 However, most liberal and left social and cultural commentators who dismiss such rigid conceptions of the family also remain firmly committed to a recycled form of "family values," except that the version they espouse does not use the same formula for "family" as does the right's version.s What such "alternative lifestyle" domestic arrangements rescue from traditional scenarios is precisely this sense of private comfort, safety, and exclusiveness. This rescue, more often than not, results in a nostalgically recycled domesticity that allows for a continued enjoyment of domestic pleasures without questioning or dismantling domesticity's founding assumptions. The domestic, perhaps more than other modern institutions, has been recycled and reinvented in the last few decades. Much of this recycling aims for alterations in domestic forms and practices to better satisfy current demand without examining the social and gender inequalities that buttress domesticity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, domestic reform has been among the top priorities of most modern liberal social movements, such as liberal feminism. The constant reworking of domestic arrangements is an index of the success of these movements as much as an indication of the limits of liberalism. Liberal feminism has transformed our understanding of the domestic, but even as the institution is recycled in more gender-equitable ways, what gets deflected is the responsibility of addressing the other complexities that shape this arena-for instance, the economic and racial connections that hold domestic sites adjacent and yet unequal within a national or global framework. The recycling that I advocate in this introduction and that is supported by the chapters that follow attempts to be responsive to these complexities. 6 I argue that recycling in this new sense is more than just a rescue operation or a salvaging of domestic pleasures that feeds on nostalgia and selective memory of old domestic grandeur. On the contrary, narratives and practices that responsibly recycle domesticity perform two tasks: first, they effect transformations that are attentive to the materials and the debris of past domestic edifices. Second, in being attentive to the material and histor-

Recycling

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ical factors that have enabled domesticity to flourish, such recycling narratives make the domestic a site from which countertheorizations about seemingly "larger" and unrelated institutions and ideologies can be produced. Thus domesticity can be understood, paradoxically, as both the site where the rescue and the retreat into an apolitical private sphere can be endlessly embroidered upon as well as a site from which social organizations can be rendered visible and open to critique. Many of the chapters in this collection study the ways in which domestic arrangements continue to be remade in both of these directions. The chapters examine how this recycling operates in the refiguring of institutions such as the family and in the redrawing of neighborhoods, of nations, of literary genres, and of other cultural artifacts. But most importantly this collection works to stretch our understanding of the territory covered by terms such as recycling, the domestic, and domesticity. How do we define domesticity in the late twentieth century? The standard connotations of terms such as the domestic and domesticity were described by Karen Tranberg Hansen in her introduction to African Encounters with Domesticity: "To define it [domesticity] is to describe a set of ideas that over the course of nineteenth century western history have associated women with family, domestic values, and home, and took for granted a hierarchical distribution of power favoring men."7 What is remarkable is how this "set of ideas" and practices has become globally hegemonic as a result of colonial and capitalist expansion and modernization, albeit not without contestation from other, local domestic ideologies. 8 In the late twentieth century, domesticity can be understood as a universal phenomenon just as imprecisely and yet accurately as patriarchy can be understood to be a staple feature of social organization all over the globe today. It is also necessary to note the distinctions among the terms household, family, and the domestic, if only to comprehend their conflation in our usage of these terms.9 The domestic implies spatial arrangements in which certain practices of reproduction (children as well as certain modes of production) are situated. As a primary site at which modernity is manufactured and made manifest, the domestic serves as a regulative norm that refigures conceptions of the family from a largely temporal organization of kinship into a spatially manifest entity. The domestic with all its material and metaphysical accoutrements bridges the distance between seemingly public issues and the private concerns of families. Today, domesticity is fabricated with local variations across national borders and social classes. Class, race, and geographic location place heavy inflections on domesticity, and yet, like love, childhood, and death, the domestic is seen to transcend all specifics or rather to blur distinctions in the warm glow of its splendor. The analyses of domesticity in this book are considerations of more than just the private home and homemaking practices. Burning Down the

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House views domesticity through multiple frames until the domestic expands to bear on all social arrangements. Not only is domesticity understood as a manifestation of larger national and imperial projects, but it is also employed as a means of critiquing these unwieldy ideological structures from within. Since the inquiries in this book consider political, social, and historical implications of the domestic, they take longer routes to domesticity than the reader may be used to from other scholarly writing on the topic. This introduction, in turn, does not draw all the diverse chapters together under a grand narrative on domesticity but introduces the reader to the paradoxes and juxtapositions that render tight universalizations on domesticity wholly inadequate, even as suggestive connections are made between narratives on homemaking (and house breaking) in a global context. New readings of domesticity that are attentive to its complex politics are emerging in several disparate academic discussions-for instance, those on the entanglement of the domestic within nationalist discourses and in recent (feminist) economic analyses of the home in the context of industrial "homework." Domesticity, in those discussions, has ideological functions that do not stop at constructions of the private lives of individuals, of home, and of family. Such analyses begin with the understanding that to bring home the hierarchies of gender, class, race, and religion is to render these hierarchies logical, viable, and seemingly natural. Researchers such as Jeanne Boydston and Alice Kessler-Harris see the impact of domesticity on wage and labor issues, which were hitherto understood to be purely market driven. 10 In her study of women's labor history in the west and the reliance on domestic ideologies to buttress capitalist expansion, Eileen Boris noted that a home/work split was an essential component of industrialization. She wrote: "Sometimes conceived of as separate spheres, other times expressed as private/public, reproduction/production, community/shop floor, and always seen as male/female, the home/work split pulls apart what in various concrete historical circumstances not only co-exists but defines boundaries that overlap, indeed, construct each other."11 In the preceding quote, taken from her review of recent studies in women's labor history, Boris has succinctly analyzed the home/work dichotomy that until recently formed the basis of the scholarly writing on domesticity in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism and architectural design. Other scholars have recently reworked the conventional links made between private homes and nations, 12 between domesticity and empire,13 between home country and new land in the context of diaspora,14 and of course, between domesticity and gender. 15 The close association between women and the domestic arena is of such long standing that it is sometimes perceived as a natural affinity that

Recycling

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draws the two together. Yet as Karen Tranberg Hansen reminds us: "The domestic is not everywhere nor exclusively organized by gender, but also by class and race relations, and gender relations are not only or even primarily negotiated across a politico-jural/ domestic divide. Both women and men live in households and society, so rather than assuming that gender and the domestic encompass each other, we should ask questions about their changing interrelationship." 16 Much of the feminist work that has attempted to pry apart the almost automatic association of one gender with domesticity has unfortunately ultimately served to reinforce the easy association of women with issues of housework, house decoration, child care, and so forth. Of course, this association in people's minds only mirrors the domestic arrangements that we see around us, in which women are usually expected to and do take on the burden of maintaining domesticity. 17 A quick corrective to this order of things is provided by research on the colonizers' domestic arrangements in colonial Africa, which shows domestic work in White households to be one of the earliest and most common forms of wage labor that African men engaged in. 1s European colonizers were agreeable to having their cooking, child care, and laundry needs met by male African servants; such skills were perhaps understood to be learned skills rather than innate gender attributes. Clearly, the power dynamic that operates in deciding who does the housework is not always nor everywhere determined solely by gender. Work by Hansen and others demonstrates how the ready availability of household help in Africa and other parts of the world has resulted in some upperclass, middle-class, and even working-class African, Indian subcontinental, Asian, and Middle Eastern women having identities that are not thoroughly subsumed by their domestic duties. They have the luxury of occupying a supervisory relationship to child care and other forms of household labor, and yet this in itself is no guarantee of feminist emancipation.19 We can no longer look exclusively at the domestic arena for explications of gender issues or expect gender analyses to generate all that we need to know about domestication projects.

The Domestic on the Domestic Our reflections on our damaged domesticity must include sites like that represented by the Rosalind Solomon photograph that serves as a frontispiece for this book. This stunning photograph was taken in the 1980s in South Africa in the last years of apartheid.20 The serene mother and daughter are framed by the accoutrements of modem middle-class domesticity-the TV, the elaborate coverings draped over the table, the bowdotted framed paintings on the wall, the framed family photographs, and of course, the maid on her knees. To say that the servant is the stumbling

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block in this picture is to be delicate. The Black woman should serve as the stumbling block to several projects on display in the picture-modernity, feminism, domesticity, the family, the joyous mother-daughter bond, the sense of an apolitical private sphere. And yet it seems as if none of this dissonance is apparent to the housewife or her daughter. What Rosalind Solomon has caught so unflinchingly is the necessity of the servant's presence to complete the mistress's proud display of herself as an established, prosperous, fulfilled woman. The Black woman's facial expression refuses easy interpretations, but it is clear that this photographic event is not experienced in a similar fashion by all three subjects. As in the urban collages created by the U.S. painter Kerry James Marshall, the undeniable pleasures of the domestic are ironically acknowledged in Solomon's photograph, even as their material basis is exposed. 21 Do recycled modes of domesticity radically alter or simply reproduce the dynamics represented in this family portrait? What are the virtues of domesticity when viewed by "the domestic" on her knees? Putting domestic comfort and "family" on display (as this photograph does so powerfully) requires both women to adopt unequal but complementary positions; only then is the work of homemaking complete. What Solomon's photograph makes explicit is precisely what is rendered invisible in the usual nostalgia-streaked sentimental representations of domesticity. What is unusual about this photograph is the blunt representation of the economic, racial, and gender arrangements that need to be in place on a national and often international footing before respectable homemaking is successfully achieved. Needless to say, this situation is not unique to middle-class homemaking in South Africa. And yet the more typical representation is like the cover illustration of a special edition of The Economist (September 9 to 15, 1995) on the decline of the family (see Figure 1.1). This cover photograph, set in the "family values" fifties, pictured a White father at the center of the frame reading to his attentive family members, who have dutifully arranged themselves around him. The popularity of this roseate yet clearly patriarchal view of past domestic arrangements is echoed in a March 1996 letter to the editor of Time magazine: Well, let's see. Thirty years ago, the average dad could support his family with just one job, Mom could raise the kids if she chose to, a young person could jump right out of high school or college into a job, the person best qualified got the job, there was less crime, our morals had not yet decayed, and there was less sex and violence on TV or in the movies. So what's happened? Too many people coming into our country and too many jobs leaving.22

In fact, this letter might well serve as a caption for The Economist's cover photo, for both are equally representative of a culturally selective amne-

Recycling

FIGURE 1.1

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The Disappearing Family

sia in which people remember only a certain slice of domestic life divorced from the lives of Other Americans. In concrete ways, the family wage that this "average dad" brought home was predicated on the depressed wages of these other Americans. 2 3 However, nostalgia cuts a clean path from ideal past to the present and disregards the debris and costs accumulated along the way. The sentimental and selective remembrance of the fifties in the west is mainly contrived by the skillful use of black-and-white still photography buttressed by a selective set of statistics. Solomon's photograph cannily dispels any residual sentimentalism attached to "black-and-white" family portraits. Whatever the specifics, what is common to any household is the labor of reproducing itself. Noting that "the product of labor of housework was the household itself," Jeanne Boydston defines this labor as "an evolving array of requirements, some stable and long-term, some arising from the contingencies of the moment, founded on the material and psychosocial need of its members." 24 Boydston's analysis, while directed at nineteenthcentury households, rings true for domestic arrangements in the present.

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The question that remains is who does this housework and at what costs? In Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the US, 1920-1945, Phyllis Palmer exposes the centrality of domestic servants to American models of perfect domesticity well into the mid-twentieth century. 25 Interestingly, in the final chapter of Domesticity and Dirt, Palmer obliquely suggests that the "problem with no name" (a la Betty Friedan) that beset so many White middle-class women at the end of the fifties arose in part because the era of ample cheap domestic labor came to an end as women of color who had tackled much of the domestic dirt found other employment avenues open to them. Studies show that in recent years, career women in the west are increasingly turning to domestic help, provided mainly by immigrants (both legal and undocumented) and other women of color, in order to juggle the tasks of maintaining both career and the high standards of child care and home maintenance expected from today's woman. 26 In the nonwestern parts of the globe, given the uneven nature of economic development, the use and exploitation of servants in domestic projects in which they are marginal has been the unbroken norm from premodern times to the present.27 Perhaps Adorno was right-some kinds of domesticity need to be laid to rest. Yet this cannot be done without acknowledging the organizing power and pleasures of the domestic in its many manifestations. Furthermore, narratives that attempt to deconstruct the pleasures of the domestic do not automatically put to an end such pleasurable spaces and experiences. And this is what motivates further discussion.

Of Kitchen Tables In a curiously ambivalent essay titled "Domestication," published in 1995, the literary and cultural critic Rachel Bowlby noted the ways in which feminist and other deconstructive scholarship has set up "domestication" as the opposite of "radical theorization." 28 Domestication, Bowlby notes, "refers generally to processes of simplification, assimilation and distortion-any or all of these-to which the theory in question falls victim or which it is powerless to resist." 29 Moving swiftly between metaphoric uses, such as the domestication of theories, and actual domestic fixes, Bowlby suggests that domestication is usually understood as the "reintegration or re-assimilation into the dominant culture, accompanied by the loss of ... critical impetus."30 What remains ambiguous in the essay is the degree of Bowlby's own agreement with this use of domestication as a negative metaphor, one that is "in need of no further analysis, [and] implies simply binary oppositions and two-stage stories, whereby something initially natural, spontaneous or subversive gets pushed into a conformity or homogeneity that deprives it of whatever made it differ-

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ent."31 Assessing the importance of domesticity (both real and metaphoric) to feminist theory, Bowlby writes: Just as feminists are sure that the "domestication" of feminist theories is to be regretted, so the rejection of domesticity has seemed a principal, if not the principal, tenet of feminist demands for freedom. The home figures as the place where the woman is confined, and from which she must be emancipated in order for her to gain access to a world outside that is masculine but only contingently so, and which offers possibilities of personal and social achievement that are not available within its limited sphere. In various forms this representation could be said to run right through the western tradition of feminist writing from the past two hundred years-including in different ways Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and at many points Virginia Woolf.32

We need to ask ourselves which feminisms and which feminists are left out of "the Western tradition of feminist writing from the past two hundred years" if, in 1995, such a tradition ends with Virginia Woolf and completely ignores the many feminists who have not experienced or written out of this dire opposition between domestication and radical theory. If, for instance, we were to stop and consider the name chosen by the founders of the Kitchen Table Press, we would immediately be presented with a feminism that sees the very radical potential of domesticity and no incongruity in harnessing the wisdom and labor of this homely location onto their feminist practices. Writing in 1985 of the invisibility of Black lesbian writers due to the fact that they are usually overlooked by mainstream publishers, Barbara Smith stressed the contribution that small feminist presses such as Kitchen Table Press, of which she is a cofounder, have made in getting such works out to readers.33 Similarly, in her 1986 essay titled "No More Buried Lives," Barbara Christian writes, "Despite the fact that Walker received the Pulitzer for The Color Purple and Naylor the American Book Award for The Women of Brewster Place, I doubt if Home Girls, an anthology of Black feminist and lesbian writing that was published by Kitchen Table Press, would have been published by a mainstream publishing company."34 Here, alternative theorizations of race, of sexuality, of economics, of nation, and of gender are symbolically signaled (by the sign kitchen table) as produced from within the domestic arena. The kitchen table becomes a site that is rendered serviceable in this radical usage because it is recognized as constituted by and therefore hospitable to such discussions on the so-called larger issues. The list of groundbreaking projects nurtured and published by Kitchen Table Press is truly impressive. Its publications include Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, 1983; Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, edited by Alma G6mez, Cherrie Moraga, and Mariana Romo-Camona,

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1983; and This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, 1983. It would be impossible to label any part of the Kitchen Table enterprise as simple, tame domestication in the Bowlby sense, even as the press' s name acknowledges an unglamorous domestic location as the focal point of undoubtedly radical energies. Projects such as the Kitchen Table Press recast domesticity as a launching pad for radical reflections on material conditions rather than a location that serves as a refuge from the same. In a telling anecdote, Bowlby recounts how she decided to write her article on domestication the very week that she acquired a kitchen table: I suggested the topic of domestication and then noticed that this happened in the week when I unexpectedly acquired a kitchen table, having always thought that the room wasn't big enough to take one. My pleasure at the transformation of this domestic space was both mitigated and reinforced by the events of the following two weeks, when I went to Paris-a place where I like to think I feel at home-and had my wallet snatched, twice within the space of one week. For the first time, I felt a strong sense of urban paranoia, if that is the phrase, huddling inside the cozy familiar interior of the place where I was staying, wondering how I was going to write this paper on, of all things, domestication.35

Here, domesticity provided for Bowlby a safe haven against a menacing world, and her retreat into domestic coziness seemed to reverse the direction that she saw feminist activism as charting-the escape from the home. Yet in this anecdote more than elsewhere in her essay, Bowlby exposed her reliance on a domestic ideology that maintains a home/world split-a reliance that belied her best attempts at deconstructive readings of domestication. Yet another reading of the kitchen table is provided by the researchers who analyze the use of the home as a workplace.36 Such "homework" is not the unpaid domestic labor required in most homes but the poorly paid labor performed in the home and mainly by women for industrial manufacturers and contractors. In this context, kitchen tables are workbenches where entire families or at least the women and children assemble items of domestic and industrial use for which these individuals are paid by the piece. Indeed, the growing trend toward locating production within the "private" home is presented by employers and homeworkers as a means of extending the comforts of home life to one's work arrangements, thus once again erasing the significance of household labor as well as ironically celebrating the "privacy" of the home in the very act that invades this privacy.37 Homework is championed by some women, who view it as a less restrictive and often even a creative work option compared with what they can find outside the home. Others insist that accept-

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ing homework is a recognition of their vulnerability in the marketplace. Research shows that homework carries both exploitative and liberating potential and thus underlines the paradoxical nature of the domestic scene. My intention in setting up these various kitchen tables next to each other is primarily to demonstrate that there are as many approaches to domesticity and domestication (even within western feminist theory) as there are different practices. So when Bowlby said in response to a trend she traced from John Ruskin's 1865 lectures onward, "Here, domestication runs its complete course," she was, of course, speaking not only of one kind of western rhetorical trajectory but also of one kind of narrative on domestication.38

Long Routes to Domesticity Outside a handful of books that examine specific aspects of domesticity, few cross-disciplinary conversations have taken place on the ways in which social institutions such as homes and families were and continue to be refashioned from the late nineteenth century to the present. This book makes possible a multifaceted reading of domesticity in contemporary cultures through its deliberate juxtaposition of chapters that deal with different sociocultural domestic practices and that are written from different academic locations. All the disciplines represented in this volume (literary studies, cultural studies, history, architecture, geography, media studies, queer studies, and film studies) have their own takes on the domestic arena and usually get to pursue this topic more or less unhindered by what domesticity signifies in other disciplines. In this volume, however, the placement of chapters facilitates a certain amount of "leakage" and mixing, practices that enhance and enrich all the chapters as well as the usual "readerly" interaction with such a multiauthor book. The disciplinary location that many essays in this collection approach is cultural studies, and consequently, most of the essays are written within postmodern/ postcolonial feminist and/ or Marxist theoretical frames. Considerations of race, nationhood, history, gender, sexuality, and class are central to most of the contributions and yet are differently nuanced, mainly because of the variant ways in which different disciplines and individual writers engage with such issues. The domestic is an arena in which complex ideological negotiations are conducted to make the transition from past social practices in the process of meeting the pressures of the present. In the narratives and practices of domesticity that the chapters of this book analyze, the trauma of such transformation is absorbed (imperfectly at times) and the domestic is reissued in a usable format or, in rare cases, abandoned altogether. Individual chapters engage the formation and impact of domestic and related practices in Canada, England, Egypt, Greece, India, Ireland, and

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the United States. Although this book is global in its considerations, the nation most thoroughly traversed is the United States. The chapters in this book on United States-