Burning Down The House

Recycling Domesticity

Rosemary Marangoly George

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367009915
• eBook ISBN: 9780429721250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book views domesticity through multiple frames and surveys the rhetoric and practices of domestication in contemporary cultures. It also examines the consequences and costs of homemaking in various geographic and textual locations.

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 Adorno¹

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 wood-burning 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 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 father homemaking 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.⁵ 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 historical 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 ideolo gies.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 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 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.¹⁸ 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 upper-class, 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 modern middle-class domesticity—the TV, the elaborate coverings draped over the table, the bow-dotted 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 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 t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Recycling: Long Routes to and from Domestic Fixes
• PART ONE ON THE ROAD: NATIONS, EMPIRES, TEXTS, HOMES
• PART TWO DOMESTICITY: REDRAWING URBAN SPACE
• PART THREE NOSTALGIA, MODERNITY, AND OTHER DOMESTIC FICTIONS
• PART FOUR BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE: DREAMING, REVISING, BURNING
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index