Negotiating Domesticity

Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture

Hilde Heynen, Gülsüm Baydar, Hilde Heynen, Gülsüm Baydar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134295500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In the home the intricate relations between architecture, gender and domesticity become visible. Negotiating Domesticity investigates themany and complexthemes 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 authorsexplore 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 ofdomesticity in the modern era.

Chapter 1
Modernity and domesticity

Tensions and contradictions

Hilde Heynen

Modernity and homelessness

The literature of modernity focuses on the idea of change and discontinuity, stating that in a modern condition change is paramount and nothing can remain fixed or stable. The basic motivation for this struggle for change is located in a desire for progress and emancipation, which can only be fulfilled if the containment within the stifling conventions of the past can be overcome. Thus, the usual depictions of modernity present it as a heroic pursuit of a better life and a better society, which is basically at odds with stability, tradition, and continuity. Marshall Berman states that:

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.¹

To be modern thus means to participate in a quest for betterment of oneself and one’s environment, leaving behind the certainties of the past. Inevitably, this journey results in the ambivalent experience of the gratifications of personal development on the one hand and nostalgia for what is irretrievably lost on the other.

Several feminist authors have pointed out that such, by now well-diffused, theoretical approaches tend to gender modernity as male. This is not only due to the intimate connection between modernity and critical reason – reason being a capacity that Western philosophy has invariably attributed to males more than to females, as, for example, Genevieve Lloyd has shown.² The gendering of modernity as male also resides in the heroes that figure in its narratives and in the specific sites that they occupy. As Rita Felski argues, the exemplary heroes of Berman’s text – Faust, Marx, Baudelaire – are not only symbols of modernity, pursuing ideals of progress, rationality, or authenticity in a constant battle with a world tied down by irrational beliefs and corrupt mechanisms of power. They also embody new forms of male subjectivity which manifest themselves in the public arena of city streets and political discourses, seemingly free from any familial and communal ties. They thus function as markers of both modernity and masculinity, and this results in a clearly gendered, and hence biased, account of the nature of modernity.³

The conceptualization itself of modernity as embodying the struggle for progress, rationality, and authenticity also bears gendered overtones. In as far as modernity means change and rupture, it seems to imply, necessarily, the leaving of home. A metaphorical “homelessness” indeed is often considered the hallmark of modernity. For a philosopher such as Heidegger it is clear that modern man has lost the knowledge of “how to dwell.”⁴ Theodor Adorno is of the same opinion: “Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. . . . The house is past.”⁵ Although Adorno’s perspective is very different from Heidegger’s, both philosophers share the fundamental assumption that modernity and dwelling are at odds and cannot be reconciled. The metaphor is also recurrent in sociological studies, as can be inferred from The Homeless Mind. Modernization and Consciousness by Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner.⁶ Since the home is associated with women and femininity, the metaphor of homelessness reinforces the identification of modernity with masculinity. It seems as if the vicissitudes of modernity are cast into a scenario which ascribes the active and generative roles to the masculine qualities of reason, dominance, and courage, while leaving the more passive and resistant roles to the feminine capacities of nurturing and caring. Agency, consequently, is most of all located with predominantly male heroes venturing out to conquer the unknown, whereas it is generally the role of women to embody modernity’s “other” – tradition, continuity, home. This scenario is, to a large extent, also the script for modernism.

The gender of modernism

“Modernism,” in its broadest sense, can be understood as the generic term for those theoretical and artistic ideas about modernity that embrace the experience of the new and that aim to foster the evolution towards a brighter future. Typically, however, these movements were part of high culture, and tended to be critical of mass culture and the homogenizing effects of modernization. Modernist discourses have thus often hailed the struggle for authenticity and integrity, and have denigrated the needs for comfort and consolation that were seen as characteristic for a petit-bourgeois mentality. This polarization of values, that underscored the distinction between art and kitsch, bears gendered overtones, as is pointed out by Andreas Huyssen:

It is indeed striking to observe how the political, psychological and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities.⁷

In many ways, the discourses and practices of modernism favored masculine qualities, and were embodied by male representatives. This is, for instance, confirmed by Richard McCormick who comments that in the New Objectivity “the gender of the subject who seemingly produced it, the subject it glorified and to whom it was addressed, was obviously, explicitly, indeed defensively masculine.”⁸

Not surprisingly, then, the great modernist artists, authors, and architects are predominantly male, and the canons in the different fields comprise only a limited amount of women – even if the last decades saw important contributions by feminist scholars who attempted to reinscribe women artists, authors, and architects into the histories of the visual arts, literature, and architecture. ⁹ Of course, the dominating role of men in these fields was precipitated by the social and cultural conditions of the times, which encouraged men to follow their dreams and warned women not to stray too far from accepted patterns of life. We should not underestimate, however, to which extent the legitimating discourses of modernism reinforced the assumed superiority of masculine qualities over feminine features and, consequently, facilitated the access of men into the roles of heroes and leaders, to the detriment of their female counterparts. In the architectural discourse, for example, it was quite common around the turn of the century to see nineteenth-century eclecticism being condemned for its “effeminate” traits. Architects such as Hermann Muthesius, Adolf Loos, or Henry van de Velde advocated the virtues of simplicity, authenticity, and integrity, contrasting these sober and “virile” qualities with the sentimentality, ornamentation, and ostentatious pretensions associated with eclecticism.¹⁰ Hendrik Petrus Berlage called for a modern architecture that would embody the sublime – a form of beauty, he explains, that differs from the more common quality of pleasing the eye, just like male beauty differs from female beauty. The sublime is based upon spiritual strivings, asceticism, and a totally free consciousness. These higher ideals, he states, should lead architecture to a new style based on constructive principles, necessity, and sobriety.¹¹ A rather late variant of this gendered outlook on modern architecture can be found in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead which depicts the male architect-hero as uniquely possessing the qualities of integrity, virility, and authenticity that modern architecture requires.¹²

In a move consistent with this analytical scheme, Christopher Reed states, in the introduction to his edited volume Not at Home. The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, that there is a growing divergence of domesticity and modernism. He sees modernism’s association with the idea of the avant-garde as the main reason for this divergence. He argues that, in as far as modernists conceived of themselves as “avant-garde,” they had a built-in tendency to being undomestic:

As its military-derived name suggests, the avant-garde (literally “advance guard”) imagined itself away from home, marching toward glory on the battlefields of culture. [. . .] From the Victorian drawing-room with its étagères full of trinkets to the twentiethcentury tract house with its mass-produced paintings, the home has been positioned as the antipode to high art. Ultimately, in the eyes of the avant-garde, being undomestic came to serve as a guarantee of being art.¹³

For Reed, it is clear that architects such as Loos or Le Corbusier were deeply hostile to the conventional understanding of home, which they associated with sentimental hysteria and dusty conservatism. They advocated a new way of living in which residences would be reduced to machines for living that would offer their inhabitants only the barest minimum of decoration.

It should be noted, however, that Reed’s understanding of the avant-garde in terms of heroism belongs to a rather specific interpretation of the notion of avant-garde. This interpretation, formulated by authors such as Renato Poggioli and Matei Calinescu, stresses its radical nature, its urge to battle against tradition and convention, its dynamism and activism, its restless quest for annihilating the superfluous, which sometimes ends in a nihilistic gesture seeking purification in absolute nothingness.¹⁴ This interpretation of the avant-garde had been dominant until the 1980s.

More recently, however, a competing viewpoint stresses other aspects. This viewpoint is theorized by Peter Bürger. According to this author, the avant-garde movements in the first half of the twentieth century were not so much concentrating on purely aesthetical issues, but were concerned to abolish the autonomy of art as an institution.¹⁵ Their aim was to put an end to the existence of art as something separate from everyday life, of art, that is, as an autonomous domain that has no real impact on the social system. Movements such as futurism, Dadaism, constructivism, and surrealism acted according to the principle of “Art into Life!,” objecting against the traditional boundaries that separate artistic practices from everyday life. Andreas Huyssen has taken up this understanding of the avant-garde in order to differentiate between avant-garde and modernism. For him, the avant-garde is not the most radical “spearhead” of modernism, but rather formulates an alternative for modernism. Whereas modernism insists on the autonomy of the work of art, is hostile towards mass culture and separates itself from the culture of everyday life, the historical avant-garde aimed at developing an alternative relationship between high art and mass culture, and thus should be distinguished from modernism.¹⁶

If the avant-garde can be alternately understood as either heroic (pursuing the unknown) or transgressive (oriented towards the everyday), modernism’s qualification as consistently masculine is problematized too. Bonnie Kim Scott, for example, states that the masculine gendering of modernism in literature was the result of specific historic circumstances:

Modernism as we were taught it at mid-century was perhaps halfway to truth. It was unconsciously gendered masculine. The inscriptions of mothers and women, and more broadly of sexuality and gender, were not adequately decoded, if detected at all. [. . .] Deliberate or not, this is an example of the politics of gender. Typically, both the authors of original manifestos and the literary historians of modernism took as their norm the small set of its male participants, who were quoted, anthologized, taught and consecrated as geniuses.¹⁷

As a countermove, Scott’s critical anthology of modernist literature presents a series of texts whose choice undermines the narrow constriction of modernism to experimental, audience-challenging and language-focused writing. Her choice enlarges the scope of modernism, showing that a great many voices added to it and that it should rather be described as polyphonic, mobile, interactive, and sexually charged. Scott thus (re)constructs modernism as feminine rather than masculine.

In fact, the dovetailing between modernism and femininity is not so new. As Vivian Liska argues, there is a long tradition, starting with Charles Baudelaire and Eugen Wolff, that attributes feminine qualities to “la modernité” or “die Moderne.” The allegorical female is evoked by a lot of authors around the turn of the last century to describe the ephemeral and enigmatic aspects of modernity. In high modernism – in Virginia Woolf, for instance – one also finds references to a writing style that is thought to articulate a feminine psyche. The most important elaboration of this topos is probably that in recent poststructuralist theories of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigary, and Helene Cixuous. They practice and advocate an “écriture féminine” which bears strikingly modernist characteristics, in that they reject linearity and transparency, but rather write in a way that underscores the ambivalent and paradoxical character of language, thus evoking a multiplicity and endless dissemination of meaning. The key-metaphor which, for them, harbors the promise of a subversive culture capable of undermining the dominant phallogocentrism is the metaphor of the feminine.¹⁸

What we encounter here as a contradiction between different feminist interpretations of modernism – the one depicting it as “masculine,” the other putting the “feminine” at its core – comes forth from a basic split between two tendencies which can roughly be identified as a criticalemancipatory tendency, largely incorporated by Anglo-American authors, versus a poststructuralist, French feminism.¹⁹ The first one stands in the tradition of left-wing, liberal thought, is concerned with empirically investigated mechanisms of discrimination, and focuses on historical, social, and cultural factors of inequality for women. It is politically rooted and oriented towards the emancipation of real-life (female) subjects. The second one rather refers to psycho-analytical and linguistic theories, and favors most of all the analysis of discourses and their symbolic implications. It is philosophically rooted and oriented towards the analysis of subjectivities as they appear in a diversity of practices and discourses. This second tendency is concerned first of all with unraveling, deconstructing and criticizing the conventional hierarchies between the masculine and the feminine. Given these very different backgrounds and the fact that both strands of feminism have developed quite independently from one another, it is hardly surprising that they have tended to operate on different platforms, addressing different issues. Nevertheless, the last decades have witnessed several attempts to mediate between them and to effectuate a certain rapprochement.²⁰

The cult of domesticity

If one of the perspectives discussed above tends to establish the gendering of modernity as masculine through its opposition with feminine domesticity, a focus on domesticity itself on the other hand reveals a rather different mode of interconnection. In tracing the history and meanings of domesticity, one sees that there was a direct connection between the emergence of the domestic ideal on the one hand and the rise of industrial capitalism and imperialism on the other.

Walter Benjamin observes that the private individual makes his entry on the scene of history in the early nineteenth century, at the ...