Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins

Susan Fraiman

Published by Columbia University Press 2017

Extreme Domesticity

A View from the Margins

Susan Fraiman

In the series Gender and Culture Series

https://doi.org/10.7312/frai16634

Overview
Contents

About this book

A new theory of domesticity depicted through alternative homemakers.

Author / Editor information

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).

Reviews

Thomas Foster, author of Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing: Homelessness at Home:
Extreme Domesticity is a startlingly original work that not only offers a contemporary updating of feminist studies on domestic and sentimental fiction, but also establishes provocative new frameworks for understanding modern gender formations. A brilliant and important book!

Diana Fuss, author of The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them:
This spirited book rescues housekeeping from its presumed ideological trappings by bringing a host of marginalized subjects back into view. Susan Fraiman demonstrates domesticity's strong creative pull for many working-class, immigrant, queer, divorced, or homeless subjects. Carefully probing a diverse array of homemaking experiences, along with the distinct challenges, comforts, and compensations domestic life can bring, Fraiman honors the rich meanings of home for those too often denied it. A surprising and welcome book.

Ben Highmore, author of Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday:
Extreme Domesticity brilliantly explores the homemaking practices that provide sustenance and shelter for the fierce and fragile lives of gender rebels and queer pioneers (even during times of homelessness). It is a lesson in how people find the tools for life-making amongst the ordinary and disregarded materials that surround them; and it is a dazzling excursion across dissident domesticities

Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts:
In Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman continues to perform the crucial task of challenging—in lucid, fervent prose—the "habitual, unthinking" conflations and repudiations which keep women, or the feminized, at the bottom of hierarchies of value. Using a refreshing range of sources, which includes queers, immigrants, and the homeless alongside the more usual "domestic" suspects, Fraiman sets forth a rethinking of domesticity's nature, purpose, location, and creators. It's a timely rethinking that we truly need now.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Doing Domesticity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2 Behind The Curtain: Domestic Industry in Mary Barton Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
3 Domesticity Beyond Sentiment: Edith Wharton, Decoration, and Divorce Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
4 Bad Girls of Good Housekeeping: Dominique Browning and Martha Stewart Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
5 Undocumented Homes: Histories of Dislocation in Immigrant Fiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	118
6 Domesticity in Extremis: Homemaking by the Unsheltered Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	154
Conclusion: Dwelling-in-Traveling, Traveling-in-Dwelling Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	192
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 272
Illustrations
- Other: 14 b&w illustrations

eBook

Published: March 6, 2017
ISBN: 9780231543750