Description
Book SynopsisSusan Fraiman reformulates domesticity, freeing it from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions,
Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.
Trade ReviewIn
Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman continues to perform the crucial task of challenging—in lucid, fervent prose—the "habitual, unthinking" conflations and repudiations that 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. -- Maggie Nelson, author of
The ArgonautsExtreme 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 -- Ben Highmore, author of
Ordinary Lives: Studies in the EverydayThis 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. -- Diana Fuss, author of
The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped ThemExtreme 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! -- Thomas Foster, author of
Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing: Homelessness at HomeAn imaginative and eye-opening reconceptualization of the idea of home. . . . Fraiman’s close readings of detailed descriptions of housework give ordinary daily operations both dignity and value. * Contemporary Women’s Writing *
While amply acknowledging domesticity’s historic constraints on women . . . Fraiman advocates for the empowering potential of homemaking for those who struggle to attain a home or who find it healing after trauma. * Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature *
A fresh view of domesticity . . . that comes out of dispossession and precarity, a domesticity carefully made out of wreckage and loss by those cast away or cast out. * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *
Fraiman’s nuanced readings reveal that domesticity can be, and has been, 'reconfigured as a language of female self-sufficiency, ambition, and pleasure.' * 4Columns *
Insightful and lively. * Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society *
Highly recommended. * Choice *
In spirited and welcoming prose, Fraiman makes us rethink the ideological baggage the domestic realm carries. . . . She leaves us contemplating how we—and various others—value, occupy, and adorn both real and imagined dwelling places. * ALH *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Doing Domesticity
1. Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from
Crusoe to
Queer Eye2. Behind the Curtain: Domestic Industry in
Mary Barton3. 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
