num_pages: 420
description: The essays in this cutting-edge collection work to dislodge the study of domesticity from exclusive considerations of the private home and homemaking practices. Moving beyond simple gender analyses of the domestic sphere to address other complexities that shape this arena, Burning Down the House presents domesticity as a manifestation of larger national and imperial projects. However, it also reveals how the domestic can provide a means of critiquing these unwieldy ideological structures from within. Several essays in this collection consider the economic, racial, and gendered arrangements that need to be in place nationally and often internationally before respectable homemaking is successfully achieved.Through this volume, editor Rosemary George introduces the reader to the paradoxes and juxtapositions that render tight universalizations on domesticity wholly inadequate. The global domesticities discussed within the individual essays include domestic and related practices in Canada, England, Egypt, Greece, India, Ireland, and the United States. George enables a multifaceted reading of domesticity in contemporary cultures by deliberately juxtaposing essays that deal with different sociocultural domestic practices written from different academic perspectives.Although the disciplines represented in this volume (literary studies, cultural studies, history, architecture, geography, media studies, and film studies) pursue their study of domesticity more or less unhindered by other disciplines’ approaches to the topic, the organization of the volume facilitates a certain amount of “leakage” and mixing, which enhances and enriches the entire collection. Together, these essays invite us to confront the gaps and erasures in most academic and mainstream accounts of domesticity, taking a longer and more complex route to destinations that may not always look like the domestic with which we are familiar.
language: English
title: Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity
titlecomplete: Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity
ratings_count: 3
publisher: Westview Press