A series of essays to challenge and stimulate, examining the links between gender, domesticity and architecture from a number of different perspectives and disciplines.

A series of essays to challenge and stimulate, examining the links between gender, domesticity and architecture from a number of different perspectives and disciplines.

This book examines the factors which shape the criminal justice response to domestic violence in the light of policy changes at the beginning of the 1990s which aimed to increase arrest rates. In particular, the book discusses the needs and expectations of victims and examines how theirchoices impact on decisions made by police and prosecutors. Many books on the criminal justice response to domestic violence start from the premise that withdrawal of complaints by victims and the subsequent discontinuance of cases, represents some kind of failure on the part of the agenciesinvolved and that victims would benefit from greater determination by police to prosecute offenders wherever possible. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the criminal justice system as it presently operates is capable of responding effectively to the needs of victims of domesticviolence. This book throws doubt on the validity of these assumptions.

This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through “negotiation”—a concept that accounts for artistic practices outside the duality of resistance/accommodation—and “self-fashioning,” Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today. Domestic Negotiations covers a range of archival sources and cultural productions, including the self-fashioning of the “chili queens” of San Antonio, Texas, Jovita González’s romance novel Caballero, the home economics career and cookbooks of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Sandra Cisneros’s “purple house controversy” and her acclaimed text The House on Mango Street, Patssi Valdez’s self-fashioning and performance of domestic space in Asco and as a solo artist, Diane Rodríguez’s performance of domesticity in Hollywood television and direction of domestic roles in theater, and Alma López’s digital prints of domestic labor in Los Angeles. With intimate close readings, McMahon shows how Mexicanas and Chicanas shape domestic space to construct identities outside of gendered, racialized, and xenophobic rhetoric.

Domesticity implicates notions of gender, sexuality, labour, class, ethnicity and taste. It draws upon the performative aspect of its occupants in space, and materialises ambitions for comfort, security, privacy and independence. The conserved domestic space is unlike the conserved monument. It must be flexible to change, intensified occupation, unusual habits, and robust enough to accommodate use and decay. It is a space marked by the passing of time associated with occupancy - cycles of moving in, starting a family, growing old and dying. It is also, no matter how temporary, a space one calls 'home, ' and thus includes physical, geographical and mental registers related to this idea. What does it mean to conserve a house? Can conservation's motives and domesticity's purpose converge in the house's interior? This volume explores such questions by reflecting on the afterlife of several conserved domestic spaces.

Drawing on a broad range of theoretical disciplines - and with case studies of directors such as Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, Claire Denis and Todd Haynes, Amos Gitai, Martin Ritt, John Ford, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine - this book goes beyond the representational approach to the analysis of domestic space in cinema, in order to look at it as a dispositif.

This volume studies elements of Austro-Hungarian or Central European culture that were common across linguistic, national, and ethnic communities, and shows how some of these commonalities survived or were transformed by the turmoil of the 20th century: two world wars, a major depression between the wars, Stalinism and the Iron Curtain

Women continue to be extremely under-represented in the architectural profession. Despite equal numbers of male and female students entering architectural studies, there is at least 17-25% attrition of female students and not all remaining become practicing architects. In both the academic and the professional fields of architecture, positions of power and authority are almost entirely male, and as such, the profession is defined by a heterosexual, Eurasian male perspective. This book argues that it is vital for all architectural students and practitioners to be exposed to a diversity of contemporary architectural practices, as this might provide a first step into broadening awareness and transforming architectural engagement. It considers the relationships between feminist methodologies and the various approaches toward design and their impact upon our understanding and relationship to the built environment. In doing so, this collection challenges two conventional ideas: firstly, the definition of architecture and secondly, what constitutes a feminist practice. This collection of up-and-coming female architects and designers use a wide range of local and global examples of their work to question different aspects of these two conventional ideas. While focusing on feminist perspectives, the book offers insights into many different issues, concerns and interpretations of architecture, proposing through these types of engagement, architecture can become more culturally, politically and environmentally relevant. This 'next generation' of architects claim feminism as their own and through doing so, help define what feminism means and how it is evolving in the 21st century.

From 1918’s Tickless Time through Waiting for Lefty, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue to 2005’s The Clean House, domestic labor has figured largely on American stages. No dramatic genre has done more than the one often dismissively dubbed “kitchen sink realism” to both support and contest the idea that the home is naturally women’s sphere. But there is more to the genre than even its supporters suggest. In analyzing kitchen sink realisms, Dorothy Chansky reveals the ways that food preparation, domestic labor, dining, serving, entertaining, and cleanup saturate the lives of dramatic characters and situations even when they do not take center stage. Offering resistant readings that rely on close attention to the particular cultural and semiotic environments in which plays and their audiences operated, she sheds compelling light on the changing debates about women’s roles and the importance of their household labor across lines of class and race in the twentieth century. The story begins just after World War I, as more households were electrified and fewer middle-class housewives could afford to hire maids. In the 1920s, popular mainstream plays staged the plight of women seeking escape from the daily grind; African American playwrights, meanwhile, argued that housework was the least of women’s worries. Plays of the 1930s recognized housework as work to a greater degree than ever before, while during the war years domestic labor was predictably recruited to the war effort—sometimes with gender-bending results. In the famously quiescent and anxious 1950s, critiques of domestic normalcy became common, and African American maids gained a complexity previously reserved for white leading ladies. These critiques proliferated with the re-emergence of feminism as a political movement from the 1960s on. After the turn of the century, the problems and comforts of domestic labor in black and white took center stage. In highlighting these shifts, Chansky brings the real home.

A collection of thought-provoking essays on the changing face of domestic architecture over two centuries, highlighting the wide range of source materials and theoretical perspectives available to scholars of architectural history.