Undutiful daughter(s): troubling geographies of the gendered nation and belonging in Adichie’s Americanah and Atta’s Everything Good Will Come

ABSTRACT

This paper proffers a reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah as a Bildungsroman that represents a moment of a daughter’s “undutifulness” to domesticating national patriarchies and cultures, textual and epistemic genealogies. In this regard, I posit Adichie’s twining of national romances and a heterosexual romantic love that travels and returns as a framework for examining gendered experiencing and relations to the “home.” The article considers the text’s representation of migration and return not simply as moments of re-domestication and formulaic reunification but as incidents that enunciate expanded relationalities to the nation and reconfigure domestic intimacies in a manner that radically unsettles “home.” Americanah is read alongside Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come in an attempt to show how the development of the protagonists’ interpersonal romances goes together with a studied engagement with the national space and communities in ways that inscribe women’s labours of love, care and intellect into the public domain and charts transformative possibilities of being in the world and inhabiting home. Ultimately, Adichie and Atta’s texts demonstrate alertness to celebrations of transnational black femininities, its vulnerabilities and bonds that transcend the limited “ethical” commitments delineated by the horizons of gendered roles and the national home.     

Borrowing,Dwelling, Owing

Abstract

Taking the movie The Company Men (John Wells, 2010) as its starting point, the article attempts to think the condition of indebtedness in its connection with living in and with a home. Through readings of Martin Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking,” the article claims that the predicament of the indebted person and his or her house can be described as linked to a shift in the way we view houses, from “places of dwelling” to “standing-reserves.”     

The Meaning of Queer Home

Abstract

This article positions two proto-queer texts together in order to demonstrate how the development of American “queer subjectivity” arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to “home.” Written before the arrival of the queer category, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1982) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (Alyson Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, original work published 1993) concentrate upon the home as a site conditioned by twin concerns that would become central to queer politics: “the home” as narrative metaphor and homes as real-world shelters. Queering the home stretches and scrambles the home category (“dyke bar as home,” “Black lesbian sisterhood as home,” “body as home”) while insisting upon self-defined, material structures of protection and comfort for queers. The article performs a “reading through skin” of queer scholarship and of sociological data. It argues that these queer-emergent texts helped establish notions of “queer home” via exploring metaphoric and empirical axes related to domestic space.     

The Internet and Demystifying Power Differentials

Abstract

Over the course of the past three years, a group of women residents of a forty-five-year-old public housing project have struggled with the housing authority to participate in the revitalization of that project. This article examines the emergence of a “critical consciousness” and action on the part of these women as a consequence of their going on-line on the Internet with their own home page. This article also looks at the historical and social context of their relationship with the local community and the housing authority as well as the women's ultimate challenge to the housing authority's sense of “exclusive” possession and use of information and data.     

Seventeenth-Century Pronk Poppenhuisen: Domestic Space and the Ritual Function of Dutch Dollhouses for Women

ABSTRACT

A number of pronk poppenhuisen, or “dollhouses for show” were commissioned in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Netherlands for adult women. The large wooden cabinets with multiple partitioned spaces construct a fully furnished Dutch home in miniature, complete with dolls representing family, servants, and pets. The dollhouses have been primarily regarded as sophisticated collections enjoyed by elite female connoisseurs. This study will investigate the surviving dollhouses of Petronella de la Court, Petronella Dunois, and Petronella Oortman as complex didactic objects that prescribed an ideal domestic identity for Dutch mothers and wives in the early modern Netherlands, in part through a three-dimensional structure that encouraged a tactile, physically interactive relationship with the viewer. Manipulation of the dolls within selective, gendered architectural spaces allowed the dollhouse owners to visualize the ideal Dutch home and “perform” their appropriate role within it as productive, disciplined, and orderly wives, mothers, and domestic managers.     

Making environmental sociology sociological

Three basic sociological distinctions—viewing the environment as home or place of sustenance, separation of home and workplace, and “thing” work versus “people” work—are used to illuminate such sociological concerns as environmental degradation as a social problem, social specialization and pollution, and the demographic profiles of environmentally concerned people.     

Guardians of the Golden Age: Custodians of American Military Culture and the Fortified “Home” in Time and Space

ABSTRACT

The Heritage is a gated retirement community for military officers and their wives. This “defensive space” is modeled on elite Anglo-American military culture rooted in the American Revolution. The military “family” and “home” are re-envisioned in this liminal space: a military culture into which they were born, into which they chose to marry, and now, the home into which they have chosen to live until they die.     

“No Place Like Home?”

Abstract

The concept of “home” is subject to individual interpretations; a “home” may be conceived of as a physical space, such as a building/house, a geographical space such as a street, a town or a community, or a place where meaningful social relationships and/or kinship are fostered. Consider, then, what would happen to our understandings of “home” if seen from the perspectives of young people that are “home-less” and estranged from their families and kin groups, sometimes due to their sexual orientation. This article presents results from a research project conducted together with Kentish homelessness charity Porchlight. The aim of the research is to formulate an understanding of the lived realities of homeless LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) youth (ages 16–25). Young people who identify as LGB or T are often victims of hate crime, bullying, harassment, violence, oppression, discrimination, and social exclusion in the home, in schools, and in the community at large. In many cases, these factors can contribute to alienation from the family home and subsequently result in homelessness. Here, I look specifically at how young people experience home and homelessness in relation to kin and social relationships, and drawing from anthropological literature on “the house”, “home”, kinship and “liminality”, I consider how these concepts can better inform our understanding of LGBT youth homelessness.     

Decolonizing my hair,unshackling my curls: an autoethnography on what makes my natural hair journey a Black feminist statement

ABSTRACT

There is unquestionably a buzz in US Black women’s communities about a trending “natural” phenomenon. Sales of chemical relaxers (sometimes dubbed “creamy crack” among the US Black community) have dropped 34 percent since 2009, while sales of “natural” hair care products that promise to non-chemically enhance or beautify “natural” curls are up exponentially. Corresponding to the rise in sales of “natural” hair care products are beauty blogs, YouTube instructional videos and supportive social groups—such as “natural hair” meet-ups, which have organically emerged for, and been mostly created by, Black women as a tool to support and nurture women as they take this journey. In this article, I use Black feminist P.H. Collins’s work because her understanding of the relationship between knowledge, consciousness and empowerment provides a framework or point of departure for grasping my own lived experience of going “natural” with regards to modes of oppression and methods of resistance.     

Housework,Housewives, and Domestic Workers

ABSTRACT

This article sets established historical narratives of a mid-twentieth-century turn to privacy, new domestic identities, and new ways of thinking about housework into a broader history of domestic service. I argue that the new forms of domesticity were only ever partially and unevenly established in middle-class households. Domestic service emerges as a tenacious institution, which continued to be influential in the organization of middle-class or privileged homes throughout the mid- to late twentieth century. Middle-class women were exhorted to manage their homes without servants, and were offered the consolation of greater privacy and intimacy within their homes, as well as the dignity and emotional rewards of a housewife identity. But few found that this made the prospect of being “servantless” attractive. I will therefore examine the failures of the “servantless” home and the “strange survival” of domestic service in twentieth-century Britain.     

Marrying a Man with “Baggage”

Abstract

Cultural views of previously married men include the assumption that they bring ex-wives and children as “baggage” into subsequent marriages. Analysis of 274 questionnaires of second wives revealed that such baggage was significantly associated with reporting less marital happiness, thinking about divorce, and wishing that they had not married their current husband. Implications for women contemplating marriage to a previously married man include acknowledging the vulnerability of second marriages to marital instability, questioning if living together ensures subsequent marital success, delaying the marriage until issues settle out, and considering moving into a new home or apartment with the new spouse rather than having him move into her home.     

“Welfare Mother” Activism,Mainstream Feminism,and the Cunning of History in Ontario’s 1970s Welfare Debate

ABSTRACT

This article examines the voice of mobilized welfare mothers and the mainstream women’s movement in the welfare debate of the 1970s in Ontario. A question debated was whether welfare mothers had a right to “stay home” while receiving welfare. The article shows that a radical strain of welfare mother activists at this time demanded recognition of women’s unpaid work. While mainstream women’s groups were generally sympathetic to welfare mothers, their overriding focus on employability as the solution to their poverty served to derail the radical possibilities of welfare mother politics and solidify a policy agenda that undermined the deserving status of welfare mothers.     

Sexism,Erotophobia, and the Illusory “No”

SUMMARY

I examined erotophobic, sex-negative attitudes toward female sexuality as they relate to acquaintance rape. Evidence suggests that sexist assumptions about female eroticism are intrinsically related to sexual violence against women. The argument is made that society's willingness to acknowledge women as sexual victims while simultaneously failing to validate women as sexual agents creates an ideal breeding ground for acquaintance rape. Accordingly, an analysis will be offered: in a culture that denies women freedom to say “yes” to sex without negative stigma, “no” does not always mean “no.” In this article, I will assert mat those who care about stopping sexual aggression in dating relationships have an obligation to work to eradicate sexist assumptions that neuter women's erotic selves.     

“Running as Women”?

Abstract

This article compares the campaign brochures of female and male candidates who ran for the Pennsylvania State Assembly in 1996 and 1998. The photographs and statements made in the brochures were content analyzed to see if female candidates advertise themselves in ways identified in the literature as “running as a woman.” Specifically, the issues, traits, qualifications, and group associations mentioned in the brochures were coded as “male,” “female,” or “other.” The findings indicated that while women present a mix of messages in their brochures, they are more likely than men to identify “female issues” and “female qualifications.” These differences were greatest among Republicans and challengers.     

Introduction

Abstract

This article examines how surges of female representation have produced gender patterns in standing committees and affected the financial support for “women's policy” in the Norwegian and Swedish national legislatures. The argument is two-fold. The more women there were in the Riksdag and the Storting, the more likely they were initially to end up on a “female” standing committee. Second, as the ratio of women legislators grew, spending on “families and children” in the national budget plummeted in both countries, only to acquire more prominence as the proportion of women legislators reached more than one fourth. The article begins with an extensive critical analysis of the gender-theoretical assumptions of the women and legislatures literature, suggesting that contemporary feminist scholarship that assumes gender to be malleable and contextual is more fruitful.     

Growing Home

ABSTRACT

Using the concepts of “throwntogetherness” and disorder this article offers another perspective on the role of domestic disorder in making a family home. with original data generated within a qualitative research project with same-sex parented families in Sydney, Australia, the article considers some of the everyday ways parents “use disorder” to regulate and reconcile expectations of family life with lived reality, as materialized through reconfiguring existing home spaces. At the same time, the discussion fills in some empirical gaps in contemporary geographies of family by presenting some family home cultures that remain underrepresented in the empirical work on home and family: the domestic, everyday routines, and rhythms of same-sex parented families.     

Change and Consistency in the Relation of Marital Status to Personal Happiness

Abstract

Several studies conducted in the late 1980s suggested that the effect of marital status on personal happiness was declining, meaning that the “happiness gap” between married and never-married persons was diminishing. Speculations about the causes of this diminishing positive effect of marriage ranged from changing values to the increasing role overload of married women. But there was some evidence that the decline in the “happiness gap” had reversed by the end of the 1980s. This paper uses General Social Survey data from 1972 through 2002 to show that this decline did indeed reverse, such that in recent years the difference in the happiness of married and never-married persons is as great as it has been since the inception of the GSS. Although women who are employed and/or have children in the home are slightly less happy than others, the positive effect of marriage on the happiness of these women is as strong as it has ever been.     

Sweet Dreams Security™: Aesthetics for the Paranoid Home

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the banal contraptions of domestic security so commonplace in the British urban street, designer Matthias Megyeri, creates bespoke designs for the paranoid home. His repertoire includes the affectionately titled “Mr Smish and Madame Buttly” razor wire, intricately patterned but deceptively vicious barbed wire, that can be commissioned separately or together “as the dream team of security.” Similarly, the benign, animal figure finials “R. Bunnit, Peter Pin & Didoo,” with smiley faces and floppy ears, transform iron security railings into an endearing set of cartoon-like characters. Other products include “BillyB,” a bear-shaped padlock, “Heart to Heart,” a heart-linked heavy-duty chain, and “CityCat TV,” a friendly cat-shaped CCTV camera.     

Mapping the Elder Mistreatment Iceberg: U.S. Hospitalizations With Elder Abuse and Neglect Diagnoses

Purpose: This study describes U.S. hospitalizations with diagnostic codes indicating elder mistreatment (EM). Method: Using the 2003 Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) of the Healthcare Costs and Utilization Project (HCUP), inpatient stays coded with diagnoses of adult abuse and/or neglect are compared with stays of other hospitalized adults age 60 and older. Results: Few hospitalizations (< 0.02%) were coded with EM diagnoses in 2003. Compared to other hospitalizations of older adults, patients with EM codes were twice as likely to be women (OR = 2.12, 95% CI = 1.63–2.75), significantly more likely to be emergency department admissions (78.0% vs. 56.8%, p < .0001), and, on average, more likely to have longer stays (7.0 vs. 5.6 days, p = 0.01). Patients with EM codes were also three to four times more likely to be discharged to a facility such as a nursing home rather than “routinely” discharged (i.e., to home or self-care) (OR = 3.66, 95% CI = 2.92–4.59). Elder mistreatment–coded hospitalizations compared to all other hospitalizations had on average lower total charges ($21,479 vs. $25,127, p < .001), with neglect cases having the highest charges in 2003 ($29,389). Implications: Knowledge about EM is often likened to the “tip of the iceberg.” Our study contributes to “mapping the EM iceberg”; however, findings based on diagnostic codes are limited and should not be used to minimize the problem of EM. With the so-called graying of America, training is needed in recognizing EM along with research to improve our nation's response to the mistreatment of our elderly population.