Minor architectures, micro empires: women and the production of domestic space on the nineteenth-century Pacific 'Frontier'

Abstract

This essay looks at three portraits of women as homemakers on the Pacific Northeast following British Columbia's 1873 accession to the Dominion of Canada, when colonial relationships were buttressed by legal and administrative means, and ideas and practices of the home were central to the spread of Victorian moral norms on the Canadian ‘frontier’. Colonial spatial notions of interiority and exteriority, relationships to the site, and object-regimes were negotiated in this intimate microcosm. The work of space-making that ‘frontier’ women presented in minor pictorial and literary genres was in itself a ‘minor architecture’ about finished form, or objecthood, and the perpetual negotiation of contradictory and unstable imperial spatial relationships which required reworking, reproducing, and redefining. These minor architectures' histories on the ‘frontier’ reveal architecture's power to weave hegemonic values into the very fabric of existence, as well as the fundamental interconnectedness of the identity of settler women and their labour.