Stag Head Matriarchy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes how antlers and stag heads were displayed as a symbolic expression of gendered social power and class status in the American shelter publication Domino between 2005 and 2009. Influenced by hipster styles circulating in New York City coincident to the magazine's fouryear run, Domino's postfeminist lifestyle narrative promoted practices of curation and a poetics of irony to rationalize the unexpected display of real and faux taxidermy in feminine homescapes, blending the edginess of the hipster's attraction to rural “others” and kitsch with the prestige accorded taxidermy in imperial-era Western museums. Domino's editors sought to articulate a millennial, postfeminist domesticity, and decisively masculine, ambiguously classed antlers became a means of expressing feminine social power. Drawing upon postfeminist tropes of progress, choice, and irony, the magazine's editors and writers taught readers how to decorate and relate to their homes, playfully refracting the masculinity of the stag and the domination inherent in the act of hunting through a brightly hued lens of an unapologetically consumerist feminine subjectivity. Tempering the “trashy” masculinity of hipster kitsch with a liberal ethics and nostalgia for elite early-twentieth-century museology, the tastemakers at Domino deployed antlers and stags to symbolize a new domesticity for a new era.