Domestic Identity Research Articles

Autonomy within the European Union: A Relational Perspective

Autonomy within the European Union: A Relational Perspective Ray and Maurice Kinsella Introduction The European Union (EU) has, over the last decade, been scarred – and indeed its viability called into question – by a succession of interrelated crises. This period of instability dates, more or less, from the European banking crisis, including the resultant economic and socio-political instability across the eurozone and the wider EU. But the epicentre of what can best be described as a truly existential crisis goes much deeper – from economic inequality and the near eclipse of Social Europe, to a yawning democratic deficit that has created a widespread sense of disenchantment and alienation from the European Project (as has been given expression in the ongoing Brexit debacle). The resultant tensions have often been rendered, imperfectly, as ‘populism’. At the heart of these strains is the pressure between two tectonic forces, the perception of an increasingly hegemonistic EU and the aspiration to recover iteratively eroded national autonomy. This is a consistent theme that has emerged from a succession of national elections across the EU. It is real and authentic and the single greatest priority of the new European Commission and parliament is to engage reflectively with this phenomenon, beginning with a renewed understanding of autonomy. We explore this pivotally important issue in this paper. Autonomy, as a form of self-law (auto-nomos), can be conceptually excavated in two distinct but related ways. Firstly, from a philosophical perspective,autonomyisaconceptthatcontributestowardsourunderstanding of the socio-political ontology of nations and their attendant normative and legislative status. Secondly, from a practical perspective, it is the iteratively realised capacity that encompasses taking ownership not just of specific decisions and actions, but over a broader national narrative: to govern in accordance with justifications and motivations that are authentically the nation’s own, rather than the product of coercive forces.1 To address the Autonomy within the European Union: A Relational Perspective Studies • volume 108 • number 431 275 Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 43 21/08/2019 09:14 question, ‘What path do we wish to carve out for ourselves as a nation?’, therefore first necessitates answering, even to a limited degree,‘who are we as a nation?’ Autonomy is, in this instance, the recognition and realisation of this insight – to progressively become oneself amongst others and, aligned with this, to construct a national narrative that is both authentic and meaningful. In section one, we put forward a provisional model of autonomy as ‘becoming oneself amongst others’; in particular focusing on its relational-rootedness and the significance that this has within the context of EU relations. In section two, we reflect on the extent to which imposed austerity – which is expressed in ‘Troikanomics’ – is indicative of a chronic undermining of EU member nations’ autonomy. In section three we develop this analysis by exploring how Troikanomics has subverted a set of specific autonomous capacities possessed by EU member nations. Looking to the future, a challenge for the EU is the extent to which it is prepared to critique the nature and purpose of intra-EU relationships, to learn lessons from Troikanomics, and to appreciate national autonomy’s relational-rootedness.2 Autonomy: a relationally fostered capacity National autonomy is the relational capacity to move towards a sense of clarity and coherence in who one is as a nation, and to express this understanding within one’s national pursuits. This process of ‘becoming oneself among others’ emerges through the coalescence of three autonomous capacities: self-governance, self-determination and self-affirmation. Self-governance is a nation’s capacity to critically engage with, and respond to, the range of characteristics that constitute its ‘domestic identity’. Self-determination is a nation’s capacity to critically engage with, and respond to, the range of characteristics comprising its transnational environment. Self-affirmation is a nation’s capacity to trust in its own legitimacy as an autonomous entity – encompassing its right to affirm and be answerable for ‘who they are’ amidst a multitude of other nations.3 Every country believes that they have a claim on autonomy – that their capacity to exercise ownership over their trajectory is a right that should be upheld in the treaties, policies and provisions that form and foster transnational...

“A State of Conscious and Permanent Visibility”: Sight as an Instrument of Cure and Control at the Worcester State Hospital for the Insane, 1833–1900

The nineteenth-century lunatic hospital was intended to function as a curative instrument, targeting the mind through the senses. This paper compares the way in which visibility was mobilized in the design of the asylum, drawing upon ideals of nature and domesticity, against its imperfect realization in practice, with a focus on the lived experiences of patients.

Chinese lighthearted comedies of the early 1960s

This article examines the flourishing of lighthearted comedy (qing xiju) in Chinese cinema in the early 1960s. Through comedic conflicts generated by the reconfiguration of domestic and professional identities in socialist China, the lighthearted comedies used laughter as a corrective tool to advocate new social, political, and moral values, and in particular to redefine gendered space in society. Many of these films, with apparent links to the immediate mass campaigns and national policies promulgated by the state at the time, managed to provide innovative and rich entertainment with nuanced ideological messages in everyday situations. As exemplified in popular comedies such as Li Shuangshuang, Female Barber, Satisfied or Not, and Big Li, Little Li, and Old Li, Chinese filmmakers were active in exploring new themes and styles in a volatile environment while trying to connect to various artistic and cultural traditions. A close examination of the dynamic negotiations between ideological obligation and artistic expression in these comedies reveals the constraints and potentials of artistic agency, and helps us understand the intertwined relationship between the comic and the political.

The Effects of National Role Conceptions on Bilateral Relations: Japan—Turkey Relationship in Quests of Identity

The framework of Role Theory has been developed in Foreign Policy Analysis to explain the behavior of states in the international system from an ideational point of view. However, it has not been applied as a tool for the analysis of bilateral relations. This study, by analyzing Japan-Turkey relations from its early beginnings up until today, aims not only to give a general sketch of relations and demonstrate its previously unknown richness, but it also aims to understand the impact of the choice of national role conceptions to the development and nature of the bilateral relations. By dividing and analyzing the Japan-Turkey relations in six phases that are defined by various role conceptions adopted by these countries, this study argues that two factors, level and mutuality of internationalization and the compatibility of the national role conceptions, are major factors influential in determining the nature and dynamics of bilateral relations, more than the international political orientation. It also analyzes the domestic political processes that lead these countries to assume the ascribed international roles, suggesting that the search for domestic political identity and consolidation as major influential factors in the adoption of role conceptions which in turn have consequences for bilateral relations.

(Mis‐)Coordinating identities in the transition to parenthood: Investigating the co‐development of partners’ parenting, domestic and provider identities before and after the birth of the first child

AbstractThis research takes a socio‐psychological perspective to studying the transition to parenthood, by longitudinally investigating how couples dyadically coordinate: (a) the changing centralities of parenting domestic and provider identities, and (b) the consequences of this for stress and relationship satisfaction. We collected longitudinal data from a Swiss community sample of 213 heterosexual, first‐time parents, in approximately the 24th week of pregnancy (T1) and 2 years later (T2). Participants completed a sociogram task, sketching the centrality of parenting, domestic and provider identities, for themselves and their partner. We applied actor partner interdependence models to model changing identity centralities at T2, from the (coordination) of T1 identities, distinguishing effects due to one's partner and the individual. Results support identity coordination in couples, especially in the development of the domestic identity. This coordination also had longitudinal effects for couples’ well‐being. Results emphasize the social forces that structure the self‐concept, and their health consequences.

Domestic Ideals and Lived Realities: Gendered Social Relations at the Moors House, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1848–1882

Two families—the Moors and the Balls—occupied a 19th-century house on the main street of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Archaeological assemblages associated with each of the households showed disconnects between gender ideals (notably the cult of domesticity for which the architectural style of the house itself is iconic) and the realities of poverty, raising children, and life cycle. In this article, I explore how variations in the materiality and spatiality of gender ideologies were more than simply deviations from middle-class cultural norms. Rather, they represented active negotiation of dominant ideals and the construction of alternate meaningful gender relations and forms of domesticity.

Engaging the US in the Age of Trump: The Case for a New European Strategic Discourse

While the prevailing perception of EU Member States of NATO is that cooperation with the US under President Trump has become close to impossible, there is still no alternative to engaging. International solutions of consequence will hardly be sustainable without the US. How can EU/NATO Member States and the EU engage effectively with the US on workable international solutions? Policy is applied analysis that inevitably infers from theory in response to the question: what works? Therefore, policy is an intervention, as therapy uses the term, and theories are cognitive tools. Policy and therapy are comparable because both work through discourse to effect change by cognitive restructuring. Therefore, psychological theories offer cognitive tools for designing a strategic discourse as policy intervention. A model for cognitive behavioural therapy and a theory on identity can innovate theory and make policy more effective. Current US political controversies mainly boil down to conflicting US identity stories. Foreign policy issues are an extension of competing domestic group identities and derived domestic issues. The domestic political process does not consider foreign policy issues on their own merit. As a result, current US foreign policy of unilateral confrontation causes some serious risks and costs to US interests. The states now seen as adversaries, such as Russia and Iran, have comparable identity stories that are in a similar way dysfunctional. Stories of confrontation bestow assets in a domestic power struggle while undermining international solutions. A new European strategic discourse should avoid identity stories but seek cognitive restructuring of grand strategies by proposing within the EU/Russian Permanent Partnership Council a comprehensive multilateral conference on the new regional political order in Syria and Iraq. This proposal can emulate the most successful cognitive restructuring of a grand strategy ever, the process led by Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s leading to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Ecological Challenges and New Identities: Land rights and Domus rights

For the first time of the Anthropocene, humanity is about to face an ecological threat, while being at the same time its author and victim. The globalization principle reveals a paradoxical component: the increase of economical wealth is being detrimental to natural resources, which are being depleted. This phenomenon would not have a moral impact, if it would allow preserving on one hand the human freedoms and on the other hand the natural heritage. Yet, this exhaustion of environmental resources actually affects the fundamental rights and freedoms of humanity. Our ambition is here to present a new conceptual tool, capable of legally linking human to their natural heritage: “the domestic identity”. This form of accountable identity would allow to formulate a new right of the land, likely to preserve and protect land and earth communities, in the aim of a universal justice.

Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler

Reviewed by: Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler Alice L. McLean (bio) Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man Nieves Pascual Soler Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, ix + 126 pp. ISBN 978-3319709222, $54.99 hardcover. Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies explores men's life writing, focusing on works penned by celebrity chefs. The book begins with a cursory overview of the secondary role food plays in nineteenth-century canonical "narratives of masculinity" by Henry Adams, Henry James, and Benjamin Franklin before diving into contemporary life writing by seven men—namely, Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, Grant Achatz, Marco Pierre White, Randy King, Steven Rinella, and Hank Shaw. According to Nieves Pascual Soler, the type of autobiography crafted by these chefs enables them to script a performance that works to mask—yet ultimately belies—a deep anxiety about cooking as an ideologically effeminate task. To aid in his performance, each chef-author draws on various forms of hyper-masculine life writing, casting himself as a hero, a criminal, or a hunter. As Pascual Soler acknowledges, the role of cooking has long been split along gender lines, with men serving as professional chefs and women as home cooks. Although not explicitly articulated in Food and Masculinity, this split likewise manifests within the cookbook genre—Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) trained generations of middle-class white women how to rule the home kitchen, while Auguste Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (1903) served as the canonical text for twentieth-century professional chefs. Not surprisingly, the trajectory of men's and women's food writing has been significantly impacted by the rigidly gendered nature of cooking, a rigidity that becomes especially manifest in the culinary autobiographies explored in Chapter 3. Pascual Soler argues that chefs are driven to depict themselves as heroes or anti-heroes in order to compensate for the "feminizing power of cooking" (49). The drive to jettison femininity from the professional kitchen, as Pascual Soler shows, finds its most powerful exemplar in the work of Marco Pierre White, whose Devil in the Kitchen (first published as White Slave in England but renamed when reprinted for an American audience) showcases the "badass" celebrity chef who initiated a wave of "criminal confessionals," a genre that includes Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Gordon Ramsay's Roasting in Hell's Kitchen, and Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty. This genre of food writing, according to Pascual Soler, presents a persona that draws inspiration from detective fiction and criminal autobiography. As it does in Chapter 3, the book situates men's culinary autobiographies within various genres of fiction and autobiography. It does not, however, seriously ponder how life writing blends into food writing or examine in detail the gender ideologies that bifurcate men's and women's culinary autobiographies. It reviews only cursorily Traci Marie Kelly's "'If I Were a Voodoo Priestess': Women's Culinary Autobiographies," Denise Gigante's Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century [End Page 924] Gastronomy, and my own Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century American Women's Food Writing. The book would benefit from a more sustained engagement with the historical context laid out by these three works of literary food studies, a context that clearly establishes a history of gendered autobiographical food writing dating back to the early 1800s, and underscores that genre and gender within culinary literature have long been mutually constitutive. In particular, the autobiographies explored in Food and Masculinity are directly descended from the two most masculine forms of culinary literature—professional cookbooks and gastronomic essays, the latter of which "worked in many ways against the feminized aesthetic of the novel, founded on ideals of bourgeois domesticity" (Gigante xxxv). Rather than contextualizing the chefs' narratives within the tradition of food writing, Pascual Soler places them into the historical context of the heroic journey, criminal writing, and the hunting autobiography in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Using Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the foundation for her second chapter, Pascual Soler argues that the autobiographies by Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, and Grant Achatz construct narratives in which the author transforms...

Love in the Time of Aging: Sociological Reflections on Marriage, Gender and Intimacy in India

Drawing from a group of older and middle-aged (50 years above) women and men who have re-partnered (includes both marriage and cohabitation) through the assistance of a marriage bureau based in the city of Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India), we examine the sociological notions of relatedness and the “practices” of family and intimacy. We ask whether this “non-normative” process of becoming kin in the post-reproductive lives of these participants, holds promise for a democratization of the private sphere as noted by Giddens (1992) where the social process of relatedness is privileged over its biological/procreational forms. In the process, we examine how our study participants tend to organize their newly established relationships through contradictory tensions of negotiations, commitment, social obligation and personal autonomy. In-depth interviews conducted in a dyadic format revealed gendered expressions of personhood, intimacy and sociality. For example, men expected their relationship to bring in nostalgic ideals of domesticity, whereas women associated re-partnering with increased social status, kinship support and economic security underscoring the expected social benefits associated with caste-endogamous idealized heterosexual unions. Significantly, caste relations were instrumental in determining partner preferences and relationship formation with family members among older couples. We show that despite being circumscribed by conventional social scripts, women in these relationships use their (post-reproductive) age to an emancipatory advantage by bargaining with patriarchal compulsions of verilocality and lack of say in partner decisions. In a context where cultural norms prescribe a social pathology of asexuality and familial dependence in later life, this new form of relatedness offers an uplifting narrative of self-disclosure and intimacy, although ultimately reproducing social, economic and symbolic hierarchies of gender and generation.

Tribalism, By Any Other Name

The theme of market-dominant minorities underlies Amy Chua’s latest book, Political Tribes, which examines domestic identity politics and the effects of foreign identity politics on U.S. foreign policy. Chua’s focus on tribalism, that instinctual tendency of humans to associate around shared norms, values, histories, customs, and traditions, holds together what feels like two different arguments: the one about culture at home and the other about foreign policy. The problem with Chua's perspective is that anti-tribalism is tribal, i.e., a view embraced by certain elite groups in America without regard to the perspective of many ordinary Americans. Political Tribes suggests, therefore, that Chua is part of the problem: her type of tribalism is acceptable, others are not. A more convincing plea would acknowledge that the breezy cosmopolitanism Chua prefers is not accessible to all, and offer a more nuanced depiction of “Americanness” and its multiplicities.

Sameness and selfhood: The efficiency of constitutional identities in EU law

AbstractThis article enquires into the formal dimension of constitutional identity by focusing not on what it consists of but on how it is expressed in the different discursive practices developed by constitutional courts. Contrasting constitutional identity as sameness and constitutional identity as selfhood shows that domestic courts can favour either a substantive determination of core constitutional features or a performative approach where the reflexive ability to define oneself prevails. Such a choice conditions the judicial strategies developed in the interactions with the Court of Justice, and their effectiveness. From this perspective, the accommodation in EU law, in light of the respect for Member States' national identity affirmed in Article 4(2) TEU, of these domestic identity claims rooted in the supremacy of the Constitution, depends less on what is asked for than on how it is asked for.

Islamic Criminal Law: The Divine Criminal Justice System between Lacuna and Possible Routes

The Islamic legal system differs from other legal attitudes, as civil law traditions described by law’s codification or common law practices based on binding judicial precedents. In Islamic law, there is neither history of law’s classification, nor an understanding of binding legal precedents. The process of ijtihad (analogical deduction) in Islamic (Sharie‘a) law, though, is alike to Case law model. This article discusses the main principles of criminal law substantially and procedurally and the rules of evidence for each crime is so strict and need a lot of work to proof its commission and to apply the punishments, so it sounds stricter in application than the positive laws without any contradiction to them, so it outlined and described the essential features of Islamic criminal law. Some scholars argued that international human rights values should be interpreted, applied, and practiced by domestic cultural and religious ideals. Islamic criminal law is genuinely rooted in the revelations’ tests and as such is divinely based and driven, not to remark circuitously mingled with spirituality and ethics while instructing human dignity’s philosophies and life appreciation’s values. So, in the end, as the Islamic human rights law charter is earlier than the Human Rights Declaration, so we may not ask ourselves if Islamic law is compatible with HR so, instead, we may ask which parts of the that law or the Sharie‘a norms are similar to the HR Declaration and how they are applied in each country.

The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl by Elaine Lewinnek

Reviewed by: The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl by Elaine Lewinnek René Luís Alvarez Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 239 pp. $45.00. Elaine Lewinnek’s new book is an excellent analysis of suburbs and suburban sprawl in the United States. While these are well-trod subjects within the field of twentieth century urban history, Lewinnek characterizes American suburban sprawl as a mid-to late-nineteenth century phenomenon. She also recasts suburbs not as a northeastern Levittown for men in their grey flannel suits of the 1950s, but as midwestern and on the edges of industrial areas where factory workers and their families lived. In so doing, Lewinnek, an associate professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, has set an ambitious agenda for this project. “Chicagoans imagined suburbs, then created them,” Lewinnek writes in the introduction (5). Imagination by its very nature, however, is an abstraction. Lewinnek fulfills her ambitious agenda by ably demonstrating how the imagined or abstract suburbs became a reality. In exploring the creation of imagined suburbs, Lewinnek attempts to tie together what she identifies as “the diversity of urban growth and the inequality that growth both reflects and reinforces” at “the time when diverse Americans first learned to identify as homeowners.” Chicago proves to be an ideal site for Lewinnek’s examination as it was a city that “proclaimed itself to be a typical American city and, through this claim, eventually affected the rest of the United States” (10). Lewinnek masterfully demonstrates how that occurred across the book’s six chapters, each more intriguing than the last. Lewinnek analysis of Chicago’s real estate market shows how “suburbs were the working man’s reward in several distinct senses.” The first of these senses was a “consumption-oriented reward for work.” Chicago was to be more than a portage point linking the eastern United States to the vast western territories. The city’s very dirt held the potential for hard working men to enter the middle class by owning property in the outskirts of the city. Another sense was that of a “productive space that [workers] hoped to control” in the midst of growing industrial capitalism, a notion that emerged particularly after the Great Fire of 1871. With thousands of people displaced, the city’s elites pushed immigrant workers to the suburbs where they hoped workers would become respectable citizens. Immigrants, however, viewed home ownership as an opportunity to make money through communal lodging by renting to factory workers as borders, a practice that conflicted [End Page 61] with Victorian era ideals of domesticity. Still a third sense of suburbs was that of a racially constructed reward reserved exclusively for whites. Whereas a place like the Town of Lake housed stockyard assembly line workers or Riverside developed exclusively for elites, the Black Belt of Chicago’s South Side emerged as the place where African Americans lived. Neighborhood’s and their boundaries developed as ideals worth defending, and suburbs eventually were contentious spaces over which workers willing used violence to maintain and protect against perceived threats. Two instances in particular warrant Lewinnek’s attention. The first was workingmen’s storming of city hall in 1872 to protest against new fire codes passed in the wake of the Great Fire that required all brick buildings. Protesters objected to what they perceived to be elites telling them how they were to build their homes. The second was the 1919 riots when working class whites and blacks clashed over strict separation of neighborhoods and those that lived there. Lewinnek utilizes seemingly disparate sources to explore these many facets of Chicago and its early suburbs. In addition to newspaper articles and bank and financial records, Lewinnek analyzes novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Henry Fullers’s With the Procession. Lewinnek puts works like these in dialogue with other valuable sources. Promotional materials and advertisements by realtors, such as Homer Hoyt’s One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago...

The Berlin Room

This article traces the history of the Berlin Room—a characteristic feature of Berlin's nineteenth-century layouts of flats. The Berlin Room was a space that connected the street-facing salon rooms to the back bedrooms, utility areas and servants’ quarters in the side wing. It functioned as a spacious thoroughfare, rather than the vestibule it would originally have been, and became the room where the family gathered for meals. This room became common in the early nineteenth-century bourgeois flat, where it embodied the new domestic ideals of the bourgeoisie: namely, informal social interaction and tight-knit family bonds. As a wave of immigrants came to Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century, the city's urban fabric was transformed by the construction of tenement housing. A municipal building officer, Gustav Assmann, developed a series of plans to serve as guides for tenement design and, rather than developing a distinct dwelling type to suit Berlin's lower-middle and working classes, Assmann developed a pared-down version of the bourgeois flat. Within this new typology, the Berlin Room remained the nucleus but was recast as a vehicle for conservative social reform. This article considers the changing values of the Berlin Room as it moved from one dwelling typology to another. Believed to have been unaffected by the corruptive Parisian property development industry, conservatives viewed the Berlin Room, as it reappeared in the tenement, as the last vestige of pre-modern German family life.

Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.

‘A house divided’

HGTV (Home and Garden Television) is an American cable channel devoted to property TV, with programs that combine lifestyle and reality, demonstrating the rewards of home investments. Despite the focus on domestic property and the well-styled home, the programs are generally considered bland, and the cumulative impact of the network’s simple, formulaic programs is considered relaxing and even comforting. But some HGTV programs prominently feature domestic conflict as part of their repetitive narrative formula, disturbing the domestic ideals that the network promotes. While pat endings for individual episodes restore domestic harmony and unity through new (or renewed) domestic space, domestic disputes serve as a persistent reminder of everyday domestic discontent. This emerges in the shows with narratives that highlight conflict – House Hunters, House Hunters International and Love It or List It. But the implications resonate further in the context of the broader esthetic-textual dynamics of HGTV. Repetition within episodes, between episodes of any given show, among many different shows, and in the programming schedule makes the ‘happy endings’ as transitory as the domestic disputes that dominate individual episodes. HGTV programs are lifestyle–reality hybrids that promote quality lifestyle through reality-styled drama. The same textual strategies that demonstrate quality lifestyle also open the door to a lingering sense of domestic unease.

Gender Ideals Violation in Domestic and Economic Life as Found in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind

This study aimed at describing the violation of gender ideals of the main female character in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind in relation to domestic and economic life and describing the possible reasons of why she violated them. The design used was content analysis in qualitative paradigm. Codifications and indicators were established to help to analyze the data. The theories used to analyze the data were the expansionist theory in gender, the Freudian Psychological theory, and the self-actualization theory. The finding shows that Scarlett O’Hara has violated the domestic ideals as a belle, wife, mother, and widow. She also violates the Victorian rules dealing with women and economic life. Scarlett’s violation of the rules in her society is caused by the internal factor and the external factor, the Civil War. It is the emergency, the occasion, and the condition at that time that makes her violate them. Her controversial acts in her society can be considered as a constructive change as it gears to women improvement and equality. The violation of gender ideals of her time does not always mean a negative deviation. It can also bring improvement for a better life.

‘No Picture more Charming’: The Family Portrait in Eighteenth-Century France

During the eighteenth century, so it is conventionally argued, the family portrait underwent a decisive transformation. Hitherto stiff and formal, such pictures took on a new informality and intimacy in response to the rise of a new set of domestic ideals. In the case of French family portraiture, this narrative has continued to be rehearsed in a largely uncritical way. What has not been adequately grasped to date is the way that such pictures functioned to legitimate the sitters and, more particularly, the male head of the family in the eyes of an external beholder. Although sometimes commissioned by a royal or noble family in response to a dynastic crisis, they most often functioned to consolidate the social ascent of wealthy commoners. The changes that the family portrait underwent during this period are bound up with the shift of political authority away from the absolute monarch towards the public sphere.

Life in the kitchen: Television advertising, the housewife and domestic modernity in Britain, 1955–1969

The modern kitchen was emblematic of a cold war obsession with household consumer durables as a measure of national progress. Its roots lay in a largely American idea of the ‘new household’ and the modern housewife. The article explores how television advertising in Britain played its part in helping to promote these co-joined aspects of the cross-Atlantic domestic ideal. In pursuing this argument, the article emphasises the way American domestic ideals took distinctive directions in Britain. Contributing to this adaptation of American ideals was a range of home-grown influences that shaped the remaking of the post-war home and women’s social role.