Domestic Worlds Research Articles

Regimes of participation: theorising participatory archives from the outset of archivists' views on archival institutions and user participation in Scandinavia

Introduction: In spite of the prominence of the notion of participatory archives, there is no consensus of what participation entails in archival contexts and a lack of theory to explain the mechanisms underpinning the diversity of views. Method: Norwegian and Swedish archivists were surveyed as a part of the international ALMPUB research project for their views on user participation and how these views relate to their understanding of the role and the raison d’être of archives and archival institutions. The survey findings were used as a basis for theory development. Analysis: The data were analysed using exploratory factor analysis and descriptive statistics. The results of the factor analysis theorised as subject positions relating to views pertaining to archival participation and the societal role of archival institutions. Results: The analysis shows that the professionals’ perceptions of the rationale and impact of participation and the societal role of archives and archival institutions forms clusters were interpreted as relating to regimes of participation. Conclusions: Drawing on the theorising of Boltanski and Thévenot, the alignments of the perceptions to archives’ raisons d’être and archival participation are explained in terms of four regimes of participation: 1) participation as an intrinsically valuable activity; 2) participation as a complement to professional work in the records continuum; 3) professional work as an auxiliary activity to participation of experts; and 4) participation as a means of producing additional value for archival institutions, i.e., arrangements of framing the justification and value of participation in, with and for archival institutions. It is, however, possible to imagine additional regimes that correspond with the social worlds of Boltanski and Thévenot not represented by them, including the inspired (participation as a source of inspiration) and domestic worlds (domiciliary participation), and the world by project (participatory project). The study suggests that inquiring into the justifications and regimes of worth attached to participation helps to refute simplistic assumptions of what participation entails and recognise the variety of participatory engagements and their diverging implications for different types of archival institutions and their diverse stakeholders.

Biscuits and unicorns: shifting meanings of domestic space in a post-lockdown world

ABSTRACT Women’s lives have been affected exponentially by the COVID_19 pandemic. In this paper, we explore some of the ways in which women’s everyday experiences of paid and unpaid labour have exacerbated pre-existing gender inequalities. We examine the impact that the pandemic has had on women’s experiences within the domestic sphere, as hyper-normative and historical representations of women as the ‘natural’ primary carers for children and the home have resurfaced. For many, this has led to an almost unbearable pressure to provide full-time domestic care while simultaneously holding down paid work. Drawing on theoretical feminist debate, which has emphasised the importance of intersectional approaches to gender, the paper shows how the fusion of domestic worlds and public lives has brought domestic issues and challenges to the fore and has meant that women’s participation in paid work has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in a number of ways. Women have an increased likelihood of, first, furlough and redundancy; second, of working in ‘high-risk’ jobs; third, of experiencing poverty; and fourth, of bearing the brunt of domestic labour and childcare intensified during the pandemic. Written by both an academic and practicing full-time politician, it offers a unique perspective on this subject.

Writing women on the verge of individuality … Citizen subject, consumption and power in the nineteenth-century Swedish novel

ABSTRACT Three letter-writing nineteenth-century heroines lay out domestic worlds to their fictional readers in which moral sentiment and norms of citizenship versus individual desire are at stake. In an era of nascent capitalism and nation building, these are aspects of significance. But what role does writing letters play? And what impact do epistolary novels have on citizenship and gender at the time? With Michel Foucault and Étienne Balibar as theoretical framework, this article discusses three epistolary novels—The Illusions (1836) by Sophie von Knorring in connection to Grannarne (1837) by Fredrika Bremer and Araminta May (1838) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist—in order to discern how female writing produces the gendered citizen.

Mémoire collective dans les industries culturelles


 
 
 The cultural industries participate in building collective memory because, in many cases, public decision-makers have chosen to elevate individual memories to the rank of collective memory. Cultural industries are faced with systemic discrimination (Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013), which suggests the collective memory of these industries face the same challenges. In this theoretical article, we propose a framework based on Boltanski andThévenot’s (1991, 2006) theory of justification in order to make collective memory in cultural industries more inclusive. First, we conceptualize collective memory as a compromise between the domestic and civic worlds of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991, 2006). Then, the artists and their individual memories are presented using the world of inspiration. Finally, we propose using the world of projects to make the collective memory of cultural industries more inclusive. We, therefore, propose greater openness and democratization of collective memory in the cultural industries due to the world of projects.
 
 

The War in Miniature: Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House and the Legacies of the First World War.

ABSTRACTSir Edwin Lutyens created the national shrine to the war’s losses and, a few years later, a dolls’ house gifted by a ‘grateful nation’ to Queen Mary; the legacies that coalesced in the Cenotaph are also present in the miniature project. Connections with the war are evident in the tiny contents contributed by veterans and in the ambitions that led to its creation as a paradigm of ‘Englishness’. It was a post-war reassertion of domestic and private worlds, the embodiment of a past that the war had almost destroyed, a private place displayed for public consumption and an invitation to delight in the imaginative complexity of the miniature.

Slavery at the Gendered Crossroads of the Revolutionary Era: First Ladies and Their Bondspeople

Slavery at the Gendered Crossroads of the Revolutionary Era:First Ladies and Their Bondspeople Brenda E. Stevenson (bio) Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. New York: Atria Books, 2017, xvii + 253 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $26.00. Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017, 420 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. As I walk attentively through the mansion houses at Mount Vernon, Montpelier, and Monticello as part of a series of plantation research outings during annual sojourns to my home in Virginia, my questions hover everywhere, but two in particular push to the forefront. What was it really like to work and live—young and old, male and female—within these beautifully conceived and adorned spaces, among the most powerful and privileged of one's age, with so limited an opportunity to insist on one's own humanity? How can historical narratives constructed today ever truly contain the truths of those captives' lives? Erica Armstrong Dunbar's Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge and Marie Jenkins Schwartz's Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves have powerful, even moving, stories to tell about some of these men, women and children. These engrossing monographs concern the institution of slavery in the eras of the American Revolution and the early Republic and how elites as well as those whom they enslaved shaped the margins of the nation's founding ideals of liberty and democracy. The stories told in Ties That Bound and Never Caught indeed are not new ones, but Marie Jenkins Schwartz and Erica Dunbar have profoundly enhanced our knowledge of these people and events and, as a result, deepened our understanding of slavery, particularly the gendered relations within the domestic worlds of elite slaveholding households. There is much to appreciate in Marie Schwartz's Ties That Bound. Its most significant contributions are found both in its content and analysis. It is certain, [End Page 189] for example, that enslaved women routinely described slaveholding women as "devils" and "hellcats," particularly when they spoke of their own physical abuse by these women and the sale and abuse of their children. From this perspective, slaveholding women were no better than their husbands not only because of the ways that they treated their slaves directly, but also because they willfully hid, excused, enabled, and took part in the physical and psychological terrors visited upon black bondspeople and their families. This phenomenon is a nuanced lesson in Marie Jenkins Schwartz's Ties that Bound. Schwartz's well-researched monograph is a discourse on the relationships of four of the most elite women in the early United States—Martha Washington, Martha Wayles Jefferson and her daughter Patsy, and Dolly Madison—with their slaves. The stories of these women take us through their transition from girlhood to matron status in the nation's largest slave society at the time, Virginia. This point is important because Schwartz quickly establishes for at least Martha Washington and the Jefferson women that they were socialized from birth to accept the privileges of slaveholding as a financial anchor and social marker for their households and their descendants. As girls, they learned that black people were meant to serve them without question and had no right—inherent or otherwise—to freedom, personal wellbeing, or happiness. Their childhood socialization also included learning that the men in their families routinely demanded the sexual services of enslaved girls and women; how to discount biracial kin; that slave domesticity could be tolerated as long as it did not undermine the operative racial hierarchy; that masters and mistresses must compel their slaves to work hard and be obedient; and that slaves, regardless of their age, gender, or importance within their own social worlds, were the most useful form of portable property that whites could possess. A slaveholding woman's right to barter, sell, use as collateral, loan, give, or rent a bondsperson for the most petty of economic concerns, such as to buy an article of clothing—even more than their command of slave domestic labor as...

Mental Health in Domestic Worlds

More than a decade ago, the case of a young woman named Catarina entered the annals of anthropology. Believed to be suffering from a psychosis, Catarina lived in an asylum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, ...

Home and the materialization of the divergent subjectivities of older women in Hong Kong

Although the social status of women in Hong Kong has changed significantly in recent decades, Hong Kong women continue to perform mothering, caregiving and homemaking tasks into late adulthood. Employing an agential realist approach to analyse the homes and discursive–materialist practices of three older women, this paper explores how the entanglement of materialities, discourses and subjectivities at home as a site of cultural action contributes to the ongoing enactment of divergent subjectivities of older Hong Kong women. The structural–spatial configurations of the three homes manifest the patrilineal and male-dominated family system in Hong Kong, and such older women perform a set of ‘normal’ (house) wifely and motherly duties linked to the maintenance of the male-dominated family system. Nevertheless, these older women’s subjectivities and their domestic worlds evolve through ongoing discursive–materialist practices. This paper further argues that, even if such factors as materialities, structures and practices either are neutral or indeed reinforce existing power imbalances, the dynamic and ongoing intra-action of these factors results in exclusionary but open conditions that may stabilize or subvert social phenomena, such as the ones discussed in this study: patriarchal domestic practices in Hong Kong homes.

Justifying the civic interest in sport: Boltanski and Thévenot, the six worlds of justification, and hosting the Olympic games

This paper examines and applies the widely influential work of Boltanski and Thévenot in order to investigate and understand the political issues or disputes within sport. We provide a critical elaboration of Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of the six ‘orders of worth’ or ‘worlds’ of justification that are drawn upon by social actors within these disputes. We examine how social actors may draw upon multiple justifications (or worlds) in order to advance their positions or interests; how power differences arise between these worlds; and, how weak worlds of justification may extend their influence within specific issues. To elaborate our analysis, we discuss the public issue of Olympic bidding and hosting, and how key social actors or stakeholders (such as local and national governments, event sponsors, and sport bodies) draw on different worlds of justification, particularly in advocating the staging of these events. This issue indicates that the six worlds are organized hierarchically into three ‘levels of worth’: the market, fame, and domestic worlds are the most prominent, while civic world arguments have least influence. These power differentials are reflected further in the criticisms and compromises that arise between the civic world and other worlds. We conclude by examining how civic world justifications may be accorded greater prominence within sport and other public issues, such as those relating to Olympic bidding and hosting.

Geopolitics of Home

AbstractThis paper reviews both established and emerging literatures that problematize conceptual divisions (once) held between the public arena of geopolitics on the one hand, and the so‐called ‘private sphere’ of everyday life on the other. Tying into current concerns in critical and feminist geopolitics, I aim to understand how the home has been theorized and empirically researched as a material and ideological entity of geopolitical significance. The paper covers the themes of modern warfare; home(land) and nation; and the domestic worlds of ordinary, dissident and elite geopolitical actors. It argues that while a rich source of scholarship has coalesced around the influence of geopolitics on the home at different spatial scales, more research should explore how geopolitics is influenced by, and emerges from, the home. In exposing this inequitable, yet ultimately untenable binary division, the paper calls for geographers to ‘make space’ for home in geopolitics.

Homes Both Sides of the Microphone: the wireless and domestic space in inter-war Britain

The paper will explore a neglected area of women's history, namely the entry of ‘the wireless’ into the domestic space of the home in the 1920s and 1930s. The domestic, as much a discursive as a physical space, had been emotionally and symbolically constructed as a place of mundane belonging for women. However, the introduction of the radio changed women's experiences of domesticity, offering education and reducing isolation. This article suggests that as women in the 1920s and 1930s enjoyed the cultural space of broadcasting—listening to travel programmes, explanations of political issues, comedy, plays and popular music—the porous and fluid boundaries between the domestic and public worlds were further underlined. This new domestic, and hence gendered, medium offered a novel, paradoxical, and unsettling cultural space. The reception of the wireless in the home, and the creation of a perceived ‘female listener’ and her concerns, influenced the nature of broadcasting by ‘domesticating the airwaves’. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) frequently utilised a language related to domesticity when discussing and, at times presenting, itself and its broadcasters. However, as the article will demonstrate, the relationship between the cultural space that broadcasting inhabited and the domestic spaces in which it was consumed was dynamic and contested.

Intimate Interactions: Eurasian family histories in colonial Penang

AbstractIntimate interactions across ethnic and cultural lines were integral to the archive of memory within Eurasian families in colonial Penang. Through histories of their European and Asian ancestors, Eurasian families inherited a sense of travel and geographical mobility, and complex forms of cultural exchange often shaped their everyday lives. Eurasian family histories provide access to the messy, lived interactions which formed their social and domestic worlds, but they also hint at their limits. The idea of ‘Eurasian’ in colonial Malaya was a contentious one, a site for debate, as it was experienced by different people in different ways. During the interwar period, members of Penang's Eurasian elite attempted to define and discipline the divided Eurasian communities of Malaya, by purifying Eurasian family histories of their unruly diversity. In exploring the Eurasian social world of colonial Penang, this paper aims to delineate the fragility of such processes of interaction and exchange.

How animal welfare standards create and justify realities

AbstractLuc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot tell us that we live in a plural world in which actions are justified in multiple ways. Moreover, Anne Marie Mol argues that things, certainly including animals, are always multiple, their very existence dependent on the particular practices in which they are implicated. Thus, animal welfare policies must be understood in light of both the ways in which animals are ‘practiced’ and the particular justifications provided for these practices. Such policies make claims based on the practices involved in animal-human interactions and are justified based on appeals to the scientific (industrial), civic, market, and domestic worlds, among others. Thus, animal welfare policies must necessarily involve compromises among both the multiple ways in which animals are ‘practiced’ and the multiple ways in which those policies may be justified.

‘Unhomely moments’: Civilising domestic worlds in colonial Australia

This article explores the multiple connections between the colonisation of Australia in the nineteenth century and the formation of domestic worlds as the site for ‘civilising’ children. The affective bonds of family were often regarded as an indispensable element in the nurture and training of children, but where the bonds of ‘natural affection’ seemed to pose an obstacle to the civilising project, they were ruthlessly severed.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Social Psychology and Media: Critical Consideration

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Social Psychology and Media: Critical Consideration

The Rape of Lucrece (Le Viol de Lucrèce) (review)

The Rape of Lucrece (Le Viol de Lucrece) Presented by the MC93 Bobigny, the Theatre National du Luxembourg, and the Theater im Pfalzbau Ludwigshafen, at the Theatre National de Toulouse, Toulouse, France. October 17-20, 2006. Adapted for the stage and directed by Marie-Louise Bischofberger. Translation by Yves Bonnefoy. Set by Raymonde Couvreu. Lighting by Marie-Christine Soma. Sound by Nathalie Cabrol. Choreography by Arco Renz. Costumes by Marie-Louise Bischofberger, Jean-Daniel Vuillermoz, Comedie Francaise. With Pascal Bongard (Narrator, Tarquin, the Nurse, a Messenger, Collatine), and Veronique Sacri (The Wife, Lucrece). In his 1594 narrative poem, William Shakespeare plunges the reader in medias res at the heart of the crime. The poetic text compels us to follow Tarquin's unnatural pilgrimage to Lucrece's shrine of chastity. In Bischofberger's 2006 adaptation, we followed a different and unusual guide into this tale: a twenty-first-century couple tells a bedtime story of love, lust and martyred chastity. This exploitation of the dramatic nature of Shakespeare's poem in both its poetic and dramatic translation was grounded on the theme of the fracture. The poem has been fractured by its author who gave it a hybrid nature, both poetic and dramatic, then fractured by the translator, Yves Bonnefoy, who transposed the inner dynamic of its words into a foreign tongue; lastly, it was fractured by the director who gave the poem in translation a full theatrical shape. The fractured text of The Rape of Lucrece was a significant raw material for the audience as it already symbolized the discordant world of the protagonists. The polyphonic effect of the Shakespearean text was carried a step further by Bischofberger. Firstly, she chose to modify the argument so as to lull the spectator into the tale of Tarquin and Lucrece; but this was not enough. The scenography chose to retain the text's poetical and philosophical culture at the margins of the stage. The Argument of the poem was turned into a choric interlude enabling both audience and characters to enter the action with the same subtle brutality as in the Shakespearean poem. A woman entered in an elegant, immaculate evening gown, followed by her husband in a dark suit. A small door opened upstage to let them on the main stage: a massive reclining surface torn in the middle by an impressive trap system bordered on the left-hand side corner by a simple white mattress. The playing space was set up as a resolutely modern loft with eclectic objects (a Spartan helmet, a sword, a basin, pieces of armor, a locker, a lamp, and on each side two music stands) scattered about. The bedroom, as a visual and diegetic hub, was slightly off-center. The bed loomed over the central abyss, and its unsteady position foreshadowed the chaotic intercourse to come. At the very beginning of the performance, the couple circled around the wooden floor of the stage before settling amorously on the bed. The sheer contrast between the military paraphernalia invading three corners of the reclining platform stage and the bed was both an ominous warning and a way of establishing this prologue as part of an archetypal world of courtly love. The couple seemed oblivious to the visual chaos around them and absorbed in trying to stop time and to enter the mythical stage of absolute love. The husband offered to tell his wife a tale of love and dignity, of sadness and cruelty. Suddenly, the amorous face-to-face was turned into a cruel game between lovers. The husband-narrator started putting on pieces of the armor before ending his prologue and lying on the bed with his wife. The unnatural superimposition of the military and the domestic worlds foreshadowed the imminent rape. We, as well as the characters, were on a dramatic threshold. The Prologue was about to give way to the main plot and the characters were about to alter their identities to perform the rape. The pieces of armor were no longer mere stage objects, but full props, dramatizing the poetic paradox of Tarquin's armor of nudity: he doth despise / His naked armour of still-slaughtered lust. …

International Executives, Identity Strategies and Mobility in France and China

The strategies of multinational firms increasingly rely in Asia Pacific Region on processes of socialising their employees, who are seeking to develop and reinforce a “global” company culture, without endangering the cultures of local subsidiaries. Specialists have coined the term “cross-cultural management”. A role of “company ambassador” is allocated to a new generation of international executives in Asia whose mission will be to play an effective role as interface between head office its the subsidiaries – and between the subsidiaries themselves – once they have been suitably “impregnated” with the company culture and the particular features of different markets. The repeated experience of international mobility that executives live through means that the individual may well be living in conflict with previous identities. It is true to say that nobody stays long in an internationally mobile situation without running the risk of there being strong divergence between the domestic and residential worlds, the life of the community and the world of the company. This article has been written as a result of in-depth research into the way executives of a large French oil company built up their identities and as a result of a study examines intercultural learning based on French expatriates' experience in China. We consider how French expatriates experience China and what imaginary underlies their perception. Analysis of daily socialization and interaction processes shows intercultural competence develops along distinct immersion stages: immersion–adjustment, immersion–comprehension, and immersion–integration. Individually, adjustment and comprehension support intercultural practice. The ultimate immersion stage leads to enlightened pragmatism stemming from “nomadic intelligence”. Where a researcher in the social sciences or a business man might have expected to have found an homogenous international elite, international executives building an “international system”, the heterogeneous nature of the identity strategies of international executives give the lie to the myth of the large company as a space for the irreversible assimilation of its members. At an individual level, being an international executive is a unique way of living the experience abroad, or rather, several different ways of experiencing identity strategies linked to the manipulation of one's ethnicity in a context of significant geographical and functional mobility.

Sons and Fathers/Boys to Men in the Time of AIDS: Learning Masculinity in Zambia*

The spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa is driven, at least in part, by particular expressions of heterosexual masculinities, especially those that entail aggressive sexuality. More needs to be known about how boys come to construct, experience and define themselves as men and about how hegemonic constructions are, and might be, contested. The recognition that masculinities are historically, socially and economically constructed, and that gender is a process, offers the potential for change. Many studies have described women's vulnerability to HIV along a number of dimensions, among them biological, economic, social and cultural. What is perhaps less self-evident in view of the real power exercised by many men in everyday life in Zambia and elsewhere is the vulnerability of men because of the demands made upon them by particular constructions of masculinity. This article draws upon life-histories collected from a cohort of men educated at a Zambian Catholic mission to explore their recollections of how they learnt to be men and their discovery of themselves as engendered sexual beings. The roots of many understandings of masculinity are to be found in domestic and extra-domestic worlds where boys observed the ways in which men took precedence and exercised power over women and children. The particular contributions of the father and the male peer group to the development of masculine identities are the focus of this discussion.

Gender and Time at the Top

The demand for long working hours in leading positions is seen as a primary obstacle for women entering decision-making, leading to suggestions that public policy support better compatibility between work life and home. The paradox of high-level positions is that while leaders are said to have it all in terms of autonomy and self-determination, they are subject to significant temporal constraints. This article explores the character of the time of women and men pursuing high-level careers in business and politics in Belgium, where state support for the domestic sphere is high, and yet women’s advance in management and politics has been relatively low. This research is based on a questionnaire survey and career history interviews. Women and men engaged in demanding careers organize their domestic worlds in segmented and rationalized ways, while their work has the character of more open and fluid time. This article suggests that assumptions about the character of time in different spheres of life need to be reviewed before further efforts are made to use family-friendly policies to increase women’s presence in decision-making.

L'obsolescence médiatique de « Caulerpa taxifolia »

Tropical alga acclimated to European aquariums before colonizing the Mediterranean sea, Caulerpa taxifolia is a kind of "hybrid" which modifies frontiers between the wild and the domestic worlds. Its mysterious origin, its opportunist behaviour, its toxicity should have made it an emblematic object of our conflictual relation with Nature. Yet, in spite of the important mediatic operation, the myth of the "killer" alga has not worked. The author studies the reasons for this failure, and the specificity of ethnological approach which looks for the "mythical" in scientific literature.