Middle-class Housewives Research Articles

Countertopographies of copper: Martha Rosler, Chris Kraus and the Great Arizona Copper Strike of 1983–1986

Chris Kraus is often read as a chronicler of women artists’ experience: their frustrated desires, stifled creativity and stolen labour. But while these are the struggles that her protagonists face, the novel sets such struggles within the pressing context of American Empire's expansion and reorganisation in the post-Vietnam era. The juxtaposition between these levels is what generates the drama of Kraus’ work. Foregrounding these juxtapositions, this article situates Kraus’ novels within a longer tradition of feminist conceptual artists like Martha Rosler who took the labour and domination of predominantly white middle-class housewives as a standpoint from which to attempt to understand the expansion of US-backed global capitalism. Specifically, the article draws on the concept of ‘countertopographies’ developed by feminist geographer Cindi Katz to argue that Rosler and Kraus’ work offers a form of ‘countertopographic aesthetics’. That is, they both turn to the sphere of the reproductive as a site from which to map the uneven effects of global capitalism, while also foregrounding their own uneasy relationship with the imperialist project of mapping itself, by drawing attention to the ideological practices and limits of their very mappings. To illustrate this claim, the article concludes by turning to a partially buried event in Kraus’ Summer of Hate (2012): the 1983 Clifton-Morenci Copper Strike, a crucial but often overlooked flashpoint in the roll-out of neoliberalism. This eighteen-month strike was fought by a largely Mexican-American workforce, and the Women's Auxiliary, who joined a long history of working-class housewives like the Housewives’ Committee of Siglo X in Bolivia in becoming strike leaders. I argue that the strike is both crucial to the conjecture that Kraus’ narrative traces, and also illuminating of the limit point of the protagonists’ politics and the form of mapping that is possible from such a perspective.

Gallbladder Paraganglioma- A Rare Case Report

A 34-years-old married middle-class housewife without diabetes, hypertension or betel-nut- chewing hailing from Manikganj, Dhaka; came with the outside diagnosis as neuroendocrine tumor of the gallbladder to the Oncology Department of Khwaja Yunus Ali Medical College and Hospital (KYAMCH). She was admitted in the hospital with complaints of upper abdominal pain, abdominal bloating, weakness, anorexia, nausea and heartburn while taking fatty food. According to her Ultrasonography (USG) of the abdomen, a soft tissue mass was found in the gallbladder with unremarkable routine blood examination including tumor markers. She underwent open cholecystectomy with the suspicion of cancer. Grossly, gallbladder was measures 7.0x 5.0 cm with 0.3 cm wall thickness and on opening a polypoid nodule is found. Before treatment on request from the Oncology Department of KYAMCH, all slides were reviewed and a histopathological diagnosis of paraganglioma was made on the basis of organoid, nested or lobules (Zellballen pattern) of tumor cells in the lamina propria surrounded by a prominent fibrovascular stroma. Atypical mitoses, tumor necrosis, lymphovascular or perineural invasion was not found. The IHC reveals diffuse and strong positive reactions to NSE and CD56 for chief cells and strong positive reaction to S-100 protein for sustentacular cells. The epithelial tumor was ruled out by CK negative reaction. Therefore, the diagnosis of paraganglioma of the gallbladder was established. Because of the positive reaction to sustentacular cells, the neuroendocrine tumor has been excluded. To our knowledge, this type of case has not been reported in our country. On clinical follow-up the patient was found healthy. KYAMC Journal Vol. 14, No. 01, April 2023: 57-61

Reconsidering the Lacemaker

The few published analyses of Caspar Netscher’s Lacemaker (1662) conclude that Netscher captured a straight-forward portrayal of a middle-class housewife modeling ideal feminine domestic virtue. I contend that previously overlooked ambiguities in Netscher’s canvas complicate this simplistic interpretation, in which details, such as the elegant red bodice and sturdy, unfashionable skirt, confuse rather than clarify this space and the woman depicted. Considering the artist’s visual cues within the sociohistorical context of the work, I theorize that The Lacemaker represents a German immigrant and a maidservant working in a middle-class household, rather than a Dutch housewife as specialists have maintained. By centralizing a working-class migrant, Netscher challenged the expectation that Dutch genre paintings should construct and reinforce ideals of feminine domesticity as a singularly middle-class endeavor. He also challenged biases about outsider identities circulating at the time. Given the negative stereotypes of both maidservants and German migrants, Netscher portrayed this figure in a revolutionary manner: as a woman caught between cultures who, like Dutch women, embodied industriousness and virtue. However, this sympathetic vision did not arouse support in The Hague. Netscher’s Lacemaker became an anomaly in his oeuvre, its perplexing details and apparent modesty out of fashion.

Engineering gender, engineering the Jordanian State: Beyond the salvage ethnography of middle-class housewifery in the Middle East

The figure of the middle-class housewife or ‘ rabbat bayt’ emerged in the late 19th-century Arabic-language public sphere amidst the colonial encounter. This gendering of middle-classness responded to a perceived cultural ‘lag’ yet now itself increasingly signifies backwardness in relation to ideals of middle-classness emphasizing women’s education and community service over older norms of purity and propriety. Today, amidst unemployment, discrimination, lack of childcare, lack of safe and reliable public transportation and a highly suburbanized built environment catering to male breadwinners, contemporary Jordanian families must navigate multiple class and gender paradigms. Against a tendency towards salvage ethnography that misrecognizes these constraints as manifestations of deeply held ‘traditional’ values, I emphasize their historicity, arguing that it is only by recognizing housewifery itself as a state project characteristic of the 20th century that we can appreciate how state-building projects drive the gendering of class roles – and the classing of gender roles.

Nazlı Eray’ın “Monte Kristo” Adlı Hikâyesinin Feminist Edebiyat Eleştirisi Işığında İncelenmesi

Kadının toplumdaki konumuna ve sorunlarına edebî metinler ekseninde yaklaşan feminist edebiyat eleştirisi, erkek egemen edebiyat dünyasında yeni bir pencere açmıştır. Bu çalışmada “yazar olarak kadına yönelik feminist eleştiri yöntemi” kullanılmıştır. Nazlı Eray’ın “Ah Bayım Ah” adlı hikâye kitabında yer alan “Monte Kristo” adlı hikâye bu çalışmanın inceleme konusu olan metindir. Şehirde yaşayan, orta sınıfa mensup çocuklu bir ev kadını olan Nebile’nin başkişi olduğu hikâyede kocasının ona yaklaşımından ve hayatından bezen kadının mutluluğu arama çabası ekseninde genel anlamda kadın sorunlarına bir kadın yazarın bakış açısıyla yaklaşılmıştır. Bu çalışmanın giriş kısmında feminizm ve onun Türk edebiyatındaki seyri ayrıca Nazlı Eray ve “Monte Kristo” adlı eseri hakkında kısa bilgiler verilmiştir. Giriş bölümünden sonraki bölümlerde ise “feminist edebiyat eleştirisi”; Nazlı Eray’ın hayatı, sanatı ve eserleri hakkında çeşitli bilgiler verilmiştir. Çalışmanın en sonunda yer alan bölümdeyse sanatçının bir kadın yazar olarak bir kadının yaşadığı problemleri nasıl ele aldığı hikâye metninden alıntılar da yapılarak feminist edebiyat eleştirisi ışığında ortaya çıkarılmaya çalışılmıştır.

In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy

In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy

Stereotyping ideal Woman in American blogs

Abstract: An ideal woman stereotype presents a verbalized standard of what is most desirable in a woman. A middle class housewife, who fanatically pursues her goal to be an ideal woman is designated the Stepford Wife. She is a diligent mother, a conscious citizen, an attractive woman, and an obedient wife. The study presents qualitative analysis of American blogs. Conversational tone, the author’s stance orientation, and freedom of speech approximate linguistic material to that received experimentally. Based on implicit assumptions and evaluative characteristics, psycholinguistic profile of the Stepford Wife presents attitudinal ambivalence: housewife’s positively assessed qualities come along with criticized subordination of a wife to her husband. Verbal, situational, and associative types of irony convey criticism and sneer at the Stepford Wife. The text graphic execution and illustrations used in blogs emphasize emotionally colored focal points of the utterances. Keywords: stereotype; Stepford Wife; modern media discourse; American blogs; attitudinal ambivalence; different types of irony.

Navigating Distorted Territories: “Trauma, Memory and History” in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul

This paper sheds light on the traumatic history associated with Afghanistan, one of the most war-torn places in the world, through the analysis of Tony Kushner’s remarkable play Homebody/Kabul (2001) in the light of “trauma and memory” studies. Being a Brechtian- politicized playwright who aims to engage the reader/spectator in other people’s sufferings, Kushner dramatizes the traumatic events that the Afghans have witnessed and experienced during many years of colonialization and their aftermath through the lens of a British, middle-class housewife and the eyes of other Afghan characters. In Homebody/Kabul, Kushner seeks to engage the Western reader in the trauma of the subjugated “Other” by navigating from one place to another, endeavoring to reflect on the historical, political and traumatic reality of a blighted territory.

An Alternative Form of Women's Political Representation:Netto, a Proactive Women's Party in Japan

AbstractThis article examines a Japanese local party,Netto, as a new type of women's party. TheNettois defined as a “proactive women's party” to illustrate how it is different not only from conventional political parties but also from parties organized to promote feminist platforms. The JapaneseNettois a women-dominated party in which women constitute the majority of members and candidates, as well as party leadership. The party platform prioritizes practical women's interests such as safe food and child-rearing over women's labor or feminist issues. The gendered characteristics ofNettoappeal to middle-class housewives and mothers, facilitating the electoral success of the party in urban areas. The party's notable features, such as rotation of deputies, term limits, donation of deputy salary, and volunteerism, distinguishNettofrom conventional political parties. As such, the party provides an alternative model of political representation. TheNettoparty illustrates that not all women's parties use a feminist platform, but they still play an important role in changing male-dominated electoral politics.

Histories for the Many: The Victorian Family Magazine and Popular Representations of the Past: The Leisure Hour, 1852-1870, by Doris Lechner

Reviewed by: Histories for the Many: The Victorian Family Magazine and Popular Representations of the Past: The Leisure Hour, 1852–1870 by Doris Lechner Jennifer Phegley (bio) Histories for the Many: The Victorian Family Magazine and Popular Representations of the Past: The Leisure Hour, 1852–1870, by Doris Lechner; pp. 340. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript-Verlag, 2017, $45.00. Doris Lechner's Histories for the Many: The Victorian Family Magazine and Popular Representations of the Past: The Leisure Hour, 1852–1870 has a great deal to offer anyone who wants to understand Victorian magazines, the emergence of mass-market publishing, or representations of history in popular culture. The book explores these broad topics through a case study of the Leisure Hour and the Religious Tract Society, its founder and publisher. While the Leisure Hour appealed to readers with entertaining non-fiction serials about historical events and figures, its editors were aware that competition from secular rivals such as the London Journal were brimming with sensational serials accompanied by equally exciting illustrations and non-fiction essays. Lechner argues that while the London Journal had the advantage, the Leisure Hour capitalized on the most appealing traits of [End Page 534] the penny family magazine as a way to propel itself into the realm of its bestselling rival. The Leisure Hour also anticipated "the arrival of the family magazine to the middle classes in the 1860s" as it bridged the gap between the penny weekly and the shilling monthly versions of the genre with its promotion of middle-class notions of respectability (62). Indeed, the magazine was redesigned in the early 1860s in order to incorporate some key elements of the middle-class family magazines, including a full-page illustration for each issue; a larger, more easily readable format; and features that would appeal to both middle-class housewives and railway commuters. The magazine was finally converted from a weekly to a monthly in 1881. After defining the genre of the Victorian family magazine and tracing its trajectory from a cheap mass-market genre in the 1840s and 1850s into a more expensive format for middle-class readers in the 1860s, Lechner delves into the rationale behind the Leisure Hour's focus on historical narratives rather than fiction. She maintains that the Religious Tract Society believed that the use of fiction would undermine its goal of religious conversion while historical writing would support its evangelical aims. Historical content also promised to unite its target audience of working- and lower-middle-class readers with its more educated and affluent founding members. As Lechner points out, the magazine's historical agenda was "defined by the periodical's design as an intermediary within Victorian historical culture: between secular and religious, working and middle class, male and female, popular and academic" (15). History in the Leisure Hour took many forms, including travel writing, biographical and autobiographical narratives, descriptive sketches of monuments and landscapes, and reviews of historical books and exhibitions. Much of the historical writing was serialized and illustrated, suggesting an equivalence to the popular fiction published in other family magazines. The historical selections represented English national identity across historical periods and "often addressed domestic, everyday experiences and objects" as a way to connect "historical actors or events to contemporary" readers (27). Perhaps not surprisingly for a magazine that wanted to walk the line between the secular and the religious, the Leisure Hour typically refrained from engaging in overtly religious discourse. Lechner goes on to compare the Leisure Hour with its working-class rival the London Journal (1845–1912), as well as with its middle-class counterparts Good Words (1860–1911) and the Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975). Interestingly, John Gilbert served as one of the primary illustrators for both the Leisure Hour and the London Journal, which gave the magazines a similar appearance. Both magazines also featured images of historical events, monuments, and national landscapes, though the Leisure Hour was more focused on these subjects of illustration than the more sensational London Journal. According to Lechner, the Religious Tract Society was interested in "didactic and moral notions" derived from historical events relevant to its readers' lives (77). The London Journal, on the other hand, focused on "great men...

넬라 라슨의 『패싱』속에 나타난 과장과 반복으로서의 여성 재현 - 버틀러의 수행성 이론을 중심으로

Judith Butler argues the possibility of subverting patriarchy from within the system (as the term “subvert” suggests), while other feminists have dreamed ‘subverting’ from the outside. Butler insists that the Others within the system, for example, homosexuals within the heterosexual system, can reveal the artificiality and fictionality of the dominant system by repeating and exaggerating the given/prescribed roles. Nella Larsen’s Passing meets Butler’s concept of performativity as the title itself implicates an African-American subject pretending to be white and following white norms. Passing in Passing, however, is acted not only on race, but on gender and sexuality as well. The fact that the two heroines of Passing are black females makes feminism, along with racial discourse, the main analytical frame of the novella. In particular, under the dominant normative ideology of the Harlem region in the 1920s, the two heroines, black middle class housewives, strive to survive as either white or black and their struggling becomes complicated and severe. However, through this complexity and severity of their lives, which neither fit the norm nor deviated from it completely, Passing discloses the fictionality of white, heterosexual, and patriarchal ideology. This article reexamines the issue of female representation in Passing, especially the representation of black women, through Butler’s concept of performativity: Clare’s (overt) representation of women’s beauty and Irene’s performance of the Angel in the House. Clare’s excessive representation of female beauty debunks the male subject’s or observer’s standard on aesthetics, according to which, only women “proper” enough to be contained within the male’s scope of understanding can then be judged “beautiful.” Irene’s repetition of an angel in the house also represents the dilemma of the “true (white) woman”– or a slave master’s wife in the antebellum South – who had to maintain the “house” in the face of her husband’s tacit infidelity with the other woman, the black slave. Hence, the two females’ passings represent the myth of ‘true womanhood,’ but the representations in repetition and excess as everyday performance denaturalize the discourse on black women’s gender.

Saudi Women and the Expression of Identity in the Domestic Living Space

This paper entails a non-western analysis of the contemporary home environment. The main focus of this study is the role of women in family living room design, particularly in the context of Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia. The purpose of this study was to determine how the interior design of domestic space offers opportunities for women to present their identity. Saudi women using their living space within the home can play a role in expressing the identity of those women through the experience of designing this space and the interaction with its objects. The methodological framework has been structured into an ethnographical approach, which involved in-depth interviews with middle class housewives in their living rooms, aimed to seek information about experiences, interaction and values in the home environment, and enables identity presentation in the family living room. In addition, associated methods, such as photographic and video records, coding the living space features and visual observation of the living room were used to enrich data collection and unpack the environmental meaning. These mixed methods helped to understand the reality of women’s life experiences and provide a compelling portrait of women’s roles and identity within their living space. This paper explains the expression of individual (women) identity and the expression of group (family) identity within the living rooms. The living room in Jeddah homes is the centre space of symbolic interaction, where I meets them, where women show how well they have presented themselves and the values of their families in the living room context.

Neither worker nor housewife but citizen: BBC’s Woman’s Hour 1946–1955

ABSTRACTThis article investigates BBC radio’s Woman’s Hour in the post-war period. It explores Woman’s Hour’s focus and insistence on educating women listeners about their role as citizens, and the tensions this caused particularly between broadcasters and different groups of women. The article documents the programme’s development of public and outward looking items, such as the reporting and covering of current affairs, public debates and national politics, women’s party political conferences, and further introducing women MP’s to the microphone. This gave the programme a public and arguably political dimension. The article thus places Woman’s Hour within the broader historiography of the women’s movement in this period, and illuminates the changing role and expectation of women, particularly the middle-class housewife.

Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita

Reviewed by: Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita Simon Partner (bio) Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945. By Samuel Hideo Yamashita. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2015. xii, 238 pages. $29.95, cloth; $29.95, E-book. Samuel Hideo Yamashita’s Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 offers many insights into the wartime experiences of Japanese housewives and children, city dwellers and farmers, civilians and servicemen. Yamashita draws on his long experience with wartime diaries and letters: he has collected 160 diaries, translated (according to his website) 65 of them, and included several in a fine anthology, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). Many more are featured in this book. However, the reader who is looking for a comprehensive account of daily life in wartime Japan—if we understand daily life as the everyday experiences of a broad cross-section of the population—will be disappointed. The book contains three interesting chapters on the broader picture of daily life in wartime Japan (these chapters—1, 2, and 7—would have made more sense grouped together in my opinion). However, the remaining five chapters focus on two special groups—450,000 evacuee children sent with their teachers into the provinces, and a small group of kamikaze pilots—and one special day: August 15, 1945. These are fascinating topics which certainly involved “ordinary” people (if such a category actually exists—one of the strengths of this book is its vivid portrayal of unique personalities). But they [End Page 189] by no means represent the range of daily life experiences of Japan’s 70 million people during the eight years from the “China Incident” to Japan’s surrender, or even during the five years explicitly covered by the book. There is by now a considerable body of work in English (and much more in Japanese) on civilian Japanese experiences of World War II. Yama shita has drawn liberally on some of the classic works in English (e.g., Thomas Havens’s Valley of Darkness and John Dower’s essay “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police”1), though without actively engaging with (or even mentioning) these influential works in his text. But he could also have drawn on an extensive historiography that encompasses some of the complexity of wartime experience in a modern society. These include works on art and music; boys’ and girls’ education; men’s and women’s labor; consumption and saving; clothing; rural life; women and childrearing; military conscription; and government propaganda and censorship; not to mention the experiences of almost three million Japanese civilians living in Japan’s formal and informal empire.2 That said, the three topics covered by Yamashita’s chapters on daily life—neighborhood mobilization, food security, and modes of resistance—are all interesting, albeit limited by his heavy reliance on diaries and his limited use of other available primary and secondary sources. The basic outlines of the stories of mass mobilization, neighborhood associations, food rationing, and food scarcity are well documented, and Yamashita does little more than summarize existing research. But his diaries offer vivid illustration of what these conditions meant in practice for urban Japanese [End Page 190] families. For most, their enthusiastic embrace of the war effort bumped up against the harsh realities of burdensome obligations, stress and exhaustion, shortage and hunger, fear for their own and loved ones’ safety, and, eventually, the prospect of invasion and defeat. The diaries also illustrate the diversity of responses to the war situation, from the protected comfort of a wealthy journalist, to the wholehearted efforts of middle-class housewives, to outright defeatism. Indeed, the chapter on popular resistance is to me the most interesting in the whole book, revealing as it does the determination of many people to preserve a private space in their lives separate from their country’s “total war,” even as they collaborated outwardly with the war effort. It is fascinating to me that the same diary genre that for some was a coercive space in which they felt obliged to represent themselves as aspiring “splendid citizens” was...

Arresting ‘Language,’ Dwelling in Reality : Reading Jean-Luc Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her

장 뤽 고다르는 그의 초기 저작에서부터 ‘언어’에 대한 실험을 거듭해 왔으며 이에 대해 그는 “영화언어에 있어 새로운 알파벳” 을 찾기 위한 여정이라 규정한 바 있다. 고다르의 언어에 대한 실험은 자연 언어에서부터 영화장르나 미장센과 편집 등의 영화 언어 그리고 음악이나 미술 등의 예술 언어에 이르는 다양한 재현 모드들을 대상으로 한다. 특히 그는 이러한 재현 모드들을 새로운 방식으로 조합하고 충돌시킴으로써 이들 언어가 갖는 현실세계와 인간주체와의 관계를 검토한다. 나아가 고다르는 언어란 단지 현실세계로부터 분리되어 이를 표상하는 수단이 아니라 이 둘의 관계는 긴밀하게 결합되어 있으며, 따라서 언어가 재현하는 현실은 이 둘간의 중간지점 그 어딘가에 존재한다고 생각하였다. 이러한 점에서 고다르가 그의 작품을 통해 실천했던 다양한 언어에 대한 실험은 그가 지녔던 언어에 대한 믿음을 구체적인 사례들을 통해 점검하는 과정이라 할 수 있다.BR 본 논문은 고다르의 1967년 작품 그녀에 대해 알고 싶은 두 세가지 것들을 중심으로 고다르가 그의 작품활동을 통해 끊임없이 제기해왔던 언어와 존재에 대한 물음을 검토한다. 이 영화는 1960년대 중반이라는 전후의 상황과 후기구조주의의 등장과 관련하여 서구 유럽에서 언어와 주체의 문제가 새로운 사회적 화두로 대두되던 시기에 제작되었으며, 이러한 사회적 문제의식을 담아내고자 했던 작품이다. 이 작품은 줄리엣이라는 파리의 평범한 가정주부의 일상을 따라가면서 영화언어와 자연언어가 재현해 낼 수 있는 ‘그녀’ 의 의미를 이해하고자 한다. 특히 고다르는 ‘그녀’ 라는 지시어가 갖는 다의성과 언어가 실체로서의 그녀를 담아내는데 있어서의 갖는 모호성에 대해 지적하며, 이를 위해 영화 내외적 언어 규칙과 관습에 다양한 방식으로 도전하고 질문함으로써 언어에 대한 그의 실험을 극대화시킨다. 본 논문은 이 영화가 다루고 있는 언어에 대한 물음과 언어와 현실의 문제, 전후 유럽사회에서 대두된 경제문화의 변화와 인간언어에 대한 이해방식의 변화 과정에 대해 다룬다. 나아가 메를로뽕띠의 현상학을 참조하면서 언어의 현실 재현 기능의 상실과 사회 문화적 조건의 상품화, 비인간화 과정속에서도 지속되어 온 고다르의 인간존재의 조건에 대한 천착을 이해하고자 하였다.

The Sohbet: Talking Islam in Turkey

As Islam moves to the center of Turkey’s public life, an opportunity emerges to explore how Islamic knowledge is transmitted through the discursive practice of pious reading circles known in Turkish as sohbet (conversation). Constituting a ritualistic practice of Turkish Muslims who are inspired by the influential faith community leader, Fethullah Gülen, this article investigates how sohbet is practiced by a group of middle class housewives in Ankara. In so doing, the article addresses the meanings and interpretations that pious women ascribe to the reading of religiously oriented texts, and to discussions on prayer, family, and community that take place at sohbet. It also explores how new Islamic subjectivities are fashioned, how Islamic knowledge is reclaimed, and how spirituality is integrated by women into their roles as mothers and wives. Methodologically anchored upon ethnography, this article concludes that the distinctive features of sohbet in the so-called Gülen community, among other effects, facilitate social coherence, and subsequently, a greater capacity for women to synthesize their experience with modernity and tradition.

Emergent Identity Work and Institutional Change: The ‘Quiet’ Revolution of Japanese Middle-Class Housewives

How do relatively low-power, role-constrained actors break through their constraints in a highly institutionalized environment? Examining the experience of Japanese middle-class housewives involved in a social enterprise, we developed a model of emergent identity work which outlines how actors who enacted their role values in new domains triggered a process of learning and sensemaking which led to spiralling cycles of role boundary expansion. In this process, facilitated by an enabling collective, actors not only changed their own self-concept (internal identity work) but also, through external identity work, changed others’ conceptions of their institutionally prescribed roles.

A Place Called Supermarket

Abstract: The objective of this study is to interpret supermarket stores as privileged spaces for the observation of social relations. The article is based on an ethnography of shopping conducted in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil, by observing middle class housewives during their daily shopping in supermarkets. These stores are seen as places, in opposition to that proposed by Augè (1995), who affirms that supermarkets are non-places produced by supermodernity. The article discusses the history of supermarkets, their role in the cultural and social transformations of the twentieth century, as well as ethnographic data, and shows that it is possible to identify many social interactions inside Brazilian supermarkets.

Accessibility of ICT Tools among Urban Middle Class Housewives in Bangladesh

Accessibility of ICT Tools among Urban Middle Class Housewives in Bangladesh

The Home as Battlefront: Femininity, Gendered Spheres, and the 1943 Women in National Service Campaign

This essay investigates the dynamics of the Women in National Service (WINS) campaign, an attempt by the magazine Ladies' Home Journal to militarize middle-class housewives on the U.S. home front during World War II. Adapting the construct of gendered spheres to the campaign, the analysis suggests that the WINS effort carefully modulated its prewar depictions of domesticity and female submissiveness to offer a transformative view of the wartime home and the role of the housewife in it. The essay concludes, however, that while this transformed vision was overtly empowering, its built-in limitations effectively created a sense of covert disempowerment.