Domesticities

Session coordinator: Robin Silbergleid

Department of English, 201 Morrill Hall

Michigan State University

East Lansing, Michigan 48824

silberg1@msu.edu

"'Donna Reed would never have forgotten the rolls': Utopian/Dystopian Mother-Daughter Relationships in Gilmore Girls and Thirteen"

The complex and often tenuous mother/daughter relationship receives considerable attention within popular culture, from television series to feature films to comic books. The WB series Gilmore Girls explores a utopian mother/daughter relationship while the relationship between mother Melanie and daughter Tracy in the film Thirteen is more dystopian. At the center of both narratives is the place of the home, and these vastly different mother/daughter bonds manifest in this particular space. In the Gilmore household, the place of the home is typically tidy, and the kitchen serves as a space in which to gather rather than as a space of cooking. Domestic labor in the Gilmore house is made invisible and in effect reflects the historical perception of this type of work. The things that decorate this home are frequently named and become a part of the Gilmore family. They serve to mark moments or memories of Lorelei and Rory's relationship. In contrast, the Freeland household, in Thirteen, is sparse in its contents and domestic labor is made visible. The place of the home becomes one of practicality and need rather than want, much like the relationship between Melanie and Tracy. The place of the home, then, operates as the site in which the mother/daughter relationship plays out as either ideal or decidedly flawed.

Michelle Parke

Michigan State University

parkemic@msu.edu

"Dismantling the Domestic: The Postcolonial Child in the Late 1990s"

This paper explores what is at stake for American readers of postcolonial novels focused on exposing the domestic as the site of postcolonial violence. In 1997 U.S. bestseller lists featured both Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, two anger-fueled elegies for post-colonial childhoods that fail to conform to an Anglo-American domestic ideal. Both novels focus on this domestic ideal with an over-determined intensity that at once castigates it as an impossible ideal, and at the same time reifies it into an all-encompassing norm. On the one hand, both novels frame the Anglo-American domestic ideal--a financially stable, loving heterosexual marriage honestly and entirely devoted first and foremost to the affectionate rearing of children--as the culprit behind post-colonial domestic misery. Kincaid’s Xuela sees her own life as twisted beyond narration by her father’s insincere performance of an affectionate domesticity, while Roy’s twin protagonists, Estha and Rahel, understand their entire world to have changed at the moment they find themselves barred from the first-world love lavished on their Anglo-Indian cousin. On the other hand, both novels also style the protagonists’ radical failures to conform to domestic ideals--Xuela through a conscious refusal to reproduce, Estha and Rahel through a despair-filled incestuous pairing that “broke the Love Laws”--as a form of resistance to larger global structures of oppression. Yet in crafting narratives that refuse to adhere to filial domesticity--and in naming Anglo-America as the source of all myths about filial domestic love--the books also provide a perversely reassuring view of an Anglo-American west in which a heteronormative domesticity not only thrives but cannot fail but to colonize global childhoods, incorporating all of history into its irresistible narrative. This paper will examine both the texts of the novels and the reviews with which they met in the Anglophone world as vivid reanimations of domesticity at the end of the millennium.

Sara Maurer

University of Notre Dame

smaurer1@nd.edu

"Domesticated? Hip Mamas, Fly Ladies, and the New Angels in the House"

Who are the twenty-first century angels in the house? From the conservative order of the internet's Fly Lady to the radical "hip mama" Ariel Gore, the domestic sphere has become a place where women, once again, reign. Yet the diversity of such domestic celebrities hints at the vexed relation that contemporary women have to domestic duties and roles. What does it mean when cleaning and cooking are understood not as labor but as pleasure? In what ways do these domestic duties figure in to cultural conversations about mothering? Is it possible for women to have a relation to the domestic not predicated on guilt and expectation? Can the home, finally, be a feminist space? Looking to a range of texts that proffer domestic advice, such as parenting manuals and online forums devoted to housework, this paper considers the kinds of female identities shaped by such discourses and questions the possibilities of subversion located in domestic practice. Taken together, these cultural sites reveal the continued domestication of contemporary American women.

Robin Silbergleid

Michigan State University

silberg1@msu.edu