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Always Coming Home: Subdivision Identities and Class Fantasies
Joan McAlister
Generally, this paper explores how the subdivision is rhetorically constructed as a "proper place" for the middle class home and neighborhood. It details how particular positioning and marking strategies function to create a cohesive, distinct, and exclusive scene that promotes identification and reinscribes class relations. More specifically, the paper details how thematic narratives (constructed through entrance markers, promotional materials, and street names) operate to create a mythic or transhistorical haven from the complexities of contemporary American experience. Loosely following Zizek, I illustrate how these scenes produce ideological fantasies that obscure some troubling challenges to middle class identity and daily life. Hence, I pay particular attention to how the subdivision’s ideological fantasy isolates and reinforces class distinctions and provides a legitimating narrative of place. In addition, I argue that the sheer repetition of thematic narratives in subdivisions across the Midwest create a sense of "always coming home" for a mobile middle class and a visual and spatial rhetoric of instant community and continuity that promotes a specific set of class politics. Finally, I analyze how particular absences and contradictions in this rhetoric reintroduce elements that challenge and undermine the cohesiveness of its fantasy narratives. For example, I explore how historical remains of American rural life (such as dilapidated barns and farmhouses) conflict with the mythic narrative of Countryside subdivision near Peoria, Illinois. I also consider how the aging of several other Midwestern subdivisions and the creation of a lived history through the daily practices of their residents eventually erode the transhistorical myths constructing these scenes.
This study contributes to work in the area of visual rhetoric by expanding the focus of such analysis beyond media technologies and celebrated artistic and architectural feats to the everyday visual culture of the middle class, which is a crucial part of American culture and politics and in need of a more detailed analysis by scholars. In so doing, the paper brings the question of class to the construction of place and explores how identifications and social relations are articulated through the visual, while attending to the ways in which these discourses interact with identities and practices.
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