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3 Lesbian domesticity: relationships and the home In September 1965, an article entitled ‘Myth – or unpalatable fact?’ appeared in the lesbian magazine, Arena Three.The author, calling themselves ‘Commutator’, cited a statistic from a recent television programme which had claimed that 93 per cent of marriages remained intact. Reflecting on whether the same could be said of lesbian relationships, ‘Commutator’ asked: Wouldn’t you say … that the ‘average’ lesbian is – if you want to compare her with the heterosexual world – most closely similar to the het
7 Domesticity, modernity and women’s rights: voluntary women’s organisations and the women’s movement 1950–64 What is a wife? A woman who sets jam to jell, children to rights and her hair for a Saturday night out … why does she do it? Because somebody thinks she’s wonderful-and she wants to go on keeping it that way. (Woman, 27 April 1963) The image of the ‘ideal woman’ flashed on all sides of Magazines … is of a pretty creature whose highest function is to pamper her skin and create the ‘house beautiful’ … the assumption [is] that the frilly little woman
In recent criticism, Jane Austen‘s Northanger Abbey has been reconsidered as a comic rather than mock-Gothic novel, shifting its mockery onto a variety of other targets: domineering men, unwary readers, the violence underpinning English domesticity. I argue that Austen continues her engagement with the Gothic, beyond Northanger Abbey, using Emma as an exemplary case. Emma not only includes explicit mentions of Gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe‘s The Romance of the Forest, but implicitly reformulates the relationships between Female Gothic figures: finding a frail, victimised heroine in Jane Fairfax and a seductive femme fatale in Emma herself.
Controversies about the mid-Victorian sensation novel newly brought to the fore clinical conceptualisations of novel reading as an addiction. Yet as novelists capitalised on the sensational potential of substance abuse at home as part of the genre‘s rupture of ideologies of domesticity, they juxtaposed the consumption of sensational material with other emotional and physical dependencies, while reading could be a panacea or cure. M. E. Braddon‘s John Marchmont‘s Legacy (1863) and Wilkie Collins‘s The Law and the Lady (1875) form particularly revealing examples of self-reflexive sensation novels that capitalise on a clinical Gothic of addiction by appropriating discourses that had, ironically, attacked the sensation genre most virulently.
This essay argues for the importance of James Baldwin’s last house, located in St. Paul-de-Vence in the south of France, to his late works written during the productive period of 1971–87: No Name in the Street (1972), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), The Devil Finds Work (1976), Just Above My Head (1979), The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), and the unpublished play The Welcome Table (1987). That period ushered in a new Baldwin, more complex and mature as an author, who became disillusioned while growing older as a black queer American who had no choice but to live abroad to get his work done and to feel safe. Having established his most enduring household at “Chez Baldwin,” as the property was known locally, the writer engaged in literary genre experimentation and challenged normative binaries of race, gender, and sexuality with his conceptions of spatially contingent national identity. The late Baldwin created unprecedented models of black queer domesticity and humanism that, having been excluded from U.S. cultural narratives until recently, offer novel ways to reconceptualize what it means to be an American intellectual in the twenty-first-century world.
predicament that exists even in non-conflict-affected scenarios. However, the forms of GBV and the domesticities surrounding a particular case affect the kind of help-seeking sought. A GBV survivor’s definition depends on how the violent encounters are perceived and interpreted, influencing the action afterwards: Because of culture and the stereotyped behaviours of our people, and if you are my wife, and I battered you as sometimes
research. We still know little about how lesbian women lived their lives behind the closed doors of the home. Rebecca Jennings devotes a chapter of her book Tomboys and Bachelor Girls to lesbian domesticity but ultimately concludes, ‘The narrative of domestic aspiration which contemporary cultural media ascribed to women in the post-war period is … largely absent from lesbian accounts of their lives’. Note here that Jennings refers to ‘domestic aspiration’. Her analysis is therefore intrinsically bound to the grand narrative of the reinforcement of the gender binary
Odd Men Out is a social, cultural and political history of gay men living in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. It covers the period from the circumstances leading up to the appointment of the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in 1954 to the emergence of the British Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s. It looks at contemporary public, political and legal attitudes towards male homosexuality and gay men. It also focuses on the emergence of gay identities, the opening up and limitations of social spaces and contacts, the operation of the law, and the legal reform process up to and beyond the partial decriminalisation of adult male homosexuality in 1967. The book draws on a wealth of source material from archives, newspapers, magazines, memoirs, diaries, oral histories, interviews, television broadcasts, radio programmes, films and plays. It also includes interviews with social and political commentators, writers, directors, actors and others about their recollections and experiences during the period.
Jeffrey Cox has argued that the case demonstrates that while missionary wives were duty bound to be useful, ‘this utility had to be subordinated to the primary breeding function of the wife’. 3 The case of Ann Hamilton certainly highlights the complex links drawn between mission, marriage, sexuality, reproduction and vocation: or in the words of Elizabeth Elbourne that ‘the ability of missionary women to bear and nurture children was, among other things, a sign of male power’. 4 Sex, reproduction and domesticity are
-Indians and the British empire. To fulfil these two needs – the practical and the symbolic – British domesticity was reconstructed in India in a manner that reinforced the practice and ideology of imperialism. The most private and intimate spaces of the colonizers were themselves colonized by the demands of empire. This politicized imperial home stood in sharp contrast