Negotiating Domesticity : Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture

The home as part of material culture is the very place where the intricate relations between architecture, gender and domesticity become visible.

This book investigates the multi-layered themes evoked by the interconnections between these terms.

Despite modern architecture's prominent emphasis on housing, the point is often made that modern art and architecture were about the suppression, rather than the glorification of domesticity.

The contention of the authors however is that the modern era marks the rise of a new sense of domesticity that developed simultaneously with re-definitions of gender roles and that lead to unprecedented articulations of sexuality with domestic space.

The essays brought together in this book address this issue through interdisciplinary contributions that enrich architectural theory and history with sociological, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches.

They explore the relationships between modern domestic spaces and sexed subjectivities in a broad range of geographical locations of Western modernity.