There's a lot of work emerging about the 'new' domesticity, but it's something that's not easily grasped or defined. It seems to center on women (mostly) embracing their roles as mothers and homemakers (generally on blogs, which begs the question of the other mothers who maybe don't get all confessional or performative about it), with a smattering of dads-discovering-children-and-home on the side. As Geek Chef writes, there's a heavily nostalgic bent to the whole enterprise, and it seems to me that it's this nostalgia that gets in the way of thinking of a new kind of domesticity. Geek Chef talks eloquently about the ways that labor-saving devices have transformed domesticity, and from there I wonder how domesticity can be rewritten for a new age? The argument over there is to embrace the complexities of crafting; but what happens to those of us who are not particularly crafty? Who don't love to cook, take pictures, refinish furniture, spend all of our waking hours besotted with our kids, etc.?
I mean, here we have an incredibly overeducated class of people - both women and men - whose life paths have led them to the home, rather than an office or classroom. The question then, for me, is what do you do with all that education?
Given the general (and increasing) unsustainability of universities as sites of actual higher education (as opposed to job training factories, at which they pretty much fail, but that's a rant for another day), I wonder if the new domesticity is elastic enough to encompass a growing field of independent scholars and researchers? Well, actually, that's a dumb question; the real question is, is academia elastic enough to encompass these people? Can we participate in the 'legitimate' avenues of academic expression (journals, conferences, books), or is a whole new model of scholarly pursuit necessary?
I'm blathering and it's early on a Sunday...
No comments:
Post a Comment