Extreme Domesticity

Susan Fraiman is professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her Columbia University Press publications include Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003) and Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1994).

In Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman continues to perform the crucial task of challenging-in lucid, fervent prose-the "habitual, unthinking" conflations and repudiations which keep women, or the feminized, at the bottom of hierarchies of value. Using a refreshing range of sources, which includes queers, immigrants, and the homeless alongside the more usual "domestic" suspects, Fraiman sets forth a rethinking of domesticity's nature, purpose, location, and creators. It's a timely rethinking that we truly need now. -- Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts Extreme Domesticity brilliantly explores the homemaking practices that provide sustenance and shelter for the fierce and fragile lives of gender rebels and queer pioneers (even during times of homelessness). It is a lesson in how people find the tools for life-making amongst the ordinary and disregarded materials that surround them; and it is a dazzling excursion across dissident domesticities -- Ben Highmore, author of Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday This spirited book rescues housekeeping from its presumed ideological trappings by bringing a host of marginalized subjects back into view. Susan Fraiman demonstrates domesticity's strong creative pull for many working-class, immigrant, queer, divorced, or homeless subjects. Carefully probing a diverse array of homemaking experiences, along with the distinct challenges, comforts, and compensations domestic life can bring, Fraiman honors the rich meanings of home for those too often denied it. A surprising and welcome book. -- Diana Fuss, author of The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them Extreme Domesticity is a startlingly original work that not only offers a contemporary updating of feminist studies on domestic and sentimental fiction, but also establishes provocative new frameworks for understanding modern gender formations. A brilliant and important book! -- Thomas Foster, author of Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women's Writing: Homelessness at Home

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Doing Domesticity 1. Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye 2. Behind the Curtain: Domestic Industry in Mary Barton 3. Domesticity Beyond Sentiment: Edith Wharton, Decoration, and Divorce 4. Bad Girls of Good Housekeeping: Dominique Browning and Martha Stewart 5. Undocumented Houses: Histories of Dislocation in Immigrant Fiction 6. Domesticity in Extremis: Homemaking by the Unsheltered Conclusion: Dwelling-in-Traveling, Traveling-in-Dwelling Notes Bibliography Index