Susan Fraiman

Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins

2017-01-10 · 19 citations

Introduction: Doing domesticity -- Shelter writing: desperate housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye -- Behind the curtain: domestic industry in Mary Barton -- Domesticity beyond sentiment: Edith Wharton, decoration, and divorce -- Bad girls of good housekeeping: Dominique Browning and Martha Stewart -- Undocumented houses: histories of dislocation in immigrant fiction -- Domesticity in extremis: homemaking by the unsheltered -- Conclusion: Dwelling-in-traveling, traveling-in-dwelling

Everyday life studies and feminism

2019-05-16 · 2 citations

This chapter discusses the suffrage as an equality campaign; by contrast, laws protecting women from hazardous working conditions may be seen as reflecting a difference strategy. It describes a similar split in feminist emphases between, for example, “leaning in” and provides for nursing mothers. The chapter shows how feminist interventions serve to reorient the field of everyday life studies and explores the feminist contributions made to this field by two women – one well-known, the other negl…

Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare

New Literary History · 2023-03-01 · 1 citations

Abstract: "Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare" identifies the US eldercare memoir as a burgeoning subgenre of life writing. Typically written by daughters about nursing their parents at the end of life, these memoirs—searing accounts of care for declining bodies—make eldercare visible as a major category of unpaid feminized work. Most home care aides in the US are also women, many of them Black and/or immigrants, performing this important job for meager wages. Eldercare m…

Bathroom Realism and the Women of Cable TV

Signs · 2022 · 1 citations

Who gets The Real in realism? Taking as case studies three women-centered cable TV shows, this essay aims to renegotiate the terms of realism along feminist lines. In their focus on the ordinary and domestic, on proximate bodies and intimate conversations, Broad City, Insecure, and Girls echo the quotidian concerns of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Beyond this, in their signature use of the bathroom, they echo late Victorian efforts to push past the accepted limits of the “real” to explor…

Bad Girls of Good Housekeeping

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2017-01-10 · 1 citations

Proposes a “bad girl” tradition going back to the nineteenth century in which domestic zeal and expertise are linked to women who resist compulsory heterosexuality; who are childless, child-averse, or single mothers; whose domesticity does not preclude and may actually foster professionalism; whose homemaking is divorced from selfless marital/maternal duty and expressive instead of female self-sufficiency, ambition, and pleasure. Begins with a handful of early figures before turning to Dominique…