Esta pesquisa trata das discussões em torno da apropriação do mobiliário dito moderno, no período de 1930 a 1955, a partir de matérias e anúncios publicitários publicados nas revistas ilustradas A Cigarra e O Cruzeiro, e nas revistas de arquitetura Acrópole e A Casa. A partir de textos e imagens divulgados por esses periódicos, com a finalidade de apresentar questionamentos estéticos e funcionais relativos ao uso de móveis domésticos, incluindo o seu arranjo no espaço da casa, analisamos o fenômeno social de difusão dos móveis modernos, trazendo à tona a diversidade de apropriações dos preceitos modernistas e à constituição de noções correlatas, como conforto, domesticidade e bom gosto decorativo. / This research deals with the discussions about the appropriation of the furniture called modern, from 1930 to 1955, from articles and advertising published in the illustrated magazines A Cigarra and O Cruzeiro, and in the architecture magazines Acrópole and A Casa. Using texts and images published by these journals, we have the purpose of presenting aesthetic and functional questions regarding the use of domestic furniture, including their arrangement in the home space. We analyze the social phenomenon of diffusion of modern furniture, bringing up the diversity of appropriations of modernist precepts and the constitution of related notions such as comfort, domesticity and decorative taste.

As Elizabeth Burns’s paradoxical phrase ‘the thin universe’ suggests, the home is a place of both limitations and possibilities. Domestic life has been regarded by some as a spirit-sapping hindrance to creativity, recalling Cyril Connolly’s famous declaration that: ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ This thesis examines the ways in which Burns, Herd and Jamie demonstrate how domestic life, for all its restrictions, can prove to be the ally of art. The home is a repository for childhood memories – shown in my analysis of Burns’s ‘Rummers and Ladels’ and Jamie’s ‘Forget It’ – and it is during this formative period that our ambivalent relationship with the home begins. The desire for comfort and safety can be felt alongside the tug towards the outdoor world of adventure and independence, a push-pull longing found in Herd’s ‘Big Girls’. Herd carries this longing into adulthood in ‘A Letter From Anna’, as does Burns in ‘Woman Reading a Letter, 1662’, and Jamie in ‘Royal Family Doulton’. Section one is my examination of this complicated sensation. The darkness that can make the home a hell features in Burns’s ‘Poem of the Alcoholic’s Wife’, Herd’s ‘Soap Queen’ and Jamie’s ‘Wee Wifey’. Contrastingly, the blissful events that take place there are evoked in Burns’s ‘The Curtain’, Herd’s ‘Rosery’ and Jamie’s ‘Thaw’. In section two I seek to prove that such extreme events, from the abuse suffered at the hands of an unfeeling mother to the delights of new parenthood, prove that the home cannot be dismissed as sequestered or mundane. And yet, dismissed it has been. Why bother depicting one’s ‘wretched vegetable home existence’, as Wyndham Lewis wrote, when one could ‘give expression to the more energetic part of that City man’s life’? Burns bemoans this attitude in ‘Work and Art/We are building a civilization’, and the idea that ‘home crafts’ like embroidery cannot be miraculous in themselves is dispelled by Herd’s ‘The Siege’ and Jamie’s ‘St Bride’s’. The celebration of the domestic interior found in paintings by, for example, David Hockney and Gwen John is similarly seen in the poetry of Burns (‘Annunciation’), Herd (‘Memoirs’) and Jamie (‘Song of Sunday’). Section three aims to show how the Bugaboo in the hall can be the ally of art, and – ‘thin’ though it may sometimes feel – the home is a universe in which infinite poetic possibilities exist.

Esta pesquisa trata das discussões em torno da apropriação do mobiliário dito moderno, no período de 1930 a 1955, a partir de matérias e anúncios publicitários publicados nas revistas ilustradas A Cigarra e O Cruzeiro, e nas revistas de arquitetura Acrópole e A Casa. A partir de textos e imagens divulgados por esses periódicos, com a finalidade de apresentar questionamentos estéticos e funcionais relativos ao uso de móveis domésticos, incluindo o seu arranjo no espaço da casa, analisamos o fenômeno social de difusão dos móveis modernos, trazendo à tona a diversidade de apropriações dos preceitos modernistas e à constituição de noções correlatas, como conforto, domesticidade e bom gosto decorativo. / This research deals with the discussions about the appropriation of the furniture called modern, from 1930 to 1955, from articles and advertising published in the illustrated magazines A Cigarra and O Cruzeiro, and in the architecture magazines Acrópole and A Casa. Using texts and images published by these journals, we have the purpose of presenting aesthetic and functional questions regarding the use of domestic furniture, including their arrangement in the home space. We analyze the social phenomenon of diffusion of modern furniture, bringing up the diversity of appropriations of modernist precepts and the constitution of related notions such as comfort, domesticity and decorative taste.

Choose Your End! is a short story collection that examines what it means to live in a world with containers at every corner. Containers like houses and studio apartments and Tupperware and blenders, and containers like the social constraints of domesticity and womanhood and the physical body. There are limitations in this world both out of and within our control. Both voluntary and involuntary. These stories delve into the ways in which we are affected by our surroundings, our technology, our relationships, our bodies, and our minds and the ways that individuals affect those in turn. Moreover, these stories attempt to pull apart how self-awareness works with regard to these affects alongside how conscious and subconscious delusion pairs with or overshadows that awareness. The world is weird. Mundane things that people accept as normal ways of life are really strange. This collection shifts into and out of the absurd to clash the mundane with the bizarre in an attempt to examine just how weird our world is. And also, because sometimes the traditional ways of examining the world and human existence within it do not feel nearly sufficient enough.

This dissertation focuses on novels and films produced in the second half of the twentieth century that critique traditional notions of home in contemporary America to expand on the large body of work on American domesticity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These texts demonstrate the damaging power and overwhelming force of conventional domesticity, complicating traditional notions of home by speaking from positions of marginality. In each text, key figures react to limited ideologies of domesticity that seek to maintain sameness, silence, and servitude by enacting embodied resistance to domestic entrapment. The areas of convergence between the figure of the conventional, middle-class home, and the material and psychic reality of home disavow the expectations of the middle-class home ideal and offer real resistance to narrow, and often damaging, visions of home. These spaces allow for new conceptions of home and suggest that it may be possible to conceive of home as something other than fixed in place, governed by family and community, or created by prolific consumption of goods. In this way, this dissertation intervenes in the established binary of home/stability in opposition to mobility/freedom, which maintains the limits of appropriate ways of establishing and enacting domesticity along gender and class lines. By considering portraits of domesticity that are often left out of discussions of home in the United States my research intersects with a broad range of theoretical fields and discourses about mobility, historical and popular culture representations of the tramp, the body and surveillance, the home as spatial construct, and housekeeping as both oppressive and subversive. Drawing on historical and theoretical examinations of women within the home space, coupled with literary criticism and close-readings, I seek to determine the nature of confining domesticity and examine the varied ways that different groups of people respond to their entrapment. At stake in this dissertation is a deeper understanding of the ways that literary and filmic representations of home at the end of the twentieth century suggest a conflict between the ways that home and houses, are popularly represented and the fact that home remains a contested and dangerous space.

No Place Like Home: A Cultural History of Gay Domesticity, 1948-1982, explores the development of gay male domestic spaces and their representation in American culture, from the publication of the first Kinsey Report to the AIDS epidemic. Through archival research, and analysis of periodicals, books, and film, it shows that gay men frequently experienced their homes as key sites in the construction of sexual identities, relationships, and communities. Social scientists, journalists, and filmmakers of the 1950s and 60s typically depicted gay men as outsiders, if not threats, to the ideal heterosexual household, either anti-domestic (lonely figures who lurked city streets, bathrooms, and bars in search of a one-night stand), or hyper-domestic (prissy interior decorators whose work alienated "real" men from their homes). Such images, however, overlooked the actual range of social and political possibilities gay men found in the supposed privacy of apartments and houses. No Place Like Home uncovers these domestic performances in order to reconsider the evolution of gay culture and domesticity in the postwar period. Each chapter advances chronologically while tracing the lineage of five tropes of gay male home-making: (1) the interior decorator; (2) homosexual marriage; (3) camp humor and cooking; (4) communes; and (5) vacation homes. In practice and representation, domesticity provided a stage for gay men and their observers to negotiate social anxieties around masculinity and sexuality, and debate conventional conceptions of home and family.

Modernism is often connected to the public sphere due to its associations with urbanity and technological changes. But interiority and private life was as important to modernity and, in particular, in Virginia Woolf’s writing. This essay explores the protagonists’ access to and experience of privacy in Woolf’s novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs Dalloway (1925), which both centre on women in a domestic environment. The reading combines modernist reactions against Victorian domesticity, which was structured on the private/public dichotomy and which limited women’s access to privacy, and combines it with modernist views of interiority, informed, more specifically, by Freud’s model of the unconscious and the spatial features of it. Privacy and interiority are imagined with spatial metaphors, but privacy is not necessarily connected to physical place and being alone, but rather having the ability to control the social situation and to choose what one reveals about oneself. Both novels re-imagine privacy and its ties to physical as well as mental space. This essay argues that To the Lighthouse is centred on a traditional Victorian home which reflects how its protagonist experiences interior privacy, and Mrs Dalloway explores a more modern domesticity that challenges Victorian organisation of the home and in turn, women’s access to privacy and solitude. With modernity public life was made available for women to a larger extent, but just as public life is coded by power relations, so is private life, which determines what sort of life could be lived by, for example, women.

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How we organize cities and design their spatial configuration is always relevant because it reflects politics, financial interests, and territorial dynamics. But the city is also a powerful spatial system as its framework defines the domesticity that is possible within it. This report aims to investigate the relationship between urbanization and domesticity. How can urbanization be reframed, theoretically and spatially, in relation to domesticity? The research is conducted using a subjective and feminist approach. This entails acknowledging the authors position in the research, both emotionally and politically. It also uses a non-binary approach, which refers to an active stance against the false dichotomization of concepts and abandoning restrictive binary modes of discussing, developing, and thinking about spatial concepts. Using literature review, case studies, design explorations, and photography, this report seeks to reframe urbanization beyond the urban-rural dichotomy, situate the discourse in the arctic region, and eventually propose a framework for a new urbanism in northern Sweden which is based in domesticity. The report argues that we must understand all landscapes as devices of urbanism, that urbanization is a domestication of territory, and that strong connections and shared infrastructures across all territory would allow for a more sustainable relationship between urban and rural conditions. This discourse resulted in an architectural proposal of a new framework for urbanization and domesticity in coastal Västerbotten. As conclusion, the report reflects on the danger of its theoretical nature and the interesting possibility to implement the project in a larger territory. Finally, it restates the significance of our urban frameworks.

This paper examines the everyday details of the domestic dining scenes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), and North and South (1855). By viewing dining etiquette in terms of a dramaturgical metaphor, this paper attempts to demonstrate the cooperation, complexity, labour, and significance of the self-aware performances that structure nineteenth-century domestic dining scenes in relation to the sense of pleasure and community care that those scenes produce both for their duration and for the external ‘everyday’. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This paper examines the everyday details of the domestic dining scenes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), and North and South (1855). By viewing dining etiquette in terms of a dramaturgical metaphor, this paper attempts to demonstrate the cooperation, complexity, labour, and significance of the self-aware performances that structure nineteenth-century domestic dining scenes in relation to the sense of pleasure and community care that those scenes produce both for their duration and for the external ‘everyday’.