Introduction: Feminist domesticities

Abstract

Feminist Domesticities, coedited by Jo Applin and Francesca Berry, originated in an Oxford Art Journal conference, 'House, Work, Artwork: Feminism and Art History's New Domesticities', held July 2015 at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham with additional generous support from the University of Birmingham and the University of York. It presents and consolidates a growing corpus of art historical feminist scholarship on the domestic in relation to modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary practice. The ten original research articles focus on the work of Louise Nevelson, Ida Applebroog, Carolee Schneemann, Carla Accardi, Lea Lublin, Ella Bergmann-Michel, Paulette Bernège, Sister Seven, Maxine Walker, and women as photographers in the context of post-Web 2.0 user-led digital technology. Contributors share a common interest in the artistic and scholarly problems that arise when the feminist politics of artistic agency are positioned in critical and productive relation to the feminist politics of domesticity. Scholars tackle themes that include labour, temporality, and domestic methodology; housing structures imagined for living differently; collective and individual resistance and radical domesticity; and fantastical entanglements of sexuality in domesticity, together with the various economies - formal, visual, political, psychic, that attach to each. In sum, Feminist Domesticities poses the crucial question of how we might encounter the value of domesticity as concept, environment, and object for art that is and has been made from and in response to feminism whilst resisting domesticity's oppressive pre-eminence in the definition of femininity.