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Reading the strange case of woman-as-appliance: on transfigurations, cyborgs, domestic labour and the megamachine

Reading the strange case of woman-as-appliance: on transfigurations, cyborgs, domestic labour and the megamachine
Reading the strange case of woman-as-appliance: on transfigurations, cyborgs, domestic labour and the megamachine
Considering questions of feminism, the home and migrations within (especially women's) art after World War II, this article examines the figure of the housewife in art of the UK and the US from the 1950s to the 1980s. Exploring conflations of women's identity with questions of domestic labour, representations of the housewife's configuration with appliances is of especial importance, leading to this article's proposition of the figure of ‘woman-as-appliance’. Such a figure is explored through examination of, in particular, Richard Hamilton's painting $he (1958–1961) and the video project Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $M. This article argues for woman-as-appliance as the barred subject par excellence, as the megamachine of domestic labour (through an adaptive appropriation from Lewis Mumford), and (by way of McKenzie Wark and Donna Haraway) in her cyborgic transfigurations
0952-8822
356-376
Davis, August Jordan
2511504e-30cf-4a65-a4a6-242ff3f9c20c
Davis, August Jordan
2511504e-30cf-4a65-a4a6-242ff3f9c20c

Davis, August Jordan (2016) Reading the strange case of woman-as-appliance: on transfigurations, cyborgs, domestic labour and the megamachine. Third Text, 29 (4-5), 356-376. (doi:10.1080/09528822.2016.1152091).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Considering questions of feminism, the home and migrations within (especially women's) art after World War II, this article examines the figure of the housewife in art of the UK and the US from the 1950s to the 1980s. Exploring conflations of women's identity with questions of domestic labour, representations of the housewife's configuration with appliances is of especial importance, leading to this article's proposition of the figure of ‘woman-as-appliance’. Such a figure is explored through examination of, in particular, Richard Hamilton's painting $he (1958–1961) and the video project Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $M. This article argues for woman-as-appliance as the barred subject par excellence, as the megamachine of domestic labour (through an adaptive appropriation from Lewis Mumford), and (by way of McKenzie Wark and Donna Haraway) in her cyborgic transfigurations

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Accepted/In Press date: 28 September 2015
e-pub ahead of print date: 18 April 2016
Organisations: Winchester School of Art

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 401373
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/401373
ISSN: 0952-8822
PURE UUID: 44f1070e-8e19-4796-af38-ed4fbbee4c9d

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Date deposited: 13 Oct 2016 10:31
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:46

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Author: August Jordan Davis

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