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

Davis, August Jordan (2015) Reading the strange case of woman-as-appliance: on transfigurations, cyborgs, domestic labour, and the megamachine. WSA Staff Seminar Series, Academic Year 2015 - 2016, Winchester, United Kingdom. 09 Dec 2015.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Other)

Abstract

Considering questions of feminism, the home and migrations within (especially women’s) art after the Second World War, this talk examines the figure of the housewife in art of the UK and the US from the 1950s through 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 presentation's proposition of the figure of the 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 paper argues for the 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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