Domestic Labor

697 Words2 Pages

Helen Molesworth describes the impact of the taylorization of domestic labor in the kitchen and the collapse of consumption into production within domestic labor, both influenced by advertising into as producing a paranoid and gendered subject which must continually work harder (and therefore consume more) to meet ever increasing social standards of cleanliness and the appearance of domestic order. Beyond advertisements or popular cultural representations, the physical spaces of domestic kitchens also work to produce this subjectivity through their formal design. This is not necessarily the explicit goal of architects or developers, who often justify their design decisions based on market trends, client desires, or contemporary design theories/best …show more content…

This arrangement, with a general prohibition on obstacles interrupting the pathways between each, is considered to be the most efficient layout of services, allowing the user of the kitchen, who in cliche representations is always pressed for time in cooking for their family or else desiring to reduce the labor of cooking rather than relish in it, to prepare meals with minimal effort or concern. In this spatialized economy of time bodily desires are abjected. Hunger is to be resolved as quickly as possible (though this might actually obviate the need for sink and replace the oven with the microwave in the most extreme cases such as frozen dinners) and the sensual aspects of cooking, its aromas, sounds, textures are …show more content…

Frequently at the relegated to the rear of the home and separated from other rooms for both technical and social reasons, the kitchen was not a public space and was considered the domain of those charged with domestic labor, either wives or servants. The contemporary trend of open plan kitchens reverses this abjection, placing the kitchen at the center of the home around which familial and social activity is structured. However this reversal has also replaced the previous abjection with a new form of anxiety, that of always being watched/available and the need of the domestic laborer to always be watching, surveying and managing the operations of the domestic interior landscape. Trading abjection for accessibility thus in the case of the kitchen also meant trading the possibility of a space of retreat from domestic labor for increased responsibility. Drawing on Foucault’s intersection of labor, architecture, and surveillance, within this politics of visibility and spatial efficiency we can return to Molesworth’s discussion of the subjectivity produced by modern kitchens with a greater understanding of the means by which it is both gendered and made

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