Gender and the Interior

Definition

Gender and the interior names the entanglement of interior design with gender — a cluster of issues Taylor & Preston hold to be unavoidable in any theory of the interior, "if not because of interior design's own history as a practice stemming from the upholsterer's trade then for its alliances (or stereotype associations) with domestic, residential and feminine decorative practice" (p. 10). Two claims anchor the concept: first, "the historical identification of women with the domestic interior, and subsequent cultural conflation of women, dress and the interior environment are subject to discourses on power" (p. 10); second, the consequence for architecture's own debates — "not just the suppression of ornament but the identification of the female body with the domestic and with the decorative," which forms "a lingering and significant field of inquiry, and perhaps prejudice, towards what defines interior design historically" (p. 10). Recent feminist and human-geographic studies extend this through "sexed corporeality": particular bodies' desires and capacities are "produced or created by specific spaces," an identification of specific space to specific body that engages "immanence, rather than masculine transcendent values" (p. 11). Queer theory is deployed "not to reify the lesbian or homosexual but to discuss complexities of public and private space and the containment of an identity," challenging "traditional 'normal' ontologies of home, for example, home, privacy and publicity" — "not to substitute one universalising value for another, but to destabilise implicit homogeneities" (p. 11).

Key Thinkers

• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — frame the gender/interior entanglement as constitutive of interior design's theory: feminism, gender, race and sexuality cannot be escaped (p. 10).
• Jacques Soulillou — the entanglement's anthropological theory: the ground plan in which "sexuality and power are the forces" — ornament encoding "the inter-sexual differentiation of man/woman" (transversal, "without hierarchy") against the intra-sexual hierarchy of free and non-free (p. 315–316); the sex opposition in ornament surviving modernity's distortions ("the man-woman opposition did not experience fundamental changes," p. 319); and the endless re-division of the man/woman opposition by the decorative's logic (Quintilian's orator vs "effeminate refinements"; Cicero's woman without/with make-up; atticism vs orientalism) — the gender coding shown as produced and policed rather than natural (2002/2006).
• Elsie de Wolfe — the profession's founding woman: "America's first female professional interior decorator" (editors) — the decorator who professionalized the domestic identification the concept theorizes; her chatelaine role-taking ("For the time-being I really am the chatelaine of the house," p. 82) makes the decorator an impersonator of the mistress, and her text both resists patriarchy (per the editors) and polices women through interiors ("We judge her temperament, her habits, her inclinations, by the interior of her home," p. 83).
• Shirley Ardener — the anthropological foundation the editors place first in their theory section: space and gender as cross-cultural ordering systems, women's spatial experience analysed through ground rules, social maps and muting.
• Beatriz Colomina — the parallel programme in this wiki: gendered readings of architectural history and the spaces associated with women (e.g., E.1027).
• Karen Burns — the race-coordinate the gender/interior cluster otherwise lacks: the Baker House readings as the conflation of a woman's body, costume, skin and interior into surfaces "supporting a point of difference and otherness"; the raced subject construed as lacking interiority; the self-critique of criticism that pins its subject to alterity. See epidermal-schema, corporeal-inscription.
• William W. Braham — the palette-level mechanism: the natural/artificial polarization's alignment of ornament and applied colours with "artifice, complexity, curviness, and femininity"; the profession split as gendered; taste as the affiliated feminine.
• Lee Edelman — the queer-theory concretization: the editors' programmatic use of queer theory "to discuss complexities of public and private space and the containment of an identity" (p. 11) given its first full-length interior case — the men's room, where sexuality, masculinity and architecture are interlinked and the containment is literal (the body "as a closet itself"). See mens-room, the-closet.
• Emma Ferry — the concept's professional-historical application: the Garretts as England's first female interior decorators, the identification claimed as profession (2003/2006). See house-decorator, domestic-feminism.
• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar — the identification's most extreme literary form: the house-body equation — women "described or imagined as houses," owned, denied transcendence, "transformed… into a version of the glass coffin herself" — with the gender of the author's body "inscribed in the text, and by implication, into the architectural surroundings" (1979/2006). See house-body-equation, patriarchal-poetics.
• Beverly Gordon — the identification's material-culture historian: the industrial-age conflation of women and interiors as structural metaphor (c. 1875–1925), its cause in capitalism's gendered adornment economy, and its live vestiges (the "overwhelmingly female" interior design profession, the wives' initials on jointly owned silver) (1996/2006). See house-body-equation, woman-as-decoration.
• John C Turpin — the concept's sociability-historian: women as "the gatekeepers of elite society" whose authority runs through etiquette and controlled conversation rather than office; the profuse Victorian decor as "a product of all that female energy going into ornamenting the home"; and the national contrast (the French salonnières' "new position in society" against English ladies "not permitted as much self-expression") (2003/2006). See salon, etiquette, conversation.
• J Macgregor Wise — the concept's home-theorist: the disarticulation programme — home separated from the "proper, normative" home/house/domus and from "stasis, nostalgia, privacy, and authenticity (which… are then coded as female)" (Massey, quoted p. 395); against "articulating women to enclosed prison-homes while the men wander free"; yet "homes are not gendered, they are" admitted via Illich's co-shaping ("the body in action… shapes the home," quoted p. 395) (2000/2006). See home, separate-spheres.
• (Related, not yet paged: Elizabeth Grosz on framing and embodied demarcation; Jane Rendell — critical spatial practice and feminist theory — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Domestic Interior — the site of the historical identification of women with the interior.
• The Decorative — the feminised activity whose suppression doubles as the suppression of the domestic/feminine.
• Separate Spheres — the nineteenth-century spatialisation of gender: the domestic interior coded feminine, the public interior coded masculine; Sparke's boundary war is the historiographic frame this concept theorises.
• Gendered Space — the general anthropological concept: space and gender as linked ordering principles (Ardener).
• Interiority — innerness as a category that gendered space theory destabilises and reworks.
• Power — the discourses on power within which the women/dress/interior conflation operates.
• Gender and the Interior — the historical identification of women with the domestic interior as a discourse of power.
• Domestic Feminism — the nineteenth-century strategy that claimed interior expertise through the domestic identification: "female-led domestic government, rather than domestic slavery."
• Ornament vs. Purity — the structure/ornament dialectic re-read as gendered discourse (see debate page).
• Natural Finishes — the palette-form of the same gendering: applied colour as artifice/femininity against "authentic" natural finishes coded masculine.
• Wall of Books — the convention-level instance: the "feminine note of decoration" and the masculine library's colour economy.
• Epidermal Schema — the racial extension of the same conflation mechanism: difference fixed at the skin — "costume, skin and interior space are all described as surfaces supporting a point of difference and otherness" (Burns's editors) — and the all-surface body denied interiority.
• Corporeal Inscription — the theory (Foucault/Butler) that the inner core is produced on the body's surface; Burns's addition: inscription's raced case, "cultural difference, ethnicity, and race," which the theory "conveniently ignores."
• The Men's Room — the concept's masculine counterpart: the identification of men with the public washroom as the apparatus of gender; the queer-theoretical destabilization of "home, privacy and publicity" built into a room-type.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the gendered object-system: "the social status of women as objects" (bright colour, note 2, p. 42); "all objects… become women in order to be bought"; the car as "a male preserve" against the feminine domestic world ("Daddy has HIS Peugeot… and Mummy has HER Peugeots"); and "the woman-object being the advertising world's most effective persuasive device and social myth."

• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — feminism/gender/race/sexuality as unavoidable in interior theory; the identification of the female body with the domestic and the decorative; sexed corporeality and queer theory's destabilisation of home (pp. 10–11).

• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the identification's anthropological theory: the ground plan of ornament where "the sexual relation is intersected by the power relation" (p. 315) — the man/woman opposition as the transversal axis ("from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women," p. 316); "To ornament there must be two. Ornament is born under the gaze of another… It is the mark of socialization" (p. 316); the ornamental economy's gendered cases — "the woman of ancient China whose feet have been bound, the middle-class person who hangs a Warhol print in his living room" (p. 316); the opposition's endless re-division through the decorative's logic (Quintilian: strong/pure ornament for the orator, "and the orator is always a man…" against "the effeminate refinements"; Cicero's "woman without affectation" vs "woman with make-up"; the territorial displacement into "atticism (Western)" vs orientalism's "bad taste," pp. 318–319); and the survival thesis — the man-woman opposition persisting through modernity while class-dress dissolved (p. 319). The source that theorizes the identification the editors diagnose: the woman/interior/decorative conflation as the ground plan's transversal axis, produced by ornament, policed by calls to order, and preserved after the hierarchies that sustained it failed. See ornamental-ground-plan, woman-as-decoration, corporeal-inscription.

• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — Sparke's gendered two spheres (domestic interior characterized by femininity, soft textiles and decoration; public interior by hard surfaces and "male occupations, and architecture") as the historical structure gender-and-the-interior theorises; the "herstories" parallel: interior history shares with feminist history the problem that "the very suppression and oppression of the suppressed and oppressed lay in the denial of their voices."

• War on Architecture: E.1027 (Colomina 1993) — gendered reading of a canonical interior and its erasure of a woman designer (complementary source).

• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — two gendered episodes of modernism's interior/exterior schism: Lina Loos's bedroom "made out of fur" (the interior's tactile luxury as dress and decorum against the condemned ornament of the facade), and the unbuilt Josephine Baker house (1928) whose "striking pattern of black and white stripes may have been inspired by the nautical pattern on women's bathing suits" — a fashion/surface reading Deyong takes from Anne Anlin Cheng's Second Skin, marking Baker as "an African American entertainer and one of the most celebrated women of her time" whose public figurehood released the architect from the privacy logic of the domestic interior (see separate-spheres).

• The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the anthropological ground of the concept, opening Intimus's theory section: "It discusses the space of the interior beyond its physical dimensions and its social and symbolic aspects, as experienced by women" (editorial preamble, p. 15). Supplies the cross-cultural apparatus: gender and space as linked ordering principles (coloured directions, Hertz's right/left, the nuns/lay-women ordering that "may tend to obscure the priority of males"), muting across "overlapping universes," and mobility restraints as the felt form of gendered order — see gendered-space, mutedness, partition-of-space.

• Chromophobia (Batchelor 2000/2006) — the colour-theory instance of the same prejudice-structure: in the West's chromophobia, colour "is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological" (p. 32); the prejudice "has enrolled just about every other prejudice in its service" (p. 32) — the feminine coding of colour parallels the editors' identification of the female body with the domestic and the decorative; and the whiteness regime's demolition targets are the feminine-coded interior's materials themselves: "Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin" (Le Corbusier, quoted p. 34) (see chromophobia).

• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the palette-level mechanism behind the identification: "the contemporary polarization of the natural and the artificial aligns ornament and applied colors with artifice, complexity, curviness, and femininity" on the Core-form/Art-form inheritance (p. 59); Tessenow's confession — "ornament has, and this is said with some apprehension, a lady-like quality" — as "the dark side of aesthetics" (p. 59); the profession split itself as gendered: interior design's "activities and individuals… implicitly assumed to be feminine," the connotation deriving from "women dominat[ing] the profession of interior design, a situation conditioned by the removal of men and their work from the home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (p. 57); the masculine/authenticity identity — achromatic surfaces and natural materials "deemed masculine by virtue of their authenticity (or are they authentic by virtue of their masculinity?)" (p. 61); taste as the affiliated feminine ("intuition, irrationality, and the feminine," p. 61); and books as the "feminine note of decoration" slipped into masculine interiors (p. 60). See natural-finishes, wall-of-books.

• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — the gendered economy of the decorator's world: the founding woman decorators (Elsie de Wolfe and Ruby Ross Wood) appear as Baldwin's reference-points, and the client anecdotes are largely women: the woman who took de Wolfe's roses "as an unalterable dictum" (p. 27); the client who "has no one but herself to blame… if she hasn't the gumption or self-assurance to assert herself" and who "had become so afraid of her own room, she felt everything in it had to be an arrangement" (p. 27). Assertion, not taste, is the gendered capacity the manifesto demands — the woman must claim her own room against the decorous arrangement convention assigns her.

• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the gender claim inside the sign-system analysis, made in a note on loud colour: "'Loud' colours are meant to strike the eye. If you wear a red suit, you are more than naked – you become a pure object with no inward reality. The fact that women's tailored suits tend to be in bright colours is a reflection of the social status of women as objects" (note 2, p. 42). Colour's association with surface and display is here tied to women's object-status — the same colour/feminine/inwardness economy the chromophobic purge mobilizes (colour as "a threat to inwardness," p. 38), now given a sociological rather than moral register. See chromophobia, the-decorative.

• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the concept's founding historical document: the moment the identification of women with the domestic interior was theorized as expertise rather than as mere assignment. The editors' frame — "female-led domestic government, rather than domestic slavery," "women's advancement through education" (p. 43) — states the domestic-feminist claim that the woman is the interior's governor, planner and scientist ("'scientific' kitchen planning," p. 43), while the text's design program (house-planning as the wise woman's ministry) is the positive content beneath the "identification of the female body with the domestic and with the decorative" the editors later diagnose as prejudice. See domestic-feminism, separate-spheres.

• A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the cluster's racial extension: Burns "raises questions about the presence of race and gender in architectural design and how they are disclosed through criticism that attempts to 'read' architecture" (editors), examining "the conflation of Baker's body and house in writings about the house" where "costume, skin and interior space are all described as surfaces supporting a point of difference and otherness." Her Spivak-based argument — against "the epidermal schema's insistence on skin as the visible sign of difference" (p. 66) — gives the cluster the theory of inscription's raced case ("cultural difference, ethnicity, and race," pp. 65–66) that Foucault/Butler's cited texts omit; and her Baker reading shows the gendered denial of interiority operating racially: "Without an interior, she has no possibility for an internal psychic space and no fantasized locale for the identity of self" (p. 66). See epidermal-schema, corporeal-inscription, primitivism.

• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the child-in-the-feminine-sphere register: Colley's subjects are male writers remembering habitation of the feminine-coded domestic interior — the nursery, the drawing room, the window seat between mother and father ("his position on a 'little box' between his mother and father," p. 69) — with the child's permeable or hidden body coded against the masculine public Ruskin of "prospect" and Alpine truth-telling; and her note 1 suggesting these bodily recollections "might, in some way, reflect the emphasis placed upon the child's body in nineteenth-century guides on raising a child" (Steedman's Strange Dislocations) — the domestic interior as the site where the child's body was made an object of doctrine. See separate-spheres.

• Movement and Myth (Croft 2000/2006) — two gendered notes inside the transformable-interior case: the Arts and Crafts ancestry ("spaces within spaces: the fireside alcove, the projecting oriel at Philip Webb's Red House (1859) encouraging separate activities within a companionable larger volume (although perhaps relegating female activity to marginal zones)," p. 75) — the companionable volume's gendered margins as the spatial history the modern plan inherits; and the client-side authorship of the modernist interior — the house Croft reads is named for Truus Schröder, the woman whose family the transformable plan compressed and who "ultimately… craved greater privacy" (p. 77), the female patron whose program (rather than Rietveld's theory) may be where the flexibility actually came from. See separate-spheres, schroder-house, privacy.

• Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the concept's founding professional document from the other side: the woman who professionalized the identification of women with the interior. The editors frame the text's gender politics explicitly: "Claimed to be the concern of the woman of the household, comfort and decoration are not only the measure of a woman's skill and cleverness at establishing tranquillity but a political form of resistance towards patriarchy within the social and design spheres." The text itself performs both valences the concept theorizes: the woman as the interior's expert governor ("For the time-being I really am the chatelaine of the house," p. 82; the chatelaine role studied "as thoroughly as I studied my parts") and the woman as the interior's judged object ("We are sure to judge a woman in whose house we find ourselves for the first time, by her surroundings… We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture," p. 83), with taste as the gendered moral compass — "she may be as human and feminine as she pleases, but she will never cause a scandal!" (p. 83). See interior-as-biography, domestic-feminism, taste.

• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the sensory channel of the gender valuation: "Countering the primacy of the visual opens up the museum to behaviours, activities, and identities that are not necessarily Western, privileged, and masculine, and which fail to produce collectible artifacts. Marginalized, private, or everyday experiences, such as those typically associated with women's domestic labour, can be given distinction and value" (p. 94, following Gaby Porter's feminist museology) — the women/interior identification reversed into a claim: the feminine-coded everyday (its smells, its labour, its non-collectible private world) as what the ocularcentric museum structurally excludes and what the non-visual senses can honour. The olfactory turn as feminist museum method. See mutedness, everyday-life, olfaction.

• The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the concept's earliest documentary source (1868): the gendered choreography of the Victorian house recorded from the male diner's seat — "After dinner the ladies ascend into a green and gold-papered drawing-room, to perform on a walnut-wood piano, having first seated themselves on walnut-wood music-stools, while their friends are reclining on a walnut-wood sofa" (p. 101) — the spheres' daily separation staged as furniture grammar and social routine; the rooms' gender assignment carried by the furnishing code (oak/solidity/darkness below; green-gold/walnut/"garlands and bouquets" above); and the reform critique aimed precisely at the feminine-coded pole ("the vulgarity of garlands and bouquets," p. 102) — the moment the wiki can watch the identification of women with the decorative being used, not yet theorized. See drawing-room, separate-spheres, the-decorative.

• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the cluster's queer-theoretical extension, concretizing the editors' framing that queer theory is deployed "not to reify the lesbian or homosexual but to discuss complexities of public and private space and the containment of an identity" (p. 11): Edelman's men's room is exactly such a complexity — a public interior whose "culturally designated 'privacy'" maps public/private onto the male body (p. 104), whose design "has palpable designs on men; it aspires… to design them" (p. 104), and whose architecture, masculinity and sexuality are, as the Intimus headnote puts it, "interlinked." The concept's mirror-image: where the woman is identified with the domestic interior, the man is identified with — and produced by — the men's room; and where the editors invoke destabilization, Edelman supplies the mechanism (the "vigilant nonchalance" that polices the boundary between display and desire). See mens-room, the-closet, gaze, masculinity.

• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the cluster's professional-historical keystone (1876): the feminist recovery of the Garrett cousins as "England's first female interior decorators" (editors, p. 110), their professional struggle linked "to women's suffrage and late nineteenth-century feminist activity" (p. 110). The source shows the identification of women with the interior being used by women themselves as the material of a profession: the Garretts invert Eastlake's gender identities and claim the status of trained 'house decorators' rather than 'home-makers' (Ferry, p. 110), the dining room's "especially masculine department" (quoted p. 112) redecorated by them over the Paterfamilias's resistance, the ladies upgraded from consumers to rights-claimants ("demand the right of having their particular tastes consulted," quoted p. 113). At the same time the source shows the identification's limits: the draperies chapter's only explicit statement on women re-assigns them "the refinement and beauty of a house" through "small and comparatively insignificant details" (quoted p. 113), and the Garretts' impatience with the "less politicised 'daughters of England'" (quoted p. 114) divides the professional woman from the domestic one. The identification of women with the interior, this source shows, was never only an imposition — it was also the raw material from which the first women professionals built a claim. See house-decorator, domestic-feminism, mutedness, separate-spheres.

• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — the identification's most extreme, bodily form: the house-body equation. Women "described or imagined as houses" (Erikson's female "inner space," the Madonna statues opening to reveal the Holy Family, the womb as "a child's first and most satisfying house," pp. 121–122); "conditioned to believe that as a house she is herself owned (and ought to be inhabited) by a man," she "see[s] herself as inescapably an object… defined simply by her purely biological usefulness to her species"; "To become literally a house, after all, is to be denied the hope of that spiritual transcendence of the body" (de Beauvoir); and the reversal — the trope "does not just 'place' her in a glass coffin, it transforms her into a version of the glass coffin herself": "not only a prisoner but a monster" (p. 122). The editors' headnote ties the argument to interior design: the gender of the author's body "is inscribed in the text, and by implication, into the architectural surroundings under discussion" (p. 121). See house-body-equation, patriarchal-poetics, the-madwoman.

• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the identification's industrial-age social history, the source that dates and causes what this page theorizes: the conflation of women and interiors as a Lakoff & Johnson structural metaphor ("a simile – women and interiors were like one another – was transformed into a synonym," p. 127), produced by industrial capitalism's impression regime — men's dress conscribed into "the 'uniform of industrial capitalism'" while women, "by their very economic idleness and concomitant elaborate dress… demonstrated the prosperity that the men they were associated with had achieved," becoming "the primary consumers of fashion by the mid-nineteenth century" (pp. 129–131); and the profession-level vestige the concept predicts: "The interior design profession is overwhelmingly female, and women form the primary audience for exhibits, advice literature, and even discussion of interior decoration" (p. 127) — the women/interior identification surviving the conflation's peak into "the wives' initials that are typically imprinted, even though the silver is jointly owned" (p. 127). See house-body-equation, woman-as-decoration, fashion, consumerism.

• 'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the identification's late-twentieth-century interview evidence: the gendered labour division that the home's very technology serves — "men rather than women were the target for home-based consumption in this area of leisure products, reflecting a gendered division of labour in which the home still functions as a place of rest, leisure and recuperation for men, but remains a place of work for women" (p. 221); the moralized carry of the interior's judgment — "These are issues which create anxiety not playfulness, particularly for women. Women typically take the responsibility for setting and maintaining standards of housekeeping and bear the brunt of unfavourable judgements" (p. 225; see respectability); advertising's gendered lever — "advertising is designed to play on insecurities about being a good housewife/mother, and an attractive/fashionable wife or worker" (p. 225); and the home's negotiation as women's work: the editors' headnote reads the domestic interior as "constantly renegotiated in order to resolve the tension between identity and social role," with the interviews reporting on "the way in which women, in particular, view their home and the items they have selected for it" (p. 226). Where Gordon dates the woman/interior conflation at its industrial-age formation, Madigan & Munro show its 1990s operation as judgment: the house's social worth deposited in the woman's housekeeping (see separate-spheres, work-leisure-distinction, comfort).

• From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the identification's Viennese modernist case, and its double mechanism: the ambivalence thesis — Josef Folsenics grants women "innate talent for home beautification" (mirror, wardrobe) while charging them with "the weakness to lose their aesthetic sensibility… because of their tendency to follow fashion," so that women "served as models of domestic artfulness yet, on the other, were incapable of true innovation, which must be accomplished by men" (pp. 156–157); and the counter-evidence — Wiener Kunst im Hause presented interiors "not only designed by women, but that creatively inspired the work of male teachers at the Kunstgewerbeschule" (p. 157). The chapter also shows the identification functioning as economic structure: the modernist interest in textile arts "would not have emerged… had it not been for the constant driving force of fashion, which provided a space for women to engage physically, either as designers or consumers, with the aestheticization of themselves and their living spaces through cloth and needlework" (p. 160) — the style "derived from women's traditional handcrafts, which the Secessionists admired, imitated, relied upon, and fostered" (p. 160). The editors' headnote compresses the mechanism: the Secessionist campaign "inadvertently moulded the woman of the house as a spatial artist" (p. 156). See woman-as-decoration, secessionist-style, interior-as-garment, fashion.

• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the concept's museological state of the art: "the idea of the interior as constructed discourse highly shaped by gender has spread" from poststructural-shaped, postfeminist architectural history (1980s–) into the house museum itself — measurable at the Cabanon, where the tour's anecdote that Yvonne's pillow lay "approximately twelve inches from the curtained off toilet area" (while her husband's bed "was under an airy window") is named "an effect of postfeminist inquiry within architectural history and theory," and where Colomina's feminist-Freudian reading of the E.1027 murals ("an 'effacement' of Gray's sexuality and genius") has made E.1027 the pilgrimage's destination: "Many tourists come not to see the Cabanon, but to see E.1027"; "some thirty percent of the group had come to explore Gray's work instead of Le Corbusier's." The chapter also opens the cluster's homosocial wing — the wall-text hint that Matamala "often 'slept in the house'" as a possible "radical new reading of Gaudi's life," the homo-social orientation of Gaudí's life "observable, and yet, until this hint in the wall text, it had not been inferred." See homosocial-space, colomina-beatriz, self-fashioning.

• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the intersectional-minority register: the gendered interior question joined to immigration, religion, and race in lived American cases. The studio's "unanswerable questions": "How can one handle values that diverge from the ones adopted by the mainstream, such as women socializing separately from men?" — gender-segregated socializing as the designer's dilemma in federally funded secular housing; the Somali women's bounded choices ("Bounded Choices – Somali Women Constructing Difference in Minnesota Housing," cited in the chapter's notes; the challenges faced by "veiled Somali women" — bounded-choices); the trafficking register's gendered core ("An estimated 27 million people, mostly girls and women, are trafficked each year globally" — placeness-of-trafficking); and the Mexican color-palette walls as sites "for dialogues around the process by which a color palette came to be associated with Mexicans" (global-constructs). Where the page's other sources theorize the woman/interior identification historically, Hadjiyanni shows it operating intersectionally — gender entangled with "race, gender, and class power dynamics" in the housing of new immigrants. See culturally-sensitive-design, gendered-space, mutedness.

• Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — the geopolitical register: the housewife as the Cold War's ideological battlefield, the identification of women with the domestic interior conscripted by both superpowers. Nixon's gambit — highlighting "the role that these so-called gadgets held in liberating the housewife from home-slavery" — claimed the kitchen's mechanization as women's liberation; Khrushchev's rejoinder ("the Soviet Union did not support a 'capitalist view of our women'") contested the same terrain; and the FCDA's civil-defense program judged the same housewife's housekeeping as patriotism ("Mannequin families that did not adhere to FDCA guidelines appeared in the resultant photographs in a jumble of parts"). The register makes the woman/interior identification the object of a state competition: both systems claimed to serve, judge, and liberate her through the kitchen, with her labour the standard both measured ("a dishwasher-to-dishwasher comparison"). Where the page's other sources document the identification's formation (Gordon), profession (Ferry, de Wolfe), and judgment (Madigan & Munro), Larson shows it at its geopolitical extreme — the housewife as the territory the superpowers fought over. See kitchen-debate, civil-defense, taylorism.

• The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the gendered day as the apartment's timetable, the identification's temporal form: of the three occupants the nycthemeral model routes through the rooms, only the mother's day is the apartment — "The mother takes the vacuum cleaner from the [broom closet] and does the housework (she then goes through all the rooms of the apartment but I forbear from listing them)"; "The mother fetches her shopping basket from the [kitchen]… and goes to do the shopping"; "The mother prepares lunch"; "does the dishes"; "goes out for a walk or to run some errands before going to fetch the child from school"; "gets supper ready" — while the father's slices take him out ("goes off to his office," 08.15, 13.15, returns 12.15, 18.45) and the child's route him through school and homework. The functional apartment is also a gendered division of labour made temporal: the kitchen's seven slots, six the mother's; the coat-ceremony of the entrance-hall performed by those who leave; the sitting-room's evening ("the father reads the newspaper while the mother does some sewing"). Where the page's other sources document the woman/interior identification as conflation, profession or judgment, Perec displays it as schedule — the day that assigns the interior to the woman quarter-hour by quarter-hour (see nycthemeral, kitchen, tidying, work-leisure-distinction).

• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the claim to space and authority stated at the discipline's level, by the anthology's own co-editor: Woolf's realisation — "writing by and for women can only be constructed when they write their own history outside patriarchy, epitomised by the need for independent means" — transposed to the interior ("perhaps the interior requires liberating from architecture and offered independent means: a room (Raum), or should I say a roam of its own"); "woman as something discovered rather than built… the interior is discovered not built"; and the cluster's architectural-theory side fully stated: Laugier's sister ("Would Laugier's sister have 'pointed to,' if she could have produced an equivalent work?"; "her maternal space obliterated and her destiny sealed behind masculine modes of thought"), the primitive hut as "a dominant history… fabricated" in which "structure and form is privileged over the decorative and ornamental," Laugier's "male-centred Spartan existence" acceding "to a desire by theorists to bring the wild excesses of women, home and decoration under control," and the dualisms — "structure/decoration, exterior/interior, masculine/feminine" — named as "an unhelpful homogenised binary position" that "might hamper interior design's liberation." The first source in the cluster to make the discipline's own liberation the Woolfian feminist question — the woman claiming space and the interior claiming independence as one argument. See patriarchal-poetics, primitive-hut, ornamental-excess, interior-design-vs-architecture Position AJ.

• Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — the cluster's sociability register: the identification of women with the interior reconstructed at its scene of operation, the social gathering. The gatekeeper thesis: "Due to their 'natural' taste, women soon became proprietors of good manners and civility. As a result, the best social education emanated from cultivated women, the gatekeepers of elite society" (p. 369) — and in England, "it is the case that the English ladies, much like the French madams, were considered to be the gatekeepers of society. Again, etiquette bestowed the power" (p. 371) — power flowing through etiquette, never owned ("The great hostess must be a wife or nothing," p. 371). The labour-side: "since a woman should not be idle, she spent a considerable amount of time on more 'appropriate' tasks, including the furnishing and maintaining of larger houses, social occasions and festivities. The profuse interior decor, with which the Victorian period is identified, was itself a product of all that female energy going into ornamenting the home" (p. 371) — the decorated interior as displaced female labour, poured into ornament because idleness was forbidden. The French counter-case: "Without compromising the integrity of their gender, these women created a new position in society for themselves based on the ability to enhance human relations through controlled conversations. Thus, French women clearly aided in defining the cultural standards of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through their skilful manipulation of the interior environment and the ritual of conversation" (p. 370) — gendered skill (tact, sympathy, mental alertness) converted, through the salon, into social authority. And de Wolfe as the lineage's synthesis: "In the true spirit of the French madams and the Victorian ladies, Elsie de Wolfe would combine the ritual of entertaining and etiquette and the practice of interior decoration into a cohesive whole" (p. 373) — the gatekeeper's implicit authority professionalized. Where the page's other sources document the identification's theory, profession and judgment, Turpin reconstructs its scene: the gathering, the etiquette, the gatekeeping, the room. See salon, etiquette, conversation, separate-spheres, domestic-feminism.

• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the cluster's concept-theory of home itself, and its disarticulation programme: the home's gendered coding exposed as the term's own articulation — "to use the term 'home' as I have throughout may strike one as odd in the regions of the world that this essay is most likely to circulate, because of strong articulations of the term to gender, passivity, leisure (gendered, again), both household and sexual labour, and so on" (pp. 394–395). The Massey thesis carried to the cluster's concept-level: disarticulating home from "ideas of stasis, nostalgia, privacy, and authenticity (which, as Doreen Massey has argued, are then coded as female), and present[ing] a more open and dynamic concept that does not tie identity to static place or reproduce gender inequality by articulating women to enclosed prison-homes while the men wander free, wistfully nostalgic for the gal they left behind" (p. 395) — the identification mechanism's spatial form (the prison-home) named and refused. But the refusal is double-edged: "This is not to argue that homes are not gendered, they are" — with Illich's co-shaping thesis ("Gender shapes bodies as they shape space and are in turn shaped by its arrangements. And the body in action, with its movements and rhythms, its gestures and cadences, shapes the home, the home as something more than a shelter, a tent, or a house," quoted p. 395), and the specificity rule: "One cannot deny that the car-space and office-space described at the opening of this essay are gendered male; the important point is not to universalize that experience – I mean to do just the opposite, to ground it in the specificity of forces" (p. 395). Where the page's other sources document the identification's formation (Gordon), profession (Ferry, de Wolfe), judgment (Madigan & Munro) and geopolitical extreme (Larson), Wise supplies its target-concept's correction: home re-theorized as territorialization (process, comfort-effect, "a place we are") rather than as the proper, normative, female-coded home. See home, separate-spheres, domestic-interior.

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

• source-notes/batchelor-2006-chromophobia

• source-notes/baudrillard-1983-fatal-strategies

• source-notes/baudrillard-1994-simulacra-and-simulation

• source-notes/lupton-miller-2006-streamlining

• source-notes/melchionne-2006-living-in-glass-houses

Open Questions

• Does the "identification of specific space to specific body" (p. 11) offer a usable design method (designing for sexed corporeality) or only a critical reading practice?
• How do the editors' claims hold against the "recovered histories and feminist readings of architecture as a gendered discourse of power, patriarchy and phallocentrism" they acknowledge within architecture itself (p. 10) — what does the interior add?
• Can queer theory's destabilisation of home/privacy/publicity avoid substituting "one universalising value for another" — and what architecture does that destabilisation make possible?
• Baldwin's anecdotes stage women's self-assertion as the cure for the fearful, over-arranged room — is "gumption or self-assurance" a design-disciplinary proxy for the feminist claim to one's own space, and does the manifesto's salon-world setting (de Wolfe, Wood, the decorated rich) confirm or complicate the separate-spheres coding of the domestic interior?
• The Beechers founded the identification of women with the interior as a claim to expertise and governance; the modern critics quoted by the editors read that same identification as the mechanism of women's confinement. Is the history of gender and the interior therefore the history of a single identification with two opposed valences — and can a theory of the interior hold both without collapsing into either celebration or denunciation? See domestic-feminism.
• De Wolfe's text performs both valences at once — the editors call it "a political form of resistance towards patriarchy," yet it teaches the reader to judge women by their interiors. Is professionalization through the interior-judgment a subversion of the judgment or its most efficient internalization? See interior-as-biography, domestic-feminism.
• The Garretts claim professional identity through the identification ('house decorators' not 'home-makers') while their impatience with the "less politicised 'daughters of England'" divides them from the domestic women they professionally serve. Is a feminist profession of the interior possible that does not rank women by their relation to the domestic — or is the ranking (politicized professional vs "busy idleness") itself the identification's deepest operation? See house-decorator, mutedness.
• Gilbert and Gubar push the identification to its bodily extreme — the woman is the house ("a version of the glass coffin herself") — while the Beechers and de Wolfe treat the house as the woman's jurisdiction or project. Is the house-body equation the identification's hidden logic that the professionals' expertise presupposes (you can only govern a house you are imagined to be), or its contradiction (the governing subject is precisely not reducible to the governed interior)? See domestic-feminism, interior-as-biography.
• Downey documents gender scholarship remaking a house museum's meaning (E.1027 outdrawing the Cabanon for a third of visitors). Is the house museum the discipline's most effective feminist instrument — the place where rereadings become tourist reality — or does the "shifting lens" confirm that women's interiors are only visited through the men they are told against (Gray against Le Corbusier)? See homosocial-space, self-fashioning.
• Perec's timetable makes the identification temporal: only the mother's day is the apartment; the father's day begins at its door. Is the gendered interior therefore legible as a schedule rather than a style — the division of labour routed through rooms quarter-hour by quarter-hour — and would a non-gendered timetable (both parents' slices of housework and office) require a different plan, or only a different distribution of the same rooms? See nycthemeral.
• Soulillou's survival thesis — "the man-woman opposition did not experience fundamental changes" through the very socio-economic shifts that dissolved the class axis (p. 319) — makes the woman/interior/decorative identification the ground plan's surviving residue rather than a modern invention. Does that re-date the editors' "lingering and significant field of inquiry… and perhaps prejudice" (p. 10): the prejudice as the residue of a collapsed ornamental hierarchy whose transversal axis outlived it? And does the interior profession's "overwhelmingly female" composition (Gordon) mark the axis's persistence at the scale of the discipline itself? See ornamental-ground-plan, separate-spheres.