Radical Unschooling stay-at-home momPhD, American Literature and Feminist Theory, UC DavisBA College of Creative Studies Literature and Women, Culture, and Development UC Santa Barbara
Home Stories Displacement, Domestic Labor, and Narrative in California, 1848-2007, 2014
“Home Stories” looks at how stories about domestic labor define land rights in the context of rac... more “Home Stories” looks at how stories about domestic labor define land rights in the context of racialized displacement in California. What happened to domestic fiction in between the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of sentimentalism and the late-twentieth century politics of family values? Specifically in California, how did Chican@ farmworkers, Chinese domestic servants, Black factory workers, Native Americans on reservations and in urban areas, and white settlers experience the racist assumptions of traditional domesticity? What kinds of domestic labor did they need to make California their home, and what kinds of paid or unpaid domestic labor did they do to make it a home for those with privilege, property, and power? What stories did they tell about the tension between that labor and the dominant cultural images of white, gendered domesticity?
To ask about race and domesticity is not only to ask what a particular racialized domesticity looks like, but also to question the land rights and property assumptions of domestic ideologies as well as the labor that undergirds them. California’s histories of displacement include genocidal violence against Native Californians, freeway building and urban renewal, and the early twenty-first century foreclosure crisis. Displacement often violates communal home spaces such as tribal lands and neighborhoods by pushing people into dispersed, interchangeable units assigned to nuclear families, thereby privatizing and intensifying domestic labor for the sake of profit.
The texts within each chapter share similar formal representations of domestic labor: as private support for manifesting borders in John Rollin Ridge’s "The Adventures of Joaquín Murieta" and Sui Sin Far’s "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"; as haphazard claims to white property in Helen Hunt Jackson’s "Ramona" and the work of Joan Didion; as gathering in the autobiographies of Lucy Young and Delfina Cuero; as a triple shift of housework, paid work, and activism in Anna Deavere Smith’s "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" and the 2006 film "Maquilapolis"; and as intimacy Héctor Tobar’s "The Barbarian Nurseries" and Karen Tei Yamashita's "I Hotel."
In doing this comparison and translating divergent experiences of displacement through the concept of domestic labor, I hope to map out what coalitional, everyday practices of homemaking might look like, rather than simply trace historical fights over land as an object to be owned as property. Such coalitional practices would negotiate between culturally-specific forms of domestic labor tied to one place—for example, tribal gathering practices, unpaid privatized housework, and community building—in order to reformulate property rights as equitable but different rights to presence, mobility, social reproduction, religious practice, and ecological management.
... Kaitlin P. Walker. University of California Davis. klnwalker{at}ucdavis.edu. ... The second a... more ... Kaitlin P. Walker. University of California Davis. klnwalker{at}ucdavis.edu. ... The second and sixth chapters, discussed above, focus on such narratives: the question of Hannah Crafts' racial identity, Black authorial identity in Erasure, false claims to Black identity by JT LeRoy and ...
Home Stories Displacement, Domestic Labor, and Narrative in California, 1848-2007, 2014
“Home Stories” looks at how stories about domestic labor define land rights in the context of rac... more “Home Stories” looks at how stories about domestic labor define land rights in the context of racialized displacement in California. What happened to domestic fiction in between the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of sentimentalism and the late-twentieth century politics of family values? Specifically in California, how did Chican@ farmworkers, Chinese domestic servants, Black factory workers, Native Americans on reservations and in urban areas, and white settlers experience the racist assumptions of traditional domesticity? What kinds of domestic labor did they need to make California their home, and what kinds of paid or unpaid domestic labor did they do to make it a home for those with privilege, property, and power? What stories did they tell about the tension between that labor and the dominant cultural images of white, gendered domesticity?
To ask about race and domesticity is not only to ask what a particular racialized domesticity looks like, but also to question the land rights and property assumptions of domestic ideologies as well as the labor that undergirds them. California’s histories of displacement include genocidal violence against Native Californians, freeway building and urban renewal, and the early twenty-first century foreclosure crisis. Displacement often violates communal home spaces such as tribal lands and neighborhoods by pushing people into dispersed, interchangeable units assigned to nuclear families, thereby privatizing and intensifying domestic labor for the sake of profit.
The texts within each chapter share similar formal representations of domestic labor: as private support for manifesting borders in John Rollin Ridge’s "The Adventures of Joaquín Murieta" and Sui Sin Far’s "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"; as haphazard claims to white property in Helen Hunt Jackson’s "Ramona" and the work of Joan Didion; as gathering in the autobiographies of Lucy Young and Delfina Cuero; as a triple shift of housework, paid work, and activism in Anna Deavere Smith’s "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" and the 2006 film "Maquilapolis"; and as intimacy Héctor Tobar’s "The Barbarian Nurseries" and Karen Tei Yamashita's "I Hotel."
In doing this comparison and translating divergent experiences of displacement through the concept of domestic labor, I hope to map out what coalitional, everyday practices of homemaking might look like, rather than simply trace historical fights over land as an object to be owned as property. Such coalitional practices would negotiate between culturally-specific forms of domestic labor tied to one place—for example, tribal gathering practices, unpaid privatized housework, and community building—in order to reformulate property rights as equitable but different rights to presence, mobility, social reproduction, religious practice, and ecological management.
... Kaitlin P. Walker. University of California Davis. klnwalker{at}ucdavis.edu. ... The second a... more ... Kaitlin P. Walker. University of California Davis. klnwalker{at}ucdavis.edu. ... The second and sixth chapters, discussed above, focus on such narratives: the question of Hannah Crafts' racial identity, Black authorial identity in Erasure, false claims to Black identity by JT LeRoy and ...
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Drafts by Kaitlin Walker
To ask about race and domesticity is not only to ask what a particular racialized domesticity looks like, but also to question the land rights and property assumptions of domestic ideologies as well as the labor that undergirds them. California’s histories of displacement include genocidal violence against Native Californians, freeway building and urban renewal, and the early twenty-first century foreclosure crisis. Displacement often violates communal home spaces such as tribal lands and neighborhoods by pushing people into dispersed, interchangeable units assigned to nuclear families, thereby privatizing and intensifying domestic labor for the sake of profit.
The texts within each chapter share similar formal representations of domestic labor: as private support for manifesting borders in John Rollin Ridge’s "The Adventures of Joaquín Murieta" and Sui Sin Far’s "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"; as haphazard claims to white property in Helen Hunt Jackson’s "Ramona" and the work of Joan Didion; as gathering in the autobiographies of Lucy Young and Delfina Cuero; as a triple shift of housework, paid work, and activism in Anna Deavere Smith’s "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" and the 2006 film "Maquilapolis"; and as intimacy Héctor Tobar’s "The Barbarian Nurseries" and Karen Tei Yamashita's "I Hotel."
In doing this comparison and translating divergent experiences of displacement through the concept of domestic labor, I hope to map out what coalitional, everyday practices of homemaking might look like, rather than simply trace historical fights over land as an object to be owned as property. Such coalitional practices would negotiate between culturally-specific forms of domestic labor tied to one place—for example, tribal gathering practices, unpaid privatized housework, and community building—in order to reformulate property rights as equitable but different rights to presence, mobility, social reproduction, religious practice, and ecological management.
Papers by Kaitlin Walker
To ask about race and domesticity is not only to ask what a particular racialized domesticity looks like, but also to question the land rights and property assumptions of domestic ideologies as well as the labor that undergirds them. California’s histories of displacement include genocidal violence against Native Californians, freeway building and urban renewal, and the early twenty-first century foreclosure crisis. Displacement often violates communal home spaces such as tribal lands and neighborhoods by pushing people into dispersed, interchangeable units assigned to nuclear families, thereby privatizing and intensifying domestic labor for the sake of profit.
The texts within each chapter share similar formal representations of domestic labor: as private support for manifesting borders in John Rollin Ridge’s "The Adventures of Joaquín Murieta" and Sui Sin Far’s "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"; as haphazard claims to white property in Helen Hunt Jackson’s "Ramona" and the work of Joan Didion; as gathering in the autobiographies of Lucy Young and Delfina Cuero; as a triple shift of housework, paid work, and activism in Anna Deavere Smith’s "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" and the 2006 film "Maquilapolis"; and as intimacy Héctor Tobar’s "The Barbarian Nurseries" and Karen Tei Yamashita's "I Hotel."
In doing this comparison and translating divergent experiences of displacement through the concept of domestic labor, I hope to map out what coalitional, everyday practices of homemaking might look like, rather than simply trace historical fights over land as an object to be owned as property. Such coalitional practices would negotiate between culturally-specific forms of domestic labor tied to one place—for example, tribal gathering practices, unpaid privatized housework, and community building—in order to reformulate property rights as equitable but different rights to presence, mobility, social reproduction, religious practice, and ecological management.