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Kitchen Sink Realisms - Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre (Paperback)
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Kitchen Sink Realisms - Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre (Paperback)
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From 1918’s Tickless Time through Waiting for Lefty, Death of a
Salesman,A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, and The
Prisoner ofSecond Avenue to 2005’s The Clean House, domestic
labor has figuredlargely on American stages. No dramatic genre has
done morethan the one often dismissively dubbed “kitchen sink
realism”to both support and contest the idea that the home is
naturallywomen’s sphere. But there is more to the genre than even
its supporterssuggest. In analyzing kitchen sink realisms, Dorothy
Chansky revealsthe ways that food preparation, domestic labor,
dining, serving,entertaining, and cleanup saturate the lives of
dramatic charactersand situations even when they do not take center
stage. Offeringresistant readings that rely on close attention to
the particular culturaland semiotic environments in which plays and
their audiencesoperated, she sheds compelling light on the changing
debatesabout women’s roles and the importance of their household
laboracross lines of class and race in the twentieth century. The
story begins just after World War I, as more households
wereelectrified and fewer middleclass housewives could afford to
hiremaids. In the 1920s, popular mainstream plays staged the
plightof women seeking escape from the daily grind; African
Americanplaywrights, meanwhile, argued that housework was the least
ofwomen’s worries. Plays of the 1930s recognized housework aswork
to a greater degree than ever before, while during the waryears
domestic labor was predictably recruited to the war
effort—sometimes with genderbending results. In the famously
quiescentand anxious 1950s, critiques of domestic normalcy became
common,and African American maids gained a complexity
previouslyreserved for white leading ladies. These critiques
proliferated withthe reemergence of feminism as a political
movement from the1960s on. After the turn of the century, the
problems and comfortsof domestic labor in black and white took
center stage. In highlightingthese shifts, Chansky brings the real
home.
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