W O M E N H O U S E
WomEnhouse is a collaborative, multi-authored site that explores the politics
of domesticity and gender relations through virtual "rooms" and
conceptual domestic "spaces" by 24 artists, architects, poets,
art historians, and cultural theorists.
WomEnhouse takes its initial inspiration from the 1972 Womanhouse, a groundbreaking
feminist project by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and Faith Wilding, and
other artists involved in the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute
of the Arts and from the local community. WomEnhouse contains collaborative
creative work that, like that in Womanhouse, dissects the ways in which
domestic environments are constructed, perceived, and occupied within gendered
power systems.
WomEnhouse moves away from conceptualizing domestic experiences in terms
of the literal architectural spaces of the house. It explores, through the
virtual language of the web, the intersecting issues of race, class, gender,
and sexuality as they are articulated in the psychic arena of the home.
The domestic is thus posited as the primary site of the intersection of
the public and the private realms. These realms have collapsed into one
another with the penetration of commodity culture and "men's"
(vs. domestic or "women's") labor into the home by means of direct
mail marketing, television, and telecommuting devices.
WomEnhouse proposes that, just as the domestic sphere is no longer separated
from the public world of capital, so the "feminine" (and feminism)
must expand into a cyberpolitics that addresses the multivalent vicissitudes
of identity formation and domesticity at the turn of the millennium.
Editorial Board: Annie Chu, Amelia Jones, Karen Lang, Christine Magar,
Pat Morton, Joanna Roche
Contributors: Lynn Aldrich, Dana Cuff, Amy Gerstler, Betty Lee, Lauren
Lesko, Catherine Lord, Kathleen McHugh, Laura Meyer, Yong Soon Min, Alessandra
Moctezuma, Harryett Mullen, Susan Narduli, Mary-Ann Ray, Susan Silton, Lynn
Spigel, Erika Suderburg, Faith Wilding.
Technical Consultants: Jacalyn Lopez Garcia, Terry Hudak, Anita Moryadas
To Explore WomEnhouse:
NOTE: some parts of this site are in construction.
Expand the window to its maximum size.
Click on the HYMEN text at the bottom of this page to enter WomEnhouse through
the Throat.
From the Throat, click the HYMEN text again to enter the HYMEN, the central
access point for this site.
From the HYMEN, you can enter most of the contributions.
The contributions are also inter-linked.
Links between contributions can be found on the final page of each contribution.
There are some links embedded within the contributions.
At the end of a contribution, click on the HYMEN text at the bottom of a
page to return to the HYMEN, or choose another link.
The majority of links are pink, in text, unless they have been visited,
when they turn sand-colored.
In some areas, you will click on the name of the author, below the images,
for the next page. Sometimes, you will click on an image or a map for the
next page.
Notice: This site contains sexually explicit material that may be offensive
to some viewers. The links in this project were selected by the Editorial
Board and do not necessarily reflect the personal views of the contributors.
WomEnhouse was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced
Studies in the Fine Arts.
Special thanks to Jonathan Green and Ed Earle of the UCR/California Museum
of Photography and Margi Reeve of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
© Copyright by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this project
may be copied, reproduced, or in any way used without the written permission
of the author.
Comments? JonesSher@aol.com
HOST: UCR/California Museum of Photography