ABSTRACT
There is always a certain fascination involved in viewing photographs of
domestic interiors. They appear to offer a window onto a spatial experience
that is normally coded private. The desire to gain an insight into that experi-
ence, the desire to enter the space of another’s privacy, is at the heart of these
images’ fascination. Yet the possibility for such an access to another’s domes-
ticity is predicated upon – and normalized by – the idea that there is a core of
domestic experience that is common and shared. It is this supposed com-
monality of experience that could be argued to define the domestic. From the
nineteenth century, the domestic environment provides the context for the
codification and normalization of familial roles. In this way, domesticity is both
a unifying cultural and political project, as well as the context for the articula-
tion of the autonomous individual subject.1
