Ironic Importance of Home

Last class, we discussed the inherent paradoxes of everyday life as it both conforms to and opposes a view of suburbia as a restrictive environment preventing personal (individual) and cultural (communal) growth. The questions that we have been asking throughout English 382 about how to negociate and understand the paradoxes and ironies of suburbia is what Rita Felski attempts to address in her article, The Invention of the Everyday.
Felski argues that despite the fact that "we are all ultimately anchored in the mundane...everyday life...is rarely viewed with neutrality." (16) Suburban ordinariness is given the ideological purpose of either affirming the modern herocisms of capitialism and patriarchy, or being "synonymous with acts of resistence and subversion" (18) to them. According to Felski, ideological frames, despite their usefullness, prevent intellectuals from being able to discuss the significance of everyday paradoxes and ironies found outside their purposes. That no matter how hard we try to prevent it from being true, there is always going to be an experiences in the realm of repetition, home and habit that exists in opposition to our theory.
Felski's purpose in pointing-out, in written-concrete-form, the inherent ironical nature of suburban discourses is to being a new type of dialogue. Instead of an opposition of perspectives concerning the nature of suburbia and everyday life, she is purposing a reading that combines the binaries of male and female roles, public and private spheres, and backward and forward moving, as the space itself does. In this reading, we do not have to disregard the fact that it was 19th century industrialization and consumerism that led to the technological developments of household products, such as the washing machine, the dishwasher and the electric stove, which provided women with the free-time to consider a world outside the domestic sphere on a mass scale. This development was not simply progressive, but circular as men themselves were involved in the advancement of women. By studying the circularity of the everyday, as readers we might no longer have to "ignore the fact that men are also embodied, embedded subjects, who live, for the most part, repetitive, familiar and ordinary lives." (31) That men, like women, young and old are defined by the shifting inbetweenness of the ordinary, conventional and fluid nature of the place they call home.