6/28/08 -
STUD
Architectures of MasculinityEdited by Joel Sanders
Princeton Architectural Press
This is one of the best reads on the subject in my entire collection so I will give it some detailed attention.
It is broken up into several sections of essays. I will cover each one.
Home/Homework/Bathroom/Gym/and Outings. I'll begin the first series on the Home.
Chapter l - Part ll -
So Functional for It's Purposes: The Bachelor Apartment in Pillow Talk
Steven Cohan
Excerpt: Perhaps the most memorable feature of Pillow Talk (1959; dir. Michael Gordon) is the way the film situates the sexuality of its male lead, bachelor songwriter Brad Allen (Rock Hudson), against the theatrical backdrop of his apartment, a fantasy playpen where domestic technology serves a single purpose - seduction. Flip a switch and the front door locks, the light goes out, a record player starts to play mood music. Flip a second switch and the sleeper sofa opens out into a double bed made with baby blue sheets. When career girl Jan Morrow (Doris Day), the unmarried interior decorator whom Brad ultimately marries, reluctantly agrees to accept a job of redecorating his bachelor pad, she asks, "Why redecorate? It's so functional for your purpose." While Jan's sarcastic remark equates the the bachelor pad unequivocally with the den of seduction, the bachelor pad, an architectural type prominently featured in the popular media during the 1950's and 1960's, functions as more than just the spider web (as Jan refers to it) where male traps unsuspecting female. I will demonstrate how this multi-coded space represented the culture's deepest anxieties about the stability, coherence, and normality of American maleness, underscoring the homophobia that structured the cultural meaning of "masculinity" as the opposite of "femininity." * This is a very small segment of this chapter - I will break it up.
*Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment.
Next Up: Playboy's Bachelor Apartment
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