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Home is where the heart is? Organizing women’s work and domesticity at Christmas

Sheena J VachhaniSwansea University, UK

Alison PullenSwansea University, UK

AbstractThis article critically discusses domestication and women’s work in household organization at Christmas, a case of meta-organizing which fuels commercialization. Located in the growing body of work on contesting femininity that challenges traditional notions of femininity, we problematize the binary divide between women’s work at home and commercial organizations. By considering Christmas as a set of ritualistic activities replete with myths of femininity, we explore how the home—a major site of festival activity—constructs gender through the public/private divide. This division has been central to critical interpretations of women’s subordination in work and leisure spaces where the concept of home has attracted feminist attention through its association with exile or retreat into domesticity. Home is, however, a culturally and politically contested space, and this article argues that home-work is a productive retreat from commercial-work. Home relates to domesticity and rituals in paradoxical ways and attesting to the ambivalence of Christmas provides opportunities for the subversion of traditional discourses of women in the household, especially those associated with older ideas of femininity understood through ritualistic practice. We demonstrate this by analysing cultural representations of rituals located and practised in and around the home that are central to the enactment of Christmas and discern how these both subjugate and offer subversive possibilities for feminine subjectivity. Using contemporary representations of Christmas and home from media culture, we conclude that home is a feminist space with Christmas acting as a gift for women’s return to that space.

KeywordsChristmas, domesticity, femininity, home, organizing, ritual, subjectivity, women’s work

Corresponding author:Sheena J Vachhani, School of Business and Economics, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, UK. Email: s.j.vachhani@swansea.ac.uk

416404ORGXXX10.1177/1350508411416404Vachhani and PullenOrganization

Article

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Historically, Christmas has symbolized the enactment of rituals inside the home (Bossard and Boll, 1949). However, as this special issue illustrates, Christmas can be understood as a case of meta-organizing that affects society beyond the narrow confines of the festival itself. Gender-specific familial roles are no more salient than during festivals where home life and domestication play a significant part in women’s lives and also feed into the commercial economy of Christmas. As noted in the editorial of this special issue, festivals are also important sites for organizing. This is especially so in household settings given the increased social pressure to cater and care for extended family, friends and acquaintances (Hancock and Rehn, 2009). Much of this work falls to women. Whilst debates surrounding women’s ‘work’ recognizes both women’s paid work in commercial employment and unpaid domestic work (Crompton and Lyonette, 2008), we argue that there is a continued lack of recognition for women’s home-work with more emphasis being placed on the marginalization of women’s work in commercial organizations (for example, Hakim, 2004). Even though there is a general paucity of research on Christmas, the cultural mean-ing of Christmas activities has gained some attention in consumer research (Fisher and Arnold, 1990; Laroche et al., 2000). Historically, the cultural expectations of women in the management of festivals has dominated many women’s housekeeping magazines (Beetham, 1996), a prime example being Good Housekeeping and its attendance to women’s role in household manage-ment. Despite Christmas offering possibilities for relaxation, abundance and indulgence, it simul-taneously brings stress, anxiety and the intensification of work (Boyer, 1955; Lofgren, 1993; Miller, 1993; Sedgwick, 1994).

This article places the home as a contingent feminist space, one that is culturally contested and gendered but also politically active. Acknowledging that feminist thought has often seen the home as a site of domination and oppression that exiles women from public life, we present an alternative representation of home as a space of comfort—a haven away from public life (Wacjman, 1991). Christmas as a site of organizing, whilst demanding traditional requirements of women’s domestic-ity at home, also offers possibilities for subversion. This shift from traditional conceptions of home to that of a contemporary space is particularly salient for the construction of women’s work at Christmas. This is so because the home is often the hub of family life, and the rituals of Christmas promote the preservation of family and culture albeit within the constitution of greed, indulgence and desire (Holliday and Thompson, 2001). On these terms, femininity is contested—a contesta-tion defined in terms of how different women and groups of women adopt different subjective positions as to what counts as feminine. For individual women, femininity is contested as gendered expectations and positions vie for their enrolment (Linstead and Thomas, 2002; Tyler, 2005). Christmas is a prime time where the contestation of femininity can be culturally and politically located and the often ambivalent site of the home is where this contestation manifests. Further, Christmas acts ‘as significant elements of the institutional foundations that undergird socialisation and resocialisation’ (Etzioni, 2000: 40), suggesting that women’s work involves reconstruction as women’s home-work. This prompts broader societal issues of socialization and keeps the institu-tion of Christmas ongoing as well as the maintenance of home and associated rituals.

This article draws on feminist and post-colonial theorizing to explore home as it relates to Christmas, a time when home surfaces as place and space. We return home as a dwelling place which, instead of limiting it as repressive of femininity, also enables women’s sense of self (McDowell, 2004). It is at Christmas that belonging to home becomes increasingly prominent. This is not to idealize home as a utopian space or to negate the oppressive tendencies of unpaid domestic labour. It is, however, to relocate home beyond a prison/liberation dichotomy and to emphasize home as simultaneously a cultural site of domination and liberation. Whilst a politics of exile in

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which women retreat into the home may be problematic, we reconceive this retreat from public life as potentially productive especially in the sense that Christmas can provide the gift of home for women. This is not to advocate a return to classical notions of domesticity, but to reconceive home as a politically active dwelling space.

The article unfolds as follows. In the first section we introduce the importance of ritual as it relates to a gendered reading of Christmas—a festival which locks many women into particular forms of organizing and non-paid work. Whilst ethnographic and anthropological studies have highlighted the culturally diverse nature of Christmas as a set of traditions, little has been done in furthering a gendered or even feminist critique of such rituals and festivities. Recognizing the centrality of house and home at Christmas, the second part of the article discusses the role of home as a site of feminist struggle. Presenting femininity as contested for women’s subjectivity (Höpfl, 2003; Martin, 1990; Tyler and Abbott, 1998), we break with traditional forms of feminin-ity available to women that reinforce essentialist accounts of the relationship between women, home and non- paid work (see Crompton, 2006). Empirically, the domestic space of the home is inscribed by the history and ideologies attached to the public/private divide that surface through the festival of Christmas and invoke particular forms of women’s work. This discussion enables the third part of the article to explore rituals in the home as a central theme in the enactment of Christmas as a cultural performance; rituals which express feminine subjectivity in ways that can be both productive and limiting. Finally, we turn to domesticity as a central organizing theme to interrogate the performance of domesticity and examine the cultural myths that promote ideolo-gies of femininity at Christmas. This critical account of home and domesticity and its relationship with Christmas rituals challenges taken for granted assumptions surrounding women, home, domesticity and unpaid home-work—a challenge that troubles established dichotomies of inside/outside, public/private, subjugation/joy. This prompts us to read home as a private and privatized space which is inseparable from the social relations that take place within it (Adams, 1989; Dale, 2009; Kaplan, 1987), to contribute to the theorization of home as a socially and culturally con-tested and political space for women—a contestation which renders the home a feminist space where Christmas acts as a gift for women’s return to that space.

Ritual and domestication at Christmas

Christmas rituals and myths, as they construct rules for women, promote a seductive ‘mystique’ which can reinforce traditional conceptions of femininity associated with domestic labour. This emanates from arguably European middle-class and bourgeois gender values which circumscribe the roles and rules associated with enacting an ‘appropriate’ Christmas and the role of women in ensuring that enactment. Christmas seduces, it fuels ideals of domestic bliss and consumption now deeply entwined in western culture (Miller, 1995). Christmas can thus be considered in part a prod-uct of fantasy, involving ideologies which seek to support this fantasy (Gabriel, 1995) especially in relation to home and domestication. However, rather than blindly seducing individuals, groups and communities, Christmas offers potential liberation. The rituals of Christmas can be read as domi-nating women’s lives and is thus a site for feminine subjectivity in many different guises. Constructions of women as providers, good mothers, homemakers and domestic goddesses are all open to reconstruction and may be interrogated on the basis that they are transformational and ambivalent. Following Sedgwick (1994: 6) this suggests the possibility of a productive strategy that disarticulates or disengages the institutionally derived meaning of such gender positions through the very rituals that support them.

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As Geertz explains with cultural rituals such as Christmas: ‘the world as loved and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world’ (1966: 21). In this way the cultural performance of Christmas, including its commercial organization, represents the fusion between the real and the myth. In the traditional, especially middle-class, constructions of Christmas a variety of rituals take place which implicate many women and the work they undertake in the household. For women’s work at Christmas, this cultural performance combines all that is real and fantasy—the real prompted by fantasies of Christmas traditions—the nativity, indulgent foods, carol singing, gift giving and so forth. Women’s domesticity becomes a central feature in producing and delivering the Christmas ‘aesthetic’—by planning, shopping, cooking, dressing, and cleaning, for example. In this sense the archetypal cultural performance of Christmas rituals whether it be stuffing the crown of Turkey, steaming Christmas puddings, or spicing mulled wine are, after Caplow, the ‘enforcement of rules without visible means’ (1984: 1306). The rules are governed by ritual, and are invisible. Taking this argu-ment further, a traditional Christmas, as we have typified it here, attempts to express a collective reality and engender collective meaning. Durkheim commented that,

[r]eligious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states in these groups. (1912/1965: 9–10)

Women can be seen as part of a wider collective at Christmas including a localized family system, a community of women (intentionally downplaying identity differences) and a global family. This vision promulgates popular culture and fuels the economy of Christmas from wom-en’s magazines (such as supplements and guides on Christmas organization, see Beetham, 1996) to daytime television when more programming is devoted to aspects of Christmas organizing (such as selecting the perfect gift or cooking the perfect turkey). Christmas, despite its religious origins, performs as a form of secularized religious ritual, while supporting quasi-religious beliefs. Such beliefs, again following Durkheim (1912/1965: 10), ‘presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal’, and provide a division of the world into two ‘domains’; the profane and the sacred. Durkheim shows the transformational importance of ritual, and it is through Christmas rituals that domesticity, as involving the profane and the everyday at other times in the year, become transformed into a scared realm, a realm that brings us nearer to the myths of the past, and for some closer to religion (see also Schervish et al., 1996; Zaidman et al., 2009). Christmas is typified by this transformation and transcendence out of the mundane. For women, we argue, Christmas centres women’s work within the home thus elevating the productivity of their labour instead of the docility of unpaid home work, or the mainstream focus on women’s paid work in commercial organizations.

Stressing the meta-organizing effects of Christmas on broader society, we turn to Etzioni (2000: 41) who claims: ‘rituals provide one major mechanism for the recreation of society, one in which the members of society worship shared objects and in which they share experiences that help form and sustain deep emotional bonds’. This transcendence from the mundane to the extraordinary accords opportunities for individual transgression. Home, with all the domesticity that it involves, becomes different for women and the meaning of home instead of being a private, solitary place becomes a place of symbolic and material importance, a space for social gatherings and kinship. In this sense, Christmas calls for the feminine to come forward, not in a marginal sense but located centrally within the Christmas ritual.

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Christmas is largely feminized; much of the labour associated with Christmas is both done by women and understood as women’s unpaid work. Dominated by affective labour, this work involves organizing leisure activities, gift-giving, taking care of children, being generous to fam-ily and feasting amongst other things. Further, as Carrier (1993: 67) notes, ‘because Christmas is a ceremony of affection and stability, its celebration is most pronounced in the realm of the nuclear family’. But, what constitutes the nuclear family has been deeply questioned in modern western society, leaving domesticity also open to question, for example through queer perfor-mance (Sedgwick, 1994). Hence domestication as a cultural performance demands further atten-tion when interrogating the spaces for feminine subjectivity at Christmas. It cannot be assumed that women are rendered domestic and subjugated to women’s work in support of a husband and children.

Christmas can also be understood as a ‘transitional act’ (Nippert-Eng, 1995) moving away from work and closer to home/domesticity. It presents an opportune space for lifting women out of everyday tasks into the rituals of Christmas—thus, one could say that Christmas gives the gift of purpose. In one sense this brings women meaning through a Victorian ideology of domesticity—the feminine ideal of morality and respectability (Freeman, 2000). In contemporary times, how-ever, the construction of domesticity and femininity becomes realigned (Hollows, 2000), harbouring the potential of choice for women against masculine organization (Mills and Chiaramonte, 1991) and the structures of traditional modes of organization in the public sphere. As such, domesticity is valorized in ways not seen at other times of the year. Seduced by the collective, sacred and special qualities of Christmas, the chores of the everyday transpire into a magical (but not utopian) space of Christmas.

Christmas rituals provide a space for women’s domesticity to come to the fore, especially as an organized social activity as Goffman (1955: 213) reminds us: ‘[f]ace-work utilizes cooperation and ritual. The universality of some types of ritual preserving or restoring face demonstrates their necessity for organized social activity’. Christmas becomes a staging of domesticity and femininity where women’s domesticity performs ‘face work’ (Goffman, 1955), ‘restoring face’ as the central provider of the home—a time to return to the home and hearth (Young, 2005). The ritual of Christmas enables an ambivalent reading of home, suggesting that instead of seeing domesticity as denying women of their subjectivity [as developed in readings of home by de Beauvoir (1953) and Irigaray (1993); see also Young, (2005)], domesticity becomes an opportunity for renewed subjectivity. The viewing of home and work as separate spaces, the ‘myth of separate spheres’ after Kanter (1977), is especially disrupted at Christmas. Whilst traditionally domestic labour has been ignored as ‘work’ (Cockburn, 1991; Di Leonardo, 1987), at Christmas home-work becomes privileged and attempts to solidify traditional female gender roles. With the onset of Christmas, the marginal and neglected space of home is cast as central; woman becomes centre stage, man becomes other.

Despite the discussion of Christmas we have given above we are mindful of Sedgwick (1994: 5) who marks the contradictions between the deeply refined economy of Christmas, the ‘ad-swollen magazines [that] have oozing turkeys on the cover’, and the news television reports that use Christmas as an event for freeing hostages or reporting on victims of floods and murders. For Sedgwick ‘[t]he pairing of families and Christmas becomes tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule’ (1994: 5–6). The media driven image of Christmas, however, is not practised as it is preached. It would be strange not to include our own experiences of Christmas as we engage as feminists. We recall both the Welsh traditional Christmas of excessive gift giving to children, the sound of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and

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the smell of a turkey cooking, and the Southern England Christmas of an Indian family that mixed Hindu tradition with the archetypal English Christmas. In the latter, samosas sat neatly next to a traditional turkey roast; in the former it was chipolata sausages. Despite such differ-ences, what we have in common is how our own rituals support those feminist values that pro-mote the liberation of women from home and its burdens. But at the same time we both value, as many people do, the space and meaning that home offers as children and adults with all the constraints, burdens and joys that this entails. Our life experiences and identity politics, whilst being culturally different, coalesce under similar themes relating to home. We stress here the transformational potential of rituals that allow us to reconceive home as a dwelling space where multiple meanings of home and domesticity inform women’s subjectivity and women’s work, as women retreat away from commercial organizations.

Organizing the home

Amongst the multiplicity of meanings and subject positions available to women at Christmas, home can be a place of both liberation and domination. There is a social expectation that women’s sense of who they are is informed (intellectually and emotionally) by the system called ‘family’—a system that becomes normalized in and through mass media, especially through representations of Christmas. Women are bombarded by normative prescriptions of what a ‘real Christmas’ might look like for the ‘average family’. But, after Sedgwick (1994) we need to ask whether these norms and expectations can be disarticulated and disengaged. Biological sex, class, race, religion and sexual identity become sites for the problematization of women’s unified identity, a family Christmas and women’s organizing and home-work at Christmas. Yet differences in cultural and social relations become denied as normative values that take centre stage and the ‘ideal home’ populate representations of Christmas resting on ‘the expectation that people will engage in expressing themselves through their homes’ (Dale, 2009: 133). ‘Household management’, after Dale, is not neutral but a political and personal ‘mode of organizing’ (2009: 128). Drawing on Dale’s work we argue that the materiality of the home and the female subject provide sites of politi-cal engagement—home and home-work is political in that ‘the material management of the home produces an ordering which embodied and spacialized social actors then “live through” or “enact”’(Dale and Burrell, 2007, cited in Dale, 2009: 130).

By no longer submerging women within their families, households may be considered as the ‘loci of political struggle, inseparable parts of the larger society and economy, rather than as havens from the heartless world of industrial capitalism’ (Di Leonardo, 1987: 441). Thus, home is a politically active space which problematizes the subordination of home against commercial organizations. As Di Leonardo (1987) notes, there have been two key theoretical trends emanating from the maturation of feminist historical scholarship that has featured the reinterpretation of women’s work and the family domain. The first trend has been identifying and making housework and child care visible as labour to be counted as part of overall social reproduction, and the second theoretical movement is giving domestic work and kinship a non-pejorative focus where they may be considered conscious strategies.

Drawing on Irigaray and de Beauvoir, Young (2005) sees home not simply as a site of imprison-ment or subjugation understood through patriarchal structures but a place which may offer critical possibilities where feminine subjectivity may be realized, especially at Christmas which creates a specific spatio-temporal location. Yet, for Irigaray (1993) and de Beauvoir (1953/1993) the value of home for feminine subjectivity is less ambivalent rendering it a devalued space which subju-gates women so as to neutralize any possibility for active subjectivity. Young (2005: 128), speaking

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of Irigaray’s work, writes: ‘Man builds for the sake of dwelling, to make himself at home, on the basis of woman as already always positioned as the enveloping nurturing presence of nature’. Going further, Young suggests that Irigaray exposes a bourgeois ideal of home which reduces its critical possibilities as it stages the historically specific subject of modern capitalism as fulfilling desire through commodity consumption in which house and home occupy a central role in con-sumer consciousness. More productively, Young (2005: 123–124) comments that it is still ‘difficult even for feminists to exorcise a positive valence to the idea of home […] Despite the oppressions and privileges the idea historically carries, the idea of home also carries critical liberating potential because it expresses uniquely human values’.

The symbolic and material meanings of home ‘combine to produce the construction of a par-ticular version of a home in different ways in different societies’ (McDowell, 2004: 71). Extreme conceptualizations of home range from the ideal homes longingly reminisced about by Heidegger and Bachelard, to places of burden depicted by feminist geographers who demonstrate that for poor women home is a reminder of lack of material wealth (McDowell, 2004). We are mindful that home has multiple meanings and different emphases in different societies, yet we are informed by our own European location and familial lives and upbringings; these values being deeply embed-ded in our analysis of representations of home at Christmas. Home features in our memories which, after Bachelard (1969, cited in McDowell, 2004), is prompted by ‘houses and rooms’ whilst being exposed to mass media which create ‘ideal homes’. The power of home as place and space that alludes to ‘the power attributed by theorists to the house and dwelling, with its connotations to shelter and security, of pleasure, and a storehouse of memories’ (McDowell, 2004: 72) promotes an idyllic representation which attaches itself to the house to become a home, and more often than not relies on women’s domestic and unpaid labour.

There has been long standing importance of home in women’s construction of meaning and subjectivity as they have traditionally been located within the private space of society: the house being the place of women and public/work being the place of men. Whilst times have clearly changed, what we are suggesting is that Christmas is an event which ‘returns’ women to the house in the context of social, cultural, commercial and consumer pressures that order women’s subjec-tivities. And although women are increasingly involved in public life, it is during festivals that home takes on different meanings than the rest of the year. Domesticity, or a good domestic per-formance, becomes central to the social order of women’s sense of home and its work. Historically women’s association with home was one of restriction; an association that supported the assump-tion that the home ‘is a site of disenfranchisement, abuse and fulfillment’ (Mertes 1992: 58 cited in McDowell 2004: 73). Home has therefore, been associated with devalued, unrewarded and unpaid work relying on women’s ‘natural’ skills—housekeeping. Betty Friedan (1963) refers to this confinement as ‘the problem that has no name’ because to name it would create further lack of representation in the economic structure (cf. hooks, 1984; Probyn, 1990). The hard labour of traditional women’s housework and childcare has been remembered by feminist writers as repeti-tive, isolating and time-consuming.

The reification of home as a place of security and respite has been largely recognized but how may we understand this at Christmas? We ask: does Christmas enable escape from public life and commercial organizations? The labour of and for Christmas—a culturally demanded labour—stands in stark contrast to the hard labour associated with working class women in industrial society where the house was a regulated and constrictive space for work replete with punitive labour conditions. But whilst we cannot compare women’s present day experiences of home and hard labour with that of the past, the place of home, paradoxes of domestic oppression and dreams exist hand in hand. Christmas becomes a space of both idyllic connection and oppression.

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McDowell, drawing on Heidegger, speaks to the relationship of home with religion as women’s home work was regarded as a sacred duty:

[an] idealised centre for emotional life, where feelings that might be disguised elsewhere are allowed full rein […] the locus of love, emotion and empathy, and the burdens of nurturing and caring for others were placed on the shoulders of women, who were, however, constructed as “angels” rather than workers. (McDowell, 2004: 75–76)

Domestic work was positioned as natural and pleasurable where women sought cleanliness and embellishment (McDowell, 2004, drawing on Mertes, 1992); the adage ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ echoes.

Home, domesticity and women’s work are powerful on account of their social construction and cultural embeddedness, and dominant discourses that place women in the home are especially powerful during Christmas and beyond, regardless of social class. However there are tensions between home as haven, a productive and caring space and a site of love and fulfillment versus home as prison and a site of oppression and confinement (Oakley, 1984). But while potentially oppressive, what hooks (1991); (see also hooks, 1984) calls the ‘homeplace’ can be read as a site of resistance where, black women can empower themselves. We borrow from hooks to suggest that the ‘homeplace’ especially at Christmas becomes a site for restoring women’s sense of self (which may exist alongside unfulfilled experiences) albeit recognizing the ambivalence of cul-tural, temporal and psychical space that enables distinctions and connections between home, dwelling and community to be drawn. Postcolonial approaches, for example, provide the political terrain for troubling home by rendering them sites of contestation for, inter alia, identity, class, race and religion—all of which can be understood through displacement, location and exile (Kaplan, 1987; Prasad, 2003; Spivak, 1990). hooks (1991) stresses home as community, a site of empowerment rather than as the impoverished other to public space and a response to exclusion from public life where organization shifts to private spheres of political action.

Responding to the question ‘where is the home?’, Brah (1996: 192) says ‘[o]n the one hand, “home” is a mythic place of desire in diasporic imagination. In this sense, it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of “origin”’. Similarly, Ahmed (1999: 338) suggests that home shifts across a number of registers: as a location where one lives, or where one’s family lives or one’s native country and asks, ‘is leaving home a breaking apart of this coexistence?’ Thus, we can define home not in terms of its presence, but in terms of its absence as located in the ideas of leaving or returning home. Defined negatively, home becomes associated with stasis, boundaries and fixity where ‘home is implicitly constructed as a purified space of belonging […S]uch a narrative of home assumes the possibility of a space which is pure, which is uncontaminated by movement, desire or difference’ (Ahmed, 1999: 339). Home, much like Christmas, engenders desire and involves encounters with those who arrive and leave—it becomes an open and fluid space of relationships rather than a closed container which locates women’s service. Following Ahmed, homes are contingent spaces of inhabitance where ‘being-at-home suggest that the subject and space leak into each other, inhabit each other’ (Ahmed, 1999: 341). Developing this feminist line of inquiry further, Ahmed considers how home can be concep-tualized as skin where boundaries between self and home interpenetrate in an affectual exchange. Home becomes:

Not a particular place that one inhabits, but more than one place: there are too many homes to allow place to secure the roots or routes of one’s destination […] The journey between homes provides the subject with

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the contours of a space of belonging […] a space which expresses the very logic of an interval, the passing through of the subject between apparently fixed moments of departure and arrival. (Ahmed, 1999:330)

It is this home, the absent one which one journeys to and from, that is the location of Christmas rituals and women’s home-work.

Contesting cultural myths of femininity

Christmas is dominated by the image of Santa Claus with his long flowing beard, red round face and red suit. This global image was commercially popularized in an advertising campaign for Coca-Cola in 1931. This illustrates how, at its heart, Christmas is infused with commercialization and US centric neo-colonialism. This very image associated with happiness, joy, generosity and paternalism demonstrates the sedimentation of global business into all aspects of culture even those with religious origins. It would seem that any putative conflict between business, culture and traditional morality collapses as the child sits on Santa’s knee keen to secure his or her desired gift. The absence of women and their differences is marked—Mrs Claus is a minor char-acter, if she is seen at all (which is rare), she is to be found in the home always ready to look after Santa after he is either about to go or return from his global adventures. The male Santa walks tall as the embodiment of generosity and kindness, but always outside of the home. But while Santa is a man of the world, Mrs Claus’ dominion is the home. She is portrayed positively but at best she is the great woman behind the great man. Sequestered in the home, her working role is noth-ing more than making sure that Santa can do his job. What is clear is that Mrs Claus is an image of domesticity that has reproduced stereotypes of women at Christmas and the absence of women on its front stage.

Representations of Christmas, such as that of Mrs Claus, do not always reinforce women’s back stage role in the myths and rituals of home and domesticity at Christmas. Given the ambivalence of home and the potential for returning home as dwelling, our purpose in this section is to contest such cultural myths of femininity in terms of how they endorse a particular vision of home that denies difference and assumes that women express themselves through the ‘ideal home’. We draw on examples from our own ostensibly European perspectives to explore how normative identity, that denies difference, is conflated with the oppressive tendencies of home at Christmas and what this means for the political space of home. We note that we are constructing an analysis from ‘the patch of reality that it is drawn from’ (Le Doeuff 1989: 105–106 cited in Probyn, 1990: 158) but there are cultural comparisons to be drawn from media culture which connect with the self-representations of women. As female writers we are also mindful of Braidotti’s (1994) reminder that the personal is political and theoretical.

The political question is whether a return home stands counter to feminism and individualism, or whether it harbours the possibility of feminist affirmation and resistance. With many women retreating into traditional divisions of labour at Christmas, home can be seen as anti-feminist (Faludi, 1992), positing a strengthening of traditional social and sexual hierarchy. The ‘aftermath of feminism’ (McRobbie, 2009) has fuelled the return of many women to home, family values and home-work, retreating from work/career in a backlash against childhood experiences. In this way, ‘The Good Life’ (as depicted in a UK television comedy of the same name that ran between 1975–1978, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/goodlife/) is one which contests un/paid labour, class, sex and home. Here unpaid labour is favoured as a moral alternative to the domination of paid labour. Probyn (1990) refers to ‘the new traditionalism’ that situates feminism as Other, articulating discourses of post-feminism. In accepting this argument Christmas approves centring

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women into the domestic hub, rekindling traditions through known rituals (Bella, 1992). Representations of the ‘ideal home’ often involving images of abundance and generosity are jux-taposed with representations of Christmas where families descend into the home, like an invasion, disrupting relations and space, or fleeing from home to experience Christmas outside of home. Furthermore, given the documented increase in domestic violence behind the closed doors of homes at Christmas, we note that home is not an unproblematic place.

Christmas creates a space in which femininity is contested and connected to fantasies of home and hearth. In particular, media culture (Hassard and Holliday, 1998; Rehn, 2008) that addresses Christmas illustrates how home, domesticity and unpaid work produce and constrain women’s subjectivities. As McRobbie suggests, the products of media culture, and we could argue the com-mercial organization of Christmas, do not ‘just open up the field of consumer culture to women, in particular working-class or lower middle-class women, they actively direct such women so that they learn to make the right choices’ (McRobbie, 2009: 124). These right choices are the ones that align with dominant cultural expectations of femininity as they can support commercial interests. Such expectations, function largely as fantasy. Illustrative of this, Young (2005) discussed her own home in relation to her mother’s lack of domesticity (preferring to read and drink) and warns us not to gaze upon the home with bourgeois, conservative family values. Instead, what we need to ask is ‘what are women longing for or dreaming about at Christmas?’

When we think of women at Christmas, popular images in culture at large are of the unstressed cook/host/mother preparing the festive lunch (Davis, 2005). Such imagery is personified commer-cially in television celebrity cooks such as Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith (Waits, 1994; cf. Probyn, 1990). We look no further than to Christmas issues of Vogue (see for example, Winter, 2009) and Good Housekeeping (December, 2009) to see common illustrations of the ideal woman at Christmas. For example, Vogue included a gift-buying guide for children showing a picture of a boy straddling a bicycle in an expensive Burberry scarf. Good Housekeeping’s ironic Christmas cover stated ‘546 ways to make this year’s Christmas truly magical’. Christmas stereotypes abound every issue of every women’s magazine and drive and maintain the fantasy because it appears within reach of ordinary women. More critically, the stressed host, the neurotic mother, the poor woman, the undomesticated goddess buying ‘Christmas in a box’ or the starving mother become rendered marginal and abject because the myth of Christmas fails to thrive within such realities and live on beyond Christmas.

Part of the engagement with Christmas and home, is that many women long to become closer to the media and commercial constructed ‘domestic goddess’, and this representation works on and through women’s fantasies (Bordo, 1993). From being a family carer rather than provider, social expectations of women have changed, certainly in the West, since women now need to practise affective labour albeit within a dominantly heterosexual culture. A dominant re-presentation of this in Britain is Nigella Lawson: the domestic goddess! Nigella is sexy, sassy and opinionated, but all within the confines of the discourse of mother and wife (an exemplification of an economy of domesticity, one might argue. See Nigella Bites, 2001; Brunsdon, 2006). This is in contrast to male chefs where emphasis is on technique and cooking outside of the home (with few exceptions such as Jamie Oliver, see Jamie at Home—Cook Your Way to the Good Life, 2007). Such examples illustrate that domesticity is not valued in and for men, yet it features strongly as a privileged posi-tion for women.

Media culture offers the possibility of alternatives. Take the character Carrie Bradshaw, the single professional woman in the US TV show Sex and the City. Carrie positively eschews tradi-tional notions of domesticity, using her oven and kitchen cupboards as storage space because she

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rarely enters the kitchen to prepare food. Nevertheless, Carrie is presented as being other to domes-tic stereotypes—a position legitimated by her status as a childless working woman. With Carrie, domesticity is rejected for career and an independent lifestyle. Similarly, Roseanne Barr’s charac-ter, in the US TV show Roseanne troubles the idealized American nuclear family, denying tradi-tional domesticity by dwelling in a family home without displaying any domestic prowess or even inclination to practise domestic values. At the same time, however, her maternal credentials and achievements were denigrated and parodied on the show.

The Christmas scene in the film Bridget Jones’ Diary provides another interesting example (Fielding, 1996/2001), but one where femininity is contested femininity at the level of class and age. As discussed by McRobbie (2004), the relations between Bridget and her mother show how traditional women’s work at Christmas manifests. The viewer sees Bridget’s mother offering canapés and sherry to her guests while wearing a cooking apron. A feminist reading would high-light the repressive nature of such women’s work, the image of the 1950s housewife, invisible yet at the core of its organization. In contrast, Bridget arrives looking out of place in her parents’ home, revealing her lack of domestic credentials but showing female individualism. We can question whether this is progress for women or the movie producer’s attempt to show how traditional family and domestic values have been lost in post-feminist times. However, the scene does show how middle class family and conservative femininity are positioned against independence and yet a desire for love, marriage, sex and motherhood remain.

The interplay between traditional and contemporary femininities suggests that to be a contem-porary woman requires engagement with all that is traditional—domesticity brings about respect-ability. This class achievement is therefore something that must be desired and impinges on popular images targeted at women at Christmas. McRobbie acknowledges that ‘the British are obsessed with class’ (2009: 142), and turns to the British cooking program The Two Fat Ladies (1996) as examples of women with middle and upper class backgrounds who ‘flaunt, or play up, often flam-boyantly’ those backgrounds (McRobbie, 2009:142).

Given our earlier emphasis on tradition and ritual, post-feminist arguments raise new possibili-ties for women’s subjectivities, including work. This is especially so for those arguments that productively reconsider how home and post-feminist cultures offer a contemporary context in which to explore women’s choices of domesticity and home-work as well as relationships between home-work, commercial organization (typically written as public space) and the commercial organization of home. Hollows (2000) argues for post-feminist domesticity suggesting that there is more to domesticity than the maintenance of sexual division through gendered roles and division of labour. In contrast, McRobbie suggests that feminist politics is ‘decisively aged and made to seem redundant’ (2004: 256) by exploring the relationship of feminism and feminist politics within post-feminist culture to reveal how women in popular culture downplay, or ‘cast (feminism) into the shadows’ (McRobbie, 2004: 255, bracketed text added; cf. Gillis and Hollows, 2008; Hollows and Moseley, 2006). This ambivalent relationship between domesticity and women’s subjectivity which comprises ‘liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations’ can be conceptualized as ‘double entanglement’ (McRobbie, 2004: 255–256). During post-feminist times these are choices which can be read alongside the harsh realities of domesticity and home-work and its association with anti-feminism (Faludi, 1992). The commodification of Christmas, the pressure of consumption cultures and frustration with commercial organizations return women home to prepare the feast whilst liberating their subjective positions as women in the global world. Arguably this reclaiming of home is informed by the fantasy and ideology of Christmas and home.

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Concluding remarks

This article has considered how home, a location and institution central to the organization of Christmas, can be re-theorized from an affirmative feminist position. Drawing on feminist, including post-colonial feminist theory, representations of home were analysed so as to destablize traditional perspectives that see home as a private, devalued space. By troubling the public/private divide (Dale, 2009; Kanter, 1977) we considered how home provides productive possi-bilities for the appreciation of contemporary women’s subjectivities. Rather than home being repressive or oppressive, it becomes a site of resistance for women in which temporal, spatial and symbolic spaces collide with all the multiplicity that this entails. We have thus suggested that home is an inner space and container which is also a contested political space—of both subjuga-tion and liberation especially, we argue, at Christmas. Such a festival, and its associated myths and rituals which has wider implications for society beyond its temporal location, promulgate women at the heart of home. At this time and in this place, feminist theory shows that the organi-zation of home-work reproduces relations of kinship, gender relations and subjugation (Adams, 1989; Caplow, 1982) whilst also being a site for women’s identity and human values (Wright-St Clair et al., 2005) and, we add, moral choice.

We argued that the home/work and private/public divide is at best precarious, or indeed mythical, and this suggests that further research on women’s work outside traditional commercial organizations and organizing, such as Christmas, is necessary to appreciate the multiplicity of sites of women’s subjectivity. In terms of the implications for organizing and commercial organi-zations, the return of the home into the public space of organization resounds with contemporary debates surrounding women’s roles in public organizational life, the submersion and absence of the home, and women’s invisible, masked or silent labour. In response we reclaimed home, put-ting backstage onto the front stage, as women choose to return to the hearth to care for family to live the ‘good life’. Our discussion has been very much of western images of Christmas, and we are mindful that women’s equality in some nations has not enabled them to enter paid labour let alone escape from it. Yet, overall, women negotiating careers and domesticity, here understood through the organization of Christmas, form the heart of this debate and add a much needed dimension to the feminist project in studies of organization. How this plays out elsewhere in the world begs more attention.

In conclusion, home and domesticity provide a means in which feminist politics can surface by recognizing the political space of home and the agency given to domesticity. This frees home as a negative space which houses women’s hard labour—and often un-attended labour—under the yoke of patriarchy. It also reframes hooks’ (1991) notion of ‘homeplace’ by revealing loca-tion so as to consider a ‘homespace’ which creates value for women’s work. Moreover, with this problematization the usual conception of home as the antithesis of the public, economic, and political is overturned so as to render it central. Through challenging the cultural values and systems in which women’s work and organizing is produced and maintained, women’s marked subordination is challenged. In so doing we exposed the battleground between women’s unpaid labour at Christmas and the cultural labour of ‘Christmas work’. Christmas is a culturally defin-ing institution which defines women’s subjectivity, yet as we have shown this transcends its temporal location where Christmas can be a critical site through which women work for their own identity politics. This troubles narrow and harmful images of women’s domesticity as we have seen in media culture which presents dominant images of culture and femininity which in turn contest culture and femininity itself. If this is feminism then feminism is alive and well at Christmas.

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Notes

Sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and challenging reviews which gave us the opportunity to develop our thinking. We appreciate the support and guidance of editors Alf and Phil who have provided the space where women’s writing can be published. Finally a note of thanks to the women in our lives including Fanny Craddock and Nigella Lawson for providing food for thought, positive and negative.

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Biographies

Sheena J Vachhani is a Lecturer in Organization Studies in the People, Organisations and Work Group, Swansea University. Her research interests lie in understanding embodiment, difference, ethics and the feminine in organization as well as critiquing and investigating the relationships between language, bodies and subjectivities. At present she is engaged in projects on leadership and corporeality, ethico-political feminist resistance, dirty work, domesticity and women’s work. Address: School of Business and Economics, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, UK. Email: s.j.vachhani@swansea.ac.uk

Alison Pullen is Professor of Organization Studies and works in the People, Organisations and Work Group, Swansea University. At home, she is Mother to Elliot and Ted and writes numerous things around gender, work and organization. Current projects include ethics and embodiment, monstrous organization, parody and popular culture, leadership and embodiment, and women’s writing. Address: School of Business and Economics, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, UK.