THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME: DOMESTIC DOMAINS AND URBAN IMAGINARIES IN NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

In this article, I attempt to adumbrate shifting race, class, and gender politics in the United States through a “world in a grain of sand” focus on one American city and through the fulcrum of what Marx labeled the “historical and moral element” that must always be considered in gauging class formation and capitalist development: the gendered construction, across class and race, of the workings of the “proper home.” In so doing, I both document ethnographically the counter-empirical nature of much public–cultural representation of American race/class/gender lived realities and demonstrate the ways in which we can and should consider “the political” both in terms of our older understandings of politics and political organizations and in the newer sense of cultural politics—but without succumbing to the etiolated idealism of political economy-less postmodernism.

Key Words

• urban United States,
• gender,
• race,
• political economy