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Reading the Strange Case of Woman-as-Appliance

Abstract Considering questions of feminism, the home and migrations within (especially women's) art after World War II, this article examines the figure of the housewife in art of the UK and the US from the 1950s to the 1980s. Exploring conflations of women's identity with questions of domestic labour, representations of the housewife's configuration with appliances is of especial importance, leading to this article's proposition of the figure of ‘woman-as-appliance’. Such a figure is explored through examination of, in particular, Richard Hamilton's painting $he (1958–1961) and the video project Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $M. This article argues for woman-as-appliance as the barred subject par excellence, as the megamachine of domestic labour (through an adaptive appropriation from Lewis Mumford), and (by way of McKenzie Wark and Donna Haraway) in her cyborgic transfigurations.