Digital Archeology in The Deleted City: Historicizing Geocities

by Christina Spiker, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

Although SOPA and PIPA have been taken off the table, it has become increasingly important to examine digital histories of user-created content on the web, especially as that content faces the threat of censorship and moderation.  While there was a nostalgic part of me that smiled when I stumbled upon The Deleted City project, there also seems to be an immediate need to reevaluate these kinds of digital, generative spaces such as the late Geocities and other early online communities.  According to the project's website,

The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free webhosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage... Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of "homesteaders" as the digital tennants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars.  Ten years later, in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and delted.  In a heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down.  The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

As an exercise in media archeology, The Deleted City project visualizes the archive of personal websites cataloged immediately before the deletion of Geocities on October 27, 2009.  This installation work visualizes the data of the archive as a city map, spatially arranging the "neighborhoods" based on file quantities.  The website explains, "In full view, the map is a datavisualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighborhoods.  While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing individual html pages and the images they contain.  While browsing, nearby MIDI files are played."  In their visualization of digital space, The Deleted City simultaneously embraces the communitarian aspect of Geocities (and dated artifacts such as the MIDI sound file) alongside new touch technology that allows us to point, swipe, and pinch our way through the neighborhoods of internet past. The Deleted City visualizes Geocities in a way intended for the gallery.  Does something become truly past once it passes into the realm of the museum?

My own history on Geocities seems like a distant memory.  After playing around with several other free website hosts, I navigated my way there in order to create an account in the digital neighborhood of SoHo (one of the "cities" dedicated to the arts).  My page started with a default template that soon became littered with tacky animated GIF files and a variety of MIDI songs that changed with my adolescent mood.  It housed poetry from junior high and artwork from my freshman year -- all before my own awareness of things like internet piracy and creative commons.  My barebones website encouraged me to experiment with HTML (first with "free layouts" offered by more experienced web masters and later by layouts created by my own hand).  However, Geocities also introduced me to new kinds of interaction through their interest-based communities and the glorious invention called the "webring" used to discover new sites of similar topics (a rudimentary StumbleUpon, if you will).  For me, Geocities and the phenomenon of the personal website so popular in the 1990s, prefaced much of my engagement with the internet as a space of creative possibility.  However, when Geocities faced its immanent deletion, I had already said my goodbyes and, like many of my peers, moved on to the thrill of domain ownership and social networking. My "homestead" stood vacant among many others when the plug was finally pulled.

Despite my nostalgic attachment to Geocities, its existence testifies to the life (and death) of a particular venue for user-created web content.  It forces us to consider the preservation of digital material, and, in some senses, digital world and community making.  There is a certain kind of utopic idealism that these spaces seem to enjoy and embrace. However permanent a fixture Geocities seemed to be during its height, it makes us cognizant of the eventual passing of other platforms and the impermanence of the content created on them.  In light of current news, it also forces us to consider the value of those spaces should they one day disappear.

The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.

Cinephilia Now: Michel Hazanavicious' The Artist

by Erik Watschke, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

The Artist (2011)A hit at Cannes, especially for the performance of its lead actor Jean Dujardin, Michel Hazanavicious' The Artist is a complexly reflexive film. On its surface, it tells the seemingly recycled story—à la Singin' in the Rain (1952) among others—of a silent film actor struggling to deal with the coming of sound in Hollywood circa 1927. George Valentin (Dujardin) is a man who prides himself on his refusal to do sound films even as his career disintegrates. A binary struggle ensues between the philosophy of Valentin and his main romantic interest Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), who embraces the new technologies of film and, as a result, vaults over him to stardom in the new sound cinema. When asked “Why won't you talk?” Valentin's exasperated reply sets the stakes of the film: “Because I'm not a puppet, I'm an artist!”

Ultimately, it is not only Valentin who refuses to talk, but Hazanavicious who handicaps his film in this way. This is immediately apparent in the film's embrace of outmoded features such as black & white photography, a noticibly square screen ratio, and the almost wholesale rejection (almost!) of synchronized sound. These factors have undoubtedly gone a long way in propelling the film to critical attention. Especially noteworthy are the almost surrealist moments that formally indicate that sound simply does not exist in the world of Valentin—on-screen or off!

Yet these apparent details are by no means the film's most sophisticated structural references to the silent cinema: one begins to recognize visual and narrative allusions to everything from The Crowd (1928) all the way back to The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903). One might be tempted to take Valentin at his word—as a stand-in for The Artist itself—that true film artistry corresponds foremost to the silent period sadly lost to history. However, this literalist reading is complicated by the myriad of film references to a long history of sound films as well. With unmistakable invocations to Citizen Kane (1941), Grand Hotel (1932), and everything in-between, a more non-historicized, auto-reflexive critique seems to take shape. In fact, the film may well have just as much to say about recent cinema as it does the early period. Whether or not the entire narratology of The Artist can be taken as a structural allegory for a contemporary debate about film technology in the 21^st century is largely contingent upon one's take on Valentin's ultimate solution (which will not be divulged here).

It is of note, nevertheless, that by far the most conspicuous reference of all is an extended sampling of Bernard Hermann's score to Vertigo (1958), just as Valentin arrives at his most desperate moment. As the broken man gazes into a shop window, framing his own reflection perfectly into the sleeves and collar of a tuxedo on display, he imagines what happiness he once possessed. This scene eerily invokes the nostalgic despair of Scottie Ferguson in the Hitchcock film sequence to which the soundtrack alludes. Like Scottie, Valentin clings to the already long dead even as he attempts, anachronistically, to revive it. This is the most poignant and reflexive of all the borrowed moments in the film; The Artist recognizes its own place in a larger history of narratively reflexive filmmaking and celebrates this history through its cinematic nostalgia.

Among the film's chief delights, the casting of Dujardin is laudable and his histrionic maneuverings bring the film as close as it gets to silent film sublimity. Yet, the familiar supporting ensemble is where the film goes the most awry. Any time a recognizable face appears—such as John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller, or, worst of all, James Cromwell (who performs admirably, but sticks out like a sore thumb in the role of Valentin's chauffeur)—the illusion is lost. One is left wondering why Goodman, for instance, is performing histrionically in juxtaposition to his well known televisual comedy style. The affect is clever intertextuality at best; awkward distraction at worst. Here, the film loses the essential pathos of the cinema of yesteryear by being a work that is—at times—recognizably outsmarting itself.

In its zeal to duplicate much of the visual iconography of the silent screen of old, The Artist fails to capture the character-driven energy of the same. What is left is a hollowed-out shell of allusions, which might inspire with its passion for the cinema itself, but falls short of capturing the mania of Valentin—the man—in an agreeable form. If he is merely being stubborn, is not the film as well?

Constructing Worlds: Making and Breaking Order

An interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the Graduate Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine

April 5-6, 2012
Irvine, California
Keynote Speaker: Lisa Parks, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

“When I ask, ‘What is worlding?’ I’m asking what the material, semiotic, world-making practices at stake are for whom. Who-what-lives-dies-how in this worlding? What imaginaries and flesh are conjoined in these particular acts of worlding?” - Donna Haraway, Wellek Library Lectures, 5/2/11

Worlding, in Haraway’s model, is an overlapping and intersecting of both tangible and intangible practices which decide who or what exists, how, when, where, and why - in short, how worlds are established, maintained, ordered, and deconstructed. Taking into account the introduction of various technological, philosophical, and political developments into our contemporary cultural discourse, the 2012 Visual Studies Graduate Conference at UC Irvine will ask what it means to make a world, sense a world, exist in a world, or destroy a world.

The conference will explore constructed worlds in all their visual manifestations and encourages submissions that deal with the idea of a world that is not preexisting and fixed, but constructed, or in the process of creation. This idea of a world is exceedingly supple and open to numerous complex interpretations. A world can be both tactile and virtual, exterior and interior. It can be ancient, contemporary and everything in between. Technology, language, physical migration, global economics, political discourses, and a litany of other phenomena contain the power to not only construct new worlds, but also to redefine and destroy existing worlds. With these ideas in mind, we seek papers that highlight not only the generation of worlds, but also their delineation within society. We welcome papers that discuss how ideology implements and transforms the process of world making or world breaking, provoking new methods of communication and cultural interaction.

We hope to receive submissions from across the humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural and technological sciences which engage issues of vision, visibility, and visuality, including (but not limited to) gender and sexuality studies, critical theory, ethnic and cultural studies, history, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, literature and language studies, information and technology studies, philosophy, political science, classics, art history, and film and media studies.

Potential topics include:

• The construction and experience of built environments: leisure worlds such as theme parks, themed attractions, World’s Fairs and expositions, tourist destinations, malls, Spectropoli, and virtual worlds
• Distinctions and definitions of urban, suburban, and rural territories; nature and recreation preserves
• Creating order out of chaos: authority, regulation, and discipline in the construction of worlds, colonization, nation-building, the rise of the state, and biopolitics and necropolitics
• The world in binaries: public/private, representation/reality, utopia/dystopia, creation/destruction, global/local, universal/particular
• World making as art/art as world making: design practices, museum exhibitions, and cooperative collaborations which engage in world making
• Worlds constructed around social categories: ethnicity, cultural practice, socioeconomic standing, religion, political orientation, gender, and sexual orientation and practice
• Phenomenological aspects of world making
• Time and space: the evolution of worlds over time, and the establishment and revision of boundaries
• Rendering worlds: geospatial categorizations, urban planning, ancient and modern cartography, GIS, digital or virtual globes, scientific imaging, space, ocean and earth-based photography

The deadline for submissions is January 16, 2012. Please email your 200-250 word abstract to: makingworlds2012@gmail.com. Final presentation length is 20 minutes. Conference presentations will also be part of a special online issue of Octopus Journal.

Imaginary Ethnography of Hometown: An Experimental Journey into a Memory

by Mary C. Schmitt, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

A white square.  Empty.

A white, empty square, centrally squared; national, central square.

Squarely normative, white, empty....my hometown.

Within an empty white square: isolated, suffocated, enclosed…Empty, uneasy, greedy, hungry.

(Hungry for life...for lives?)

Hunger?

(See where the memory goes, where it will lead, what will emerge…merge, merging with me; let the memory live itself.)

Swallowing Others.

(A somatic memory? A sensual memory? A muscle memory?)

Theory, Concept, Abstract:

Taking everybody into me; wanting to be everybody, anybody; swallowing others…hungry, empty.  Fill me up with pieces of you.  I am becoming myself, swallowing pieces of you, I take you into me, I become you; I am alien to myself because now I am you.

Where am I? Alien, empty, hungry.

Am I you?  Am I your lips, your legs, your gestures?

There is no invitation to join me, to join together; I swallow you and you will never know; I take you without permission, without invitation.

A ritual of Becoming?  A Cannibal?

(Salvaging my memory, a psychological resurrection, a psychic re-imaging of myself…wow am I still thinking about me?)

(“Writing as an ethnographer from memory: the frailty of excavating the memory”-Gabriele Schwab)

(How to work with a fleeting glimpse of the memory.  I look back, trying to remember or trying not to forget.  How long did this last; seems like it lasted for years.)

A self-cannibalism; I must eat another in order to become a full human being; a primitive desire to become the Other.  “The libidinal wish to suck and incorporate was combined with the destructive aim of scooping out and emptying the object.”  “Oral-Sadism (second phase): the incorporation of the object and its characteristics, identification with it, and, at the same time, greed and destructiveness.”[1]

Innate Destructive Instincts?  Lack of self-confidence?  Overabundance of the ego?

Three stories, one brown, dim hallway: it’s third grade.  Thoughts.  Proust.

Jesse:

There I stood next to my locker, staring down the dim, brown hallway.  I’m sure it smelled like crayons and hot lunch.  She was approaching, and I was ready.  I knew what to do, had time to wait until she came closer.  Her long, elegant dancer legs, her beautiful curling eyelashes, her perfectly shaped lips and teeth, I must leave enough time to get both the head and the legs.

(I don’t understand how time and distanced was measured in this act of swallowing, but it seems to be important.)

If she was walking past me, this could be a little easier.  Wait, I’m sure I already have her legs.  I must have taken them in a long time ago. [She is about ten feet away.]  Just to be safe…I focus in on the legs…Gulp, quickly look up…breathe, squeeze the sides of my tongue.  This second swallow more difficult, my body desperately attempting to produce enough saliva.  I focus on the face…dry Gulp…phew!  I got it.  My throat contracts, expands, settles back to its resting place.  I almost missed it.  Jesse speaks to me, “Katie, do you want to come play after school…go find some more of those baby frogs for the bathtub.”  I answer, “Okay!”.  If she would have said my name one second earlier…

(What is it about naming and timing?  It seems like once she engages me by my name, interpolates “Katie” [my nickname], the unconscious desire is snuffed out.  It vanishes without recognition.)

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, from the volume Swans Way:

"And there was another day on which she said to me: "You know, you may call me 'Gilberte'; in any case I'm gong to call you by your first name. It's too silly not to." Yet she continued for a while to address me by the more formal 'vous,' and, when I drew her attention to this, smiled, and composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put into the grammar books of foreign languages with no other object than to teach us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name. And when I recalled, later, what I had felt at the time, I could distinguish the impression of having been held, for a moment, in her mouth, myself, naked, without, any longer, any of the social qualifications which belonged equally to her other companions and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips - by the effort that she made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special value - had the air of stripping, of divesting me, as one peels the skin from a fruit which one is going to put only the pulp into one's mouth, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly, not without testifying to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt, accompanying itself with a smile." (390, Volume 1).

(Proust recalls an event from childhood where he felt, in a way, swallowed; yet, when swallowed, he was naked.  The social and historical layers that projected outward on the world were peeled away from his person, and he was stripped of what, externally, made him what he was.  The nudity he felt as he entered her mouth was described as a kind of juicy, raw essence, which brought him pleasure, even gratitude.  I wonder if Jesse ever felt any unconscious pleasure in me swallowing her.  Also, in the process of proper naming that is stripped away in Proust, I can see something similar happening in the timing and distance necessary in swallowing Jesse.  Once language and thought enters, and the exchange is no longer purely instinctual, the pleasure of taking one into oneself is much more difficult, if not impossible.  Reminder: I am giving language to a memory that was itself a more unconscious activity.)

Chris:

He came out of his classroom; I stood far enough away so that he would not notice me.  God I was so in love with him.  I adored him like reese’s pieces and popcorn at the movies.  Even the thought of him made me anxious, yet stirred an insatiable longing.

He walks across the hallway…Gulp…Gulp.  I swallow him twice before he ever makes it over to the water fountain.  He dips his mouth under the stream of water.

I’ve got to get over there before anyone else; otherwise, it’s gone.  I’ll lose it.  How many more chances will I have like this one?  But he can’t see me run over there.

As soon as he turns back towards his classroom, I look around to see if anyone will block my way.  I quickly dash over to the fountain.  Now I have it all to myself.  I can take it in slowly.  It’s all mine and no one else’s.  I bend down, all the excitement and pleasure running through my body.  I turn the water on and suck in the stream; I take him into me.

(This was the most physical experience I can remember in relation to me swallowing others.  Perhaps that is why it is still so vivid.  It almost feels something akin to a muscle memory.  I remember thinking Chris and I had basically kissed at that moment.)

Melanie Magrel:

I want Melanie’s dimples and Dana’s hair.  They walk in a single file line towards the hallway’s back exit; it’s recess time.  We are still waiting in the doorway of our classroom.   I see Melanie and Dana approaching, Melanie in front of Dana (Magrel before Mastandrea). 

(Why is it that I need the proper names to retrieve and articulate the memory?  Is this the result of adulthood and language?  Am I so submerged in proper naming and language that it is impossible to think without it?)

I have to wait just a few seconds longer until they are close enough.  Melanie is smiling, as she always did, her dimples deeply impressed into her chubby cheeks…Gulp…breathe, tighten my teeth, hurry Dana is right behind her (my swallow reflex giving me a hard time due to the anxiety of missing her, knowing this would not be an easy task)…Gulp… Oh no!  Dana has already passed, I was too late, I swallowed Allissa Perry…not Allissa!  She is so big.  She is the strongest kid in third grade, and she has big boobs already!  I cannot afford to get any bigger myself; I’m already so muscular from gymnastics.  I am worried, threatened, anxious.  I need to immediately find smaller arms, smaller legs, smaller breasts!...Gulp…Christy Negeri’s legs, not the best but better than Allissa’s.  I’m distressed.  I just know now that I will really need to concentrate on finding the skinniest, little bodies to counter the large, muscular body that is now in me! 

Here comes the next line of children, Mrs. Cup’s class, Jegima Brown leads the pack.  She is even bigger than Allissa.  She’s even as tall as the teachers!  And, she is black; the only black kid in the entire school.  Good thing I did not accidentally swallow her.  I wouldn’t know how to resolve that one.

White empty square; centrally, normatively squared

National, central square

Normative, white, empty…my hometown.

---

[1] Rabin, Jean-Francois. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.  Enotes.com Dec 2 (2011) www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/oral-sadistic-stage

Octopus Journal welcomes creative submissions of any variety including essays, artwork, photography, and short films.  Please contact us if you have a piece you would like to share.

Imaging and Imagining the Neoliberal: Martha Stewart's Entertaining

by Anna Kryczka, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

Throughout Catherine Liu’s seminar, I found myself consistently interested in tracing a publications history of the 1980s. So much of what has come to be the canon of critical or postmodern theory was either translated or published during this decade. From Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1000 Plateaus in 1987 to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in 1984 to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto of 1985 and many more. These texts and numerous others attempt to assess that state of theory, culture, and resistance in the decades since 1968. Rather than recapitulate the reception of these texts, I will examine yet another touchstone publication of the 1980s, one that speaks to the diverse themes and tendencies delineated in those academic publications: Martha Stewart’s debut book, Entertaining of 1982.  

Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982)Entertaining offers a luxurious vision of late capitalist, do-it-yourself, domestic display.  This oversized and lavishly illustrated book contains anecdotes, recipes, and instructions for events such as a “Midnight Omelet Party for Thirty” or a “Russian Buffet for Twenty–four.”  These opulent propositions for domestic entertainment and leisure activities fill this three hundred page aspirational and pseudo-instructional tome. The interplay of text and image, anecdote and recipe enact a form of imaginary class consolidation and aggregate an appropriate visual vocabulary around an ideal form of elite domestic display. Through a scale of overabundance and the re-enchantment of material culture, Stewart conquers the domestic with an elite bricolage, thick with neoliberal “values,” such as self-sufficiency, ceaseless work, and self-expressivity. 
In the introduction to Entertaining she details the transformation of her self-sufficient home into her nascent corporate headquarters.  She writes: “My own kitchen has grown wild with detail. I think it is very beautiful because it is expressive. The other rooms in the farmhouse are ordered and formal, with few truly comfortable places to sit down—for, in fact, we don’t sit down very much.” Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1980)Stewart’s embrace of gratuitous elite display is matched by her inflated and demonstrative work ethic. Further, her assertion that her kitchen is “expressive” relates to discourses of personalization and “Martha Stewart” individualism and neo-Emersonian perfectionism reiterated throughout the book.

While Stewart does not explicitly condemn or even hail progressive modernist design or food cultures, her willful anachronism and promotion of individualism, cultivation, and self-sufficiency can be seen in some ways as a rejection of the rhetoric of access to modernity and efficiency through mass consumption. The notion that all Americans can buy good taste or that good taste can be mass produced is the tacit target of Stewart’s rusticated and antiquated mode of domestic display. By circumventing this rhetoric of industrially or mass produced taste, expertise, access, and leveling, Stewart espouses the primacy of self-sufficiency, distinction, and cultivation over the promotion of good living through good citizenship, conformity, and consumption.

Throughout Entertaining, Stewart also works hard to differentiate her own recommendations for throwing the perfect social engagement from the long history of etiquette and the tight, top-down regulation of special events. Her brand of elite bricolage smoothly sutures together a highly selective family history, a résumé-like account of her various high end catering feats, all on a luxuriant scale, with recourse to homespun expertise, appeals to modesty, and a highly attuned form of spatial production. These aspects are stitched together and evened out by the overall thematic of style and through her consistent presence throughout the images that illustrate the book. Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982)Indeed, Stewart’s home, house wares, food arrangements or body populate every page of the book. Further, the spatial proximity of the nonspecific “Oriental” cocktail party, a splash of Victorian whimsy, the “Russian” Banquet, the ahistorical “Country” style produces, through pastiche, a non-hierarchical form of stylistic pluralism. Stewart obliterates difference across culture and history for the sake of class distinction and transgressive deviation from fussy traditions. Further, Stewart’s dismissal of enervating or stifling traditions associated with etiquette manuals works to position her intervention into the advice world as well-versed in past thought, permissive, and anti-authoritarian.

Stewart’s form of opulent, home entertaining espouses a kind of self-made expertise derived from endless labor that banishes drudgery because of its “higher calling” to Emersonian self-sufficiency.  Stewart tells her own story of self-overcoming from her humble family background to her entrepreneurial development, as a marker of her own embodiment of self-reliance.  Through the compression of time and space accomplished through the elision of difference between labor and leisure public and private, Stewart’s home is offered as a microcosm of the greater neoliberal imaginary. The renovated farmhouse, transformed from abandoned agricultural relic into self-styled hybrid working and living space, manifests Stewart’s self-transformation. Stewart, too, utilizes this language of growth and personalization and uses the event and the home as metonymic stand-ins or signifiers for the self. The everyday activities of cooking and household management find their extreme and fantastic form in Stewart’s banquets and dinners. These instances of domestic hyperbole are packaged as expressive emblems of the self, while also serving as markers of class distinction and, therefore, mastery of emergent neoliberal subject positions. Stewart’s book, published in 1982, was well positioned as a manual for a newly minted financial elite eager for the appearance of cultural fluency.

Indeed, Stewart’s homestead and vision of entertaining seems to cobble together a diversity of pasts—agricultural, geographic, economic, literary, personal, and historical—made manifest through and for decoration and display.Martha Stewart's Entertaining (1982) Stewart’s practice is both spatial and fiscal; she fills her home space with this ahistorical, elite bricolage through a foreclosure of separable spheres of public and private and the elision of labor and leisure for the purposes of developing her domestic empire. Stewart’s fabricated rituals and “tactical” labors manifest through the colonization of domestic space and time with form of labor that is at once ordinary, performative, and entrepreneurial. Stewart works to codify an elite eclecticism, stemming from her proposition of “Martha Stewart individualism” as a new or invented domestic tradition. Stewart turns away from novel or technocratic solutions with regard to domestic labor and promotes performative individualism, care, and craft as the route to better living.

In closing, Martha Stewart’s wholesale revolution of the domestic advice industry traces back to this early 80s moment, when she so skillfully harnessed and met the cultural capital needs of a newly configured financial elite. Stewart was well prepared for the eventual fall of the hyperactive market activities that produced this intended elite audience. In 1987, the same year the massive stock market crash shocked the finance world with the largest single day drop, Stewart cut a deal with Kmart to carry a line of affordable house wares.  Since then, her entrepreneurial DIY ethos has become fairly ubiquitous, from Stewart’s own multi-media, multi-platform, and multi-product domestic empire to online marketplaces such as Etsy. The politics of entrepreneurial domestic labor and craft production would make for a fascinating conference in itself. Further, Stewart’s home-based enterprise anticipates the ubiquity of the home-office or the “work from home” freelance labor model. Her spatial and entrepreneurial practices inflect contemporary understandings of work and leisure—in and out of the domestic context. Stewart’s eventual imprisonment for insider trading has not tempered the popularity of her myriad domestic products and musings. Her role as a corporate scapegoat, her time in prison, and her post-incarceration resurgence together form a fascinating cycle of entrepreneurial bust, reform, and renewal.

Read more from this series...