Comer, Krista2022-09-232022-11-012022-052022-04-20May 2022Culver, Annie. "A Feminist Ecology of the Suburbs." (2022) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113335">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113335</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113335Many critics of post-WWII American culture dismiss the suburbs for their conformity and banality. This project intervenes in commonly held beliefs about the suburbs by illuminating how these large, populous, and complex places both conform to and resist the set of tropes that exclusively subject them to critique. Much of the scorn that the suburb accumulates comes from the gendering of these domestic spaces and the feminized labor performed there. This dissertation places the suburbs front and center in a feminist ecological analysis. This method is a reading practice that promotes a concept of ecology that emphasizes the relations of place, drawing on feminist and bioregional environmental methods. “A Feminist Ecology of the Suburbs” analyzes a multi-media archive including canonical and genre novels, film, and television because the American pop culture imaginary generates the suburbs. Central to this analysis is the figure of the “ecological housewife” whose refiguring takes seriously the environmental commitments and knowledges, held largely by women and domestic laborers, already present in suburban places. Bringing together the fields of environmental studies, feminist theory, and suburban studies, this synthetic approach attends to the particularity of suburban places across several U.S. bioregions. This project intends to meet suburbanites where they are both geographically and politically to mobilize them towards a political project to mitigate the worst effects of living in a changed climate.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.SuburbsFeminismEnvironmentEcologyPost-45 LiteratureAmerican LiteratureEcocriticismThesis2022-09-23