Abstract
The Swedish domestic interior has been used as an extension of state authority and morale since the beginning of the 20th century. Chiefly, it acquired an explicit and unquestionable weight in the construction of the Swedish Social Democratic project in the 1930s. ‘Staged domesticities’ worked as 3D, mass media sites of application of the new techniques of sexual and spatial governance. The triad of architecture, design, and body politics defined and effectively produced a new heteronormativity that would become a global signifier of progress, health, and urbanity over the 20th century. The Swedish case is a very helpful way to underline the existing relationship between modern architecture and the production of gender. Domesticity emerges here as an architectural phenomenon with great biopolitical power: the power to model life, politics and sexuality, signalling the interscalar nexus that always existed between small-scale domestic realities and power relationships which give shape to the world.
Keywords: Domesticity, architecture, gender, Sweden, mass media
Topic: The domestic project as the heart of modernity: the single, one-off house and collective housing, from the Modern Movement to the 21st century
