Household Words: Bloomers, Sucker, Bombshell, Scab, Nigger, CyberLooking in detail at words that “treat people as things, and things as people, and do so at that strange space where joking, ridiculing, demeaning, oppressing, resisting, and regretting converge,” Household Words is a study of how certain words act as indices of political and social change, perpetuating anxieties and prejudices even as those ways of thinking have been seemingly resolved or overcome by history. Specifically, Stephanie A. Smith examines six words—bloomer, sucker, bombshell, scab, nigger, and cyber—and explores how these words with their contemporary “universal” meaning appeal to a dangerous idea about what it means to be human, an idea that denies our history of conflict. She traces “bombshell” from Marilyn Monroe through women’s liberation and the sexual revolution to Monica Lewinsky, “scab” from blemish to strikebreaker, “sucker” from lollipop to the routinely cheated. Exposing the ambiguities in each of the words, Smith reveals that our language is communal and cutting, democratic and discriminatory, social and psychological. Stephanie A. Smith is associate professor of English at the University of Florida and the author of Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature as well as three novels. |
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Household Words: Bloomers, Sucker, Bombshell, Scab, Nigger, Cyber Stephanie Ann Smith No preview available - 2006 |
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altered Amelia Bloomer Amelia Jenks Bloomer American argue argument became Billy Budd blood bloodsucker Bloomer Costume Bloomerites body bomb bombshell called capital Carrie's claim cloning clothes common sense concept conflict course critical cultural cybersex cyborg debate desire despite difference Donna Haraway Douglass Dreiser dress reform Elizabeth Cady Stanton ethnic example fact fashion female femininity feminist fiction film Fordism frivolous gender genetic girls Haraway Hollywood household words human Hurstwood identitarian identity ideological industrial intimacy Jacqueline Rose labor language Last Tycoon living logic Marilyn Monroe meaning middle-class Miller Monroe's narrative nation natural nigger nineteenth century notes novel pants person political popular Quentin race racial remains scab sexual signify Sister Carrie so-called social speak Stahr Stanton story sucker sucking suffragettes thing Timebends tion trousers truth twentieth century United universal vampire wear Whitman woman women word bloomers wore writes wrote