Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity - (Experiments/On the Political) by Clare Gallagher (Hardcover)

About the Book

Home is a word brimming with emotion, expectation and contradiction. It is where love and comfort are sought, yet it can also feel oppressive or unreachable.

Book Synopsis

Home is a word brimming with emotion, expectation and contradiction. It is where love and comfort are sought, yet it can also feel oppressive or unreachable. Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity unpacks the many dimensions of what it means to inhabit this space - physically, emotionally, and socially. Is home a sanctuary, a workplace, or a battleground for equality?
Far from a simple haven, home carries the weight of invisible labor, tension, and even danger. It is shaped by routines and rhythms, often dismissed as mundane or unproductive, yet requiring vast effort. Through engaging with these complexities, this book challenges the simplistic binaries that reduce home to a private, insignificant space.
By turning towards the discomfort produced by our encounters there with dirt, disorder, and ambiguity - aspects most associated with mothers and domestic work - we uncover how home embodies power dynamics and acts of resistance. Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity invites readers to rethink this deeply familiar yet elusive space, recognizing the hidden histories, emotions, and struggles that exist within its walls. Thoughtful and compelling, it sheds light on why home is never just a place, but a profound experience that both shapes us and is shaped by us.

Review Quotes

Clare Gallagher's book is both beautiful and dangerous, as books that shake up structures always are. This book stunningly dissects the expectations, attitudes and self-evident assumptions we have come to associate with the mental, physical and emotional work of the home. Gallagher's book is brilliant, not only because of its sharp analysis, which shows the big societal structures in everyday domestic practices, and challenges binary oppositions, but just because the extremely important topic: home.

Gallagher's work is a penetrating exploration of the domestic. The taxonomy, method, terminology and subject headings reflect a feminist, mother's eye of a well-practiced artist. She plays masterfully with subversion, in particular, the disruptive qualities of the literal and metaphorical lens.

This is a work of domestic divination. Using photography as a methodological instrument Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity takes us into a realm where chaos and dirt can reveal patterns of meaning, and pristine order can signal the deployment of power. Lyrical, politically astute, aesthetically profound, Clare Gallagher's book is always deeply humane. I will never look at a paper towel in the same way again.

About the Author

Clare Gallagher is artist, writer, and curator in Northern Ireland, and is senior lecturer in photography in the Belfast School of Art at Ulster University.