Tecnologias do morar: domesticidades e desigualdades de raça, gênero e classe na revista de arquitetura A Casa (1923-1952)

Abstract

The present thesis investigates the influence of the magazine “A Casa”, a specialized publication in residential architecture in Brazil, on the production of structural inequalities in the organization of society through domestic life. Developed from the corpus provided by the Brazilian Digital Periodicals Library, this study examines how the magazine played a significant role in constructing identities and subjectivities related to dwelling during its circulation period between 1923 and 1952. Employing an intersectional approach, I consider how different social dimensions —especially race, gender, and class —influence the individual and collective experiences of the subjects portrayed in the publication. In this thesis, “A Casa” is treated as a technological artifact that produced discourses and practices related to the construction, decoration, and organization of the home. I observe how these practices are imbued with cultural conceptions of race, gender, and class, contributing to the production of structural inequalities based on these social markers. Analyzing the periodicals, I emphasize how the magazine endowed discursive strategies related to the modernization of domestic space and the promotion of an ideal of “good taste”. In this context, the domestic space emerges as a place of tension between different subjects and social actors vying for representations of power. Among the main objectives of the thesis is the identification and understanding of the strategies employed by the magazine to materialize inequalities among subjects, which I term “technologies of dwelling”. This concept aims to provide cohesion and coherence to the organization of society taking the domestic space as its breeding ground. In the case of “A Casa”, the technologies of dwelling operate matrices of intelligibility structured on binary oppositions such as public/private, male/female, and employers/domestic workers., The magazine constructs discourses that reinforce and naturalize social inequalities, associating domestic space with feminine activities and establishing a hierarchy of labor between architects/decorators, housewives, and, mostly black female, domestic workers. These representations also marginalize and stereotype the presence of black women in domestic spaces. I also explore how the journal employs the female figure as an aesthetic parameter for the equivalence between the body and the domestic object, reinforcing the fusion between the idealized slender, white and young female body and the beautification of the home. I highlight the role of technologies of dwelling in producing subjects who shape their ways of inhabiting and existing in the world in mediation with social markers of inequality. I conclude that these technologies are informed by scientific precepts that were considered neutral and universal in their time but, in reality, perpetuate asymmetries of race, gender, and class. Through this analysis, the contribution of this study to understanding “A Casa” as a historical agent is justified, thus enriching the comprehension of the production of social differences within the domestic space through mediation with technology and the discourses propagated by the media.