Rippling: towards untamed domesticity

Abstract

The paper proposes ‘rippling' as a practice of untamed domesticity that contests the hegemony of the essentialised model of modern nuclear family and its associated domesticity. The conceptualisation of ‘rippling' derives from a context of the dissolved household in contemporary rural China — they are families of China's 285 million floating population who have seen the absence of a middle generation. At the intersection of architecture and anthropology, and with Shigushan village in Wuhan as the primary site of fieldwork since 2015, the point of entry is spatial and ethnographic observations and documentations of everyday practice in and around ordinary self-built family houses. The material traces and empirical evidence manifest a constantly diffused distinction between the domestic and the public, enacted by the rural dissolved household. In this way, the practice of ‘rippling' defies the confinement and codification of domesticity. Importantly, ‘rippling' and ‘dissolving' are a temporary, transient state that has become part of a broader structure rather than an exception. Through inhabiting and altering a multiplicity of spatial, social, and political thresholds, an elastic form of association is enacted, through which the act of mediating between genders, generations, households, neighbours, and the village community is constantly framed, and even spreads to the city through ‘floating’. Spatially stretched from house to territory and temporally coordinated from daily to multi-year cycles, domesticity as such is untamed.