A View from the Margin: Interior Design

About ten years ago, after nearly a decade of practice as an interior designer, I returned to school to work on a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary humanities. In my first semester, I was, perhaps, a bit over zealous and enrolled in a philosophy course whose subject was Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. I was intellectually rusty after being away from school for so long, and this class was very difficult. New jargon and concepts had sprung up since my last academic experience, and I found that I was hanging on the professor's every word just so I could understand. But I studied hard, read diligently, and I was doing well. I was required to do a presentation in class, so I met with the professor just to be sure I was on the right track. In that meeting, we quickly got into an extremely stimulating discussion of Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics, which was my topic. It was one of those animated discussions that every grad student and professor long for. I was elated that I was able to hold my own in the discussion, and perhaps because I could, the instructor paused in our conversation to ask about my background. In my description of myself, I mentioned that I was an interior designer and from that moment everything changed. My professor abruptly ended our previous conversation, and started asking for my advice about decorating her living room. Although I tried to get the conversation back on its previous track, I could not. Somewhat discouraged, I decided to leave and our interview ended, not with closing remarks on Nietzsche or my presentation, but with my professor commenting: "I have always admired you girls like my mother and sister who have the knack for picking colors." 1 Considering my instructor was both a woman and a feminist, I was incredulous that this conversation had taken such a turn. I had encountered many people in the past with preconceived ideas about me because of my identity as an interior designer, but I had never seen it shift so remarkably right in front of my eyes. The ability of the label "interior designer" to do that indicated to me that something very powerful was in play. The fact that my professor, who seemingly was sensitive to issues of sexism, could not recognize the same embedded in her own statement made me realize just how strong and obscured this power was. As a graduate student and later as a professor teaching interior design, I have long attempted to understand this phenomenon. From an investigation that is situated in both my personal experience It is important to note here that the same stereotypes assigned to women as interior designers are equally inscribed in stereotypes of gay men. The elision of the feminine, decoration, the interior, and the inferior was put firmly in place in the early modern movement not only by the anti-decorative invectives of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, but by a large societal discussion and concern about the issue referred to as "degeneration." At the turn of the century, legitimate scholars as well as pseudo-scientists from all fields theorized that the new conditions of modernity indicated that society was devolving or degenerating. The reason for this degeneration generally was recognized as the "feminization" of culture. In degeneration theory, the feminine represented the primitive, base, and erotic urges of society that had to be suppressed in order for society to evolve and progress rationally. All indications of the feminine, therefore, were perceived as inferior. The perception that gay men are "feminized" men links them automatically with the same inferiority assigned to both women and decoration. Like stereotypes of women and decoration, the stereotype of the gay man as decorator still is strongly inscribed in the public's perception and equally as undeconstructed. Since this article speaks mainly from my personal viewpoint and experiences as a woman, it will not deal specifically with issues of this stereotype, although it is equally important and relevant to this discussion. (See my article "Decoration as Modernism's Other: (Re)Reading the Texts of Early Modern Architecture and Design" in Cultural and Artistic Upheavals in Modem Europe: 1848-1945(Cummer Studies, Vol. 1, 1996) for a more complete discussion of the origins of these stereotypes).