« is there a possibility that laundry can be redeemed as an art, a cultural form? if there is an aesthetic of cookery, can there be an aesthetic of the care and cleaning of clothing! »

aritha van herk, “invisibled laundry,” signs 27(3), 2002

Is there a possibility that laundry can be redeemed as an art, a cultural form? If there is an aesthetic of cookery, can there be an aesthetic of the care and cleaning of clothing! Certainly, laundering metonymizes an inherent pleasure in comfort, cleanliness as declared good, frequently emblematic of health or wealth or sexual continence. Nothing is so charming as the well-scrubbed child dressed in clean clothes, a physical embodiment of innocence and hope. But the conjunction between theoretical and practical activity does not fit well with the work's metaphorical import.Yes, there is beauty observable in the "random ballet" (Busch 1999, 69) of the clothesline, but can that beauty inscribe the dead weight of tired arms lifting and pegging dozens of wet sheets?Laundry persists as a metaphor for secrets, and tied to its degenerate reputation is laundry's implicit association with the erotic. Of course, because laundry deals with the most private and suggestive articles of apparel, it rubs elbows with fetishism. Further, the physical situation of women washing has traditionally been seen as a site of opportunity (Odys-seus again!): "Wherever women were found in isolation, there was the potential for rendezvous. Throughout history, the place where laundry gets done-be it by the creek or in a freestanding shed-has been the province of a courtship" (Busch 1999, 62). And so, doing the laundry came to be associated with sexual experimentation and freedom. "Typical meeting places for women alone, like public laundries and spinning rooms, were feared to give rise to slander and intrigue and secret liaisons" (Warner 1994, 35). In the laundry, stories were produced and reproduced. This space, then, can be read as imaginatively dangerous, breeding a miasma of fictional and sexual exhalations. In contemporary terms, too, the laundromat (Margaret Atwood's novel The Edible Woman [1969], the film My Beautiful Laudrette [1985]) becomes a safe place for cruising: "just by glancing at a woman's wash, [a man] could discern the relevant facts of her life" (Busch 1999, 63).