Resumen de Figural materialism: renovating marriage through the american family home
This article attempts to revitalize figural study by putting the rhetorical tradition of tropology into conversation with feminist theories of figuration and proposing a new method called “figural materialism” that draws on rhetorical analysis of discursive figures as well as feminist theories addressing the political import of figurations. To illustrate this method, I provide a case study of the refiguration of marriage and the American family home and explore its implications for heteronormativity. The case study illustrates how figurations of the couple run through literary, visual, and spatial discourses in ways that colonize eroticism in the service of traditional social institutions, reinscribing gendered and classed subjectivities and constraining sexual agency.
