The net curtain in the uncanny home

I’ve been busy writing recently and am pleased to say that Textile: the journal of cloth and culture has published another one of my papers. This one is entitled ‘The domestic veil: the net curtain in the uncanny home’ and is based on part of my PhD research. Basically it suggests that the net curtain embodies Freud’s description of the uncanny as the point of slippage between the homely and the unhomely because it lies on the borders of the home. The net curtain can be seen as a delicate furnishing as well as a barrier to the outside world and is thus used to reconsider women's equivocal experience of home as sanctuary and prison, based on tropes from Victorian gothic novels, but with contemporary parallels. Many Victorian gothic novels critiqued the idea of women being conflated with their homes and this research builds on that idea. The research is practice-based so the textile works are as important as the text and the paper includes some lovely images of them. Pins and needles pierce the curtain to mark the passing of time, referencing a cell-bound prisoner. Dust, memories and conversations are trapped within its sieve-like net. Experiences of claustrophobia, confinement and coercion are therefore revealed through the domestic veil of the net curtain. 

It was an interesting exercise trying to isolate a part of my research and rewrite it in a shorter form. However now I’ve done it I can see that there are other parts of the research that could be written up as papers so there could be more to work on. That won’t be for a while though as I’m currently writing a paper about some net curtains I’ve been researching in Nottingham. If you’re interested in reading ‘The domestic veil’ there are 50 free copies available via the following link https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/V3RRVTTY5Y9P6YJW73YM/full?target=10.1080/14759756.2019.1676617