The Master’s Tools,or,Tearing Down the Goat House From Within

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House: Audre Lorde ¹

The First House

We all know the story of the First House.

The people were Wanderers, always in search of food. They traveled in groups, family groups. They slept around the fire in skins or tents. Maybe they had stable sexual partnerships, maybe not. Probably not. Paternity was probably a loose concept.

After a time, the people settled down. They started to grow crops, to domesticate animals. But the goats kept running away, so they kept them tied up. Then the goats ate through the rope, so the people built a big box of stone, or dried mud, or wood, to keep the goats safe.

When some of the women tried to run away from the men (why they wanted to leave does not matter, maybe one of them wanted to run off with a young lover and start a new group), they were locked in the goat-house, for a few hours at first, but they just tried to run away again.

In any case, the men soon found this situation was convenient and started to keep them and other unruly women locked up all the time, except for work and sex.

But the goat-house soon became too small, and the men soon realized they needed to keep the children locked up with the women, so they built a new house just for the women, a house they could visit whenever they wanted sex and a house where the women could do their work. Maybe this was communal at first, but soon each man who was a MAN built his own house to keep his own women and his own children and his own goats available for his use.

So the first house was a brothel.

And the first brothel was a prison.

And the first prison was a goat-shed.

A few months ago, when Olivier Vallerand, the guest editor of this special issue, asked me to write an invited perspective for the Journal of Interior Design, I thought it would be a fairly easy assignment. After all, perspective pieces have kind of become my specialty—I’m better at intuiting unseen angles and connections than at doing the hard work of the rigorous academic—and my work on queer theorizations of architecture (and of the interior) should, or so I thought, hold me in good stead on this topic.

However, when I sat down in front of my computer to actually think about what I would write, to sketch out what my perspective would be, I realized that the task is actually quite difficult. The question raised by Olivier in this issue is, of course, a complex and multifaceted one as well as one that is core to the discipline—and the issues faced by women in the world of interior design are surely different from those of people of color, or indeed of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) people. How can I develop a perspective that holds within it the experience of all three of these groups, let alone the subgroup and intersectionalities they imply?

And of course, my own perspective, my own positionality, is suspect from the beginning, and not only because of the implication of perspective as a technique in the development of the (modern, western, scientific, colonial, capitalist, racist) world. I write from the perspective of a certain amount of privilege, as a university professor, as a White male of a certain age, as a descendant of settlers, and as a native speaker of English. As a gay male, true, but a gay male for whom my gayness has never, or very rarely, impinged on my privilege and indeed, at critical moments, has heightened it.

Still, the situation described in the call for articles for this issue is serious enough to respond. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but the broad strokes are known to all of us, at least anecdotally: the industry is overrepresented by women, in the simple sense that the percentage of women working as interior designers is (much) higher than the percentage of women in the general population, and by LGBTQ or Questioning, and Two-Spirit (LGBTQ2S+) people, or rather by gay men—I could find little evidence for the presence of other segments of this catchall term, and no statistics that I am aware of. Meanwhile, the industry is underrepresented by people of color, particularly by individuals who self-identify as Black or Indigenous. And of course, by men. As the workplace website foyr.com puts the question of gender in relation to the interior design profession, seemingly without a hint of irony.

It may come as a natural expectation that 9 out of 10 individuals in interior design careers are women. Color palettes and decorations are inclined to femininity thus, it is normal to be a female dominant field. ²

On the other hand, in 2020, the website riluxa.com asked the question: “69% of interior designers are women. So why do men still take so much of the credit?” ³ The writer points out that a large majority of the winners of interior design awards were men. Other studies have shown that male interior designers earn more than their female colleagues.

The situation in the schools hardly seems better. In my own school, we have some statistics about our student body: 87% female, 7.5% LGBTQ+ (lower than the percentage of students self-reporting in this category at the university as a whole), 2.4% Black people (against 7% in the university as a whole), 0.75% First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, and shockingly (to me at least) 6.72% persons with disabilities, against a reported 20% in the community—despite the clear and evident ways in which interior design affects people with disabilities.

How did we get to this position? A better historian would doubtlessly trace the disciplinary or professional histories of women, LGBTQ people, and people of color over the past century or two, seeking to untangle the forces that have brought us here; there are doubtless several great articles of that type in this journal. ⁴ For my own part, I want to preface this good work with a speculative origin story.

The Violence of the Line

There is hardly a more primordial action for a designer than the drawing of a line—the representation of the construction of a wall. Drawing a line on a piece of paper, like the construction of a wall in a field, changes that paper from pure surface into a project. The line is a projection of myself into the project, a splitting of myself. It is also a promise, first of all a promise of more lines, a promise of a fully worked out concept, of a construction of stone and concrete and wood and glass, of a place in which one can live, of a new world in the process of becoming, and a new world in which I am already present by means of the projection and splitting of self already mentioned. The line also makes claims: the claim, first of all, to the right to draw the line (to build the wall). It makes a claim of technique, a claim that I have the knowledge and power needed to draw that line, and the ability to understand it not just as a random mark, but as a line, that is, as a mark with meaning. By drawing the line, I make the claim that it is my mark to make, my wall to build; this is a claim of power, of standing. And it makes a claim of ownership, that I can make that mark, on that paper (that wall, in that field).

The line, the first line on a piece of paper, also has other effects and does other things: it claims the paper, stains it, and marks it; if the line is drawn too hard, it can tear it; and crucially, it divides the paper, stratifies the paper, and organizes the paper. The wall turns the ground into a site.

None of these promises, claims, and effects come without violence. Think of the violence I do to a piece of paper when I draw a line on it, or the violence done to millions of creatures by the erection of a wall. But isn’t the act of division, this splitting and bifurcation, the real fundamental violence of the line? The essential property of the line, of the wall, is this characteristic of classification through division, of dividing A from B, left from right, gay from straight, and male from female. Walls both represent and create binary divisions of the world. In other words, the fundamental binaries of which our conceptual world is fabricated, with which we ceaselessly work to ground ourselves in our groundless void, binaries as primary as me|you, false|true, good|evil, left|right, male|female, nature|artifice, and human|inhuman are all architectural operations, derived from the violence of drawing the line.

If the primary mechanism of the line in architecture is the cut, the division, and the imposition of the architectural binary, the second mechanism is that of the noose, the surround, the enclosure, the line that turns back on itself, the deadly line of the garotte, and also of the snare. This is the invention of the interior and is probably the most consequential of all architectural operations. This line of enclosure is the wall of the prison, of the fortress, and of the medieval city, but also the exterior wall of every house, and as such, it creates a particular and very special form of the architectural binary: inside|outside. The enclosure marks not simply a division but also more radically a separation, marking and demarcating groups, objects, people, and land: us|them, mine|yours, and in|out. This is the line of limits that produces, as an effect, individual entities, both objects and subjects. The invention of the interior brings with it all of the promises, claims, and effects of the simple line, but in addition turns the world into discrete pieces, into property, and marks an initiating theft, the theft of property.

The Masters’ Tools

Interiority, or interiorization, has been a primary tool of all forms of subjection and dominance. Consider for a moment the family, with its concomitant domestication of women, ownership of children, and expulsion of the queer; the family, as we understand it, is nothing more or less than the construction of an interior that turns human beings into property—or, in the case of the queer, into waste. Let us not forget, as Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici point out, the common Latin root of domus and dominus, of domestication and domination. ⁵ Or consider the institution of slavery and its interiorizations: the interiors of the slave ships provide a concrete example of the interior-as-tool, while the more abstract interiorization and containment within the law of the enslaved body lays bare the power of this tool. Then there is the process of colonization, with its forts, its reserves for the enclosure of native populations, and its residential schools (as they are known in Canada)—these interiors as tools that, in conjunction with the interiority of colonial law and even the transformation of the land into property, produce a domestication and domination of a foreign land and peoples. And there is also that most powerful technology of domination, capitalism; the production of capitalist interiors (the factory, the schoolroom, the condominium, the prison) is among the basic mechanisms for the extraction of wealth and the reification of class inequality. Indeed, one might argue that a primary requirement for being understood as not just a productive member of society but as human in contemporary society is to have a home, that is, to control (and be limited by) an interior space. We could even add to this list of interior machines that great institution of modern domination and subjectification, the discipline of psychiatry, with its invention in the nineteenth century of that greatest fiction of modern interiors, the individual unified self.

The interior, in other words, is among the most powerful of the masters’ tools. It should be no surprise that subaltern groups, survivors (if only barely) of the great technologies of domination, should have complex and conflicted relationships with the discipline of interior design. We are seeing the results of complex, multi-generational, society-wide trauma.

From a certainly naïve perspective, we see traces of this today: commercial design serves to maintain and reinforce hierarchies and other relations of power in the workplace (consider, e.g., the exaggerated manner in which design is used in the television series Severance). Retail design supports capital in the most evident way by maximizing sales volumes, reinforcing once again what Alain Badiou calls “the pornographic era”—that is, a world in which the basic functional mechanisms of pornography (replacement of a real object of desire by its image, production of a population addicted to this imagery, and extraction of profit from the needs of the addicted) are extended to all aspects of society. ⁶ Healthcare design reinforces and clarifies medicine as an institutional presence in our lives, or rather over our lives, as Paul B. Preciado analyzes in his Testo Junkie. ⁷ Hospitality design anchors the development of the neocolonialism that is tourism (here I am reminded of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Platform, or for that matter the television show Ozark). And residential design is, well, always the design of the master’s house.

This analysis, of course, is far from subtle or rigorous and is patently unfair to the many people who are working hard to rethink what interior design might be in relation to structures of power and to equity-seeking communities. My intention here is to point out that interior design, as a discipline, as an industry, and as a profession, has a “wicked problem” on its hands, a major conundrum that does not easily lead to answers, a problem that is situated right at the root of its being: we know we need to demolish the master’s house—but the only tools we have are the ones that built the house. Not only interior design, mind you: this is a conundrum that is faced by pretty much all aspects of our contemporary society.

The professions, like interior design, are a cornerstone of the master’s house. The universities, and perhaps even more, the colleges, are another. Both of these cornerstones are highly resistant to change, but change is what is needed now, and radical change is needed if the situation addressed by this issue of this journal is to be taken on. The administrators, of course, want us to believe that we can solve the problems by a mix of targeted marketing, scholarships, and the addition of a few courses, but that is naïve if not, in fact, counterproductive. What we need to do as educators, I believe—this in the end is my perspective—is to turn our schools into the tools that will demolish the master’s house. We need to open up the cages of academic, disciplinary, and industry responsiveness so that we can free our students and ourselves to not just expose and expunge the effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, and all the other forms of domination that the interior can hold but to start to build from the ruins a new world. This means, I think, teaching fearlessly from our bodies more than from our minds, mobilizing the fire of anger that burns in our bellies.

Now is the time—our students are demanding it. We need to tear down the goat house.