(Home)work and the bedroom-study: Work, leisure and communication technology

"(Home)work and the Bedroom-Study: Work, Leisure and Communication Technology," investigates the myth of the bedroom as a space of sex and privacy and the disruption of the myth through the introduction of communication technology. This project examines the bedroom as a site of work, although it is commonly associated with modern notions of what constitutes the private sphere. Privacy has historically been reflected in the separation of home and work, the private and public spheres, respectively. However, as I argue, the bedroom has always been a space where the line between public and private is blurred. This research examines representations of the bedroom (and its co-evolution with the study/home office) to argue that the bedroom has always been a space of work within the system of capitalism. Within the home, the bedroom is a key site for this intersection of leisure and work. In examining the bedroom as a social space, this project reveals how representations in popular culture of the bedroom depict persistent and shifting American ideologies about family life, class, gender, and the relationship between work and leisure and potentially challenges them. Furthermore, this research reveals how the production and design of the hybrid bedroom-study have helped alter and consequently reveal transformations in the meaning of leisure and work life. That practices of the bedroom-study reveal how media and communication technologies have transformed social and labor relations within and outside the home by undoing spatial divisions between the sites of leisure (formerly coded as unproductive by disregarding unpaid labor) and sites of work/labor.;This research contributes to the interdisciplinary areas of cultural studies, communication and media studies by combining the social history of the bedroom and media studies to understand the influence of long-term social processes on the present and to determine connections between media, space, technological development, and structures of power. Specifically, this research examines the social organization of space as a site of ideological meaning, where markers of difference such as class and gender are contested, negotiated, and transformed, and the role of communication technologies in those processes.