In a land where “get off my lawn” has become a mantra of jokey crankiness, the American front door is the most intimate and personal of borders, the place where public encounters private — occasionally with disastrous results.
The American front door is a place where signs trumpet words of warning, where cameras monitor visitors in high definition, where intruders find an entry point. It is where only a hunk of wood or metal separates the innermost spaces of home from a world full of chaos.Both conceptions are real. They can and do exist together — usually peacefully but sometimes, particularly of late, contentiously.
“There is so much division in American society, so much polarization, so much animosity and so much fear,” says Bill Yousman, an associate professor of media studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. “The front door does in some ways embody all of that — as that last place that separates your internal domestic life with the life of the public.”The United States, more than many countries, has made private property a priority — a fetish, some would say.
“This is a space where we have to kind of choose whether we’re literally going to throw open the door or bar the door,” says Nicole Rudolph, an associate professor at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, who teaches a class called Domestic Politics: The Public Life of the Private Sphere.“I think we want to show our better selves to the world much of the time, so we open the door — cautiously,” Rudolph says. “But we are also sensitive to the risk that opening the door entails.
“We’ve made our homes prisons. Who are we keeping out? We’re keeping ourselves locked in. There’s so much focus on who’s coming to get you,” says Lori Brown, a professor of sociology, criminology and criminal justice at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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