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On January 1, 2023, Rajiv Surendra posted a video: “How to Wash your Whites,” the first full video on his personal YouTube channel. This wasn’t his first video appearance, as he played mathlete Kevin Gnapoor in the 2004 film Mean Girls. Nor was it his first how-to video; he’d been appearing on HGTV’s DIY-channel, Handmade, on and off in a series called “Life with Rajiv” where he demonstrated both everyday tasks (like bed-making, where he prepares his compact New York apartment for his lover’s visit) and more elevated ones (like silver-polishing, where he showcases his collection of antique English ironstone). The January 2023 video, however, was the first of his tutorials to be fully crowd funded and independently produced. But while the videos began with task-based instruction, the queer Canadian actor moved quickly to include more explicit efforts toward a kind of self-cultivation. Videos titled “How to Spend Time with Loved Ones,” “How to Become a Positive Thinker,” “How to Walk,” and “How to Make Your Chores a Beautiful Experience” interspersed a stream of videos about ironing, cooking, winterizing beds, and reviving wicker. He yokes, like many domestic advisors, material and interior betterment, connecting the body, the home, and the mind in their instruction. Emblematic of this is his tutorial on building a healthy mind: at an antique desk, and in front of a backdrop of Chantilly lace curtains and peonies, Rajiv Surendra empties a drawer—in parallel to his mind, cluttered by homophobic parents and familial alcoholism—of its junk. The home, like media studies scholar Kristen Swenson (2023) writes of Marie Kondo’s empire of tidiness, is not metaphor for the subject’s health but part of the broader organism.
This paper uses the example of Rajiv Surendra’s domestic advice—an entry in a North American tradition that historians and cultural theorists have narrated as a deeply feminized form—to reframe the intimate work of home rules as less stably feminine than presumed and, in fact, as drawing on more masculine structures of prescription and authority (A. Douglas 1998; Leavitt 2002). In short, this paper asks, what different conceptions of masculinity, domesticity, and kinship become possible when we imagine domestic advice writing as not simply maternal and feminine but invested in systems of knowledge production that we might identify as masculine or masculinist in their underlying paradigms? How does Surendra’s recognizability as a domestic advisor—as a queer, unchaste, wealthy, Tamil man— both modulate and reinforce conclusions we have drawn about Americanization, racial formation, kinship, and gendered discipline through domestic advice writing?
The author forwards the comparative node of Lizzie Kander’s Settlement Cook Book (1904), a charity cookbook developed by the students and teachers of the Milwaukee Settlement House, to examine the ways granular instruction in daily living through a gentle, authoritative voice promises the foreclosure of failure’s possibility and makes possible new structures of kinship in the displacements of, for both Kander and Surendra, diaspora and, for Surendra in particular, queerness. Through its practices of translating, testing, and quantifying cultural practices of home into tutorials that stand alone in the absence of maternal examples, Kander’s book presented a new and didactic model of authority to the immigrant women who used it, providing what were to be foolproof pathways for domestic prosperity and good living (Rubel 2018). For Taste (2021), a reader and inheritor of a copy of the Settlement Cookbook described Kander’s tone as aunt-like, stern but familial in her promises of non-failure. Historian of science Lorraine Daston (2022) describes such artifacts as part of the history of modern instruction, as reducing art to rules to govern a social order.
Putting Surendra in conversation with Kander and, by extension, other domestic advisors frames a regendering of home advice’s precision. While Kander quanitifies a “pinch” and a “heap” in her collected recipes, Surendra teaches his viewers not just how to iron a shirt but also how to walk. While Kander teaches her students and readers how to be good homemakers and wives and Americans, Surendra, teaches people to think well and work hard and buy into a neoliberal economy of pleasure and home labor. These are domestic and even tender modes of authority and instruction, but they need not be localized, I argue, to feminine, or feminized, modes of speech.
The study of religion gives us conceptual tools and nodes of historical comparison to think about charisma, celebrity, and governance as ways of describing public pedagogies toward better living (Lofton 2011, Lucia 2014, Logan 2022). Work on domestic writing, though, remains committed to interpreting these cultural forms as maternal in nature, even as our disciplinary understanding of mastery and knowledge production considerably deepens. This paper represents an attempt to correct some of those entrenchments within the field as well as to offer existing literature on domesticity and the masculine muddier, more precise frames for understanding the two’s intersection.
Daston, Lorraine. Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2022.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
Dreilinger, Danielle. The Secret History of Home Economics. New York: Norton, 2022.
Gelber, Steven. “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing, and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity.” American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1997): 66-112.
Helen Zoe Veit, Helen Zoe. Modern Food Moral Food. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013.
Leavitt, Sarah. From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002.
Lofton, Kathryn. Consuming Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Logan, Dana. Awkward Rituals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Lucia, Amanda. “Guru Sex: Charisma, Proxemic Desire, and the Haptic Logics of the Guru-Disciple Relationship.” JAAR86, no. 4 (2018): 953-988.
Rubel, Nora. “ ‘You Can’t Make a Yankee out of Me that Way!’ The Settlement Cook Book and Culinary Pluralism in Progressive-Era America.” Dublin Gastronony Symposium, 2018.
Swenson, Kristin. “Marie Kondo and the Joy of Things: Affective Discourses of Housekeeping.” Cultural Critique 120 (2023): 30-42.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
This paper emplots the work of Rajiv Surendra, an emerging domestic advisor with a dedicated following, in the longer tradition of domestic advice. By locating his teaching in conversation with domestic advisors like Lizzie Kander of the Settlement Cook Book, the author seeks to reframe the intimate work of teaching homemaking as less stably feminine than presumed and more invested in masculinist structures of prescription and authority. In short, this paper asks, what different conceptions of masculinity, domesticity, and kinship become possible when we imagine domestic advice writing as not simply maternal and feminine but invested in systems of knowledge production that we might differently gender in their underlying paradigms? This paper argues that the Canadian actor-turned-influencer’s recognizability as a domestic advisor—and as a queer, unchaste, wealthy, Tamil man—both modulate and reinforce conclusions we have drawn about Americanization, racial formation, kinship, and gendered discipline through domestic advice writing.