Kill 'em dead! : the ordinary practices of pest control in the home

As previous research has shown in relation to practices of cleaning and germ management, popular marketing activities have kept the pest threat at the forefront of domestic concern. The ‘iceberg’ threat is perhaps the most insidious and effective of these representations, equating individual pest incursions with vast numbers of hidden pests and the disintegration of home. In these depictions the presence of one insect pest signifies these hordes and highlights the limitations of human control over home and the easy permeability of home’s borders. In this context pests are creatures that unstitch home, highlighting the constructed and always insecure nature of boundaries between home and its dangerous and disordered outside. More than this, they point to home’s enormous underbelly – the liminal spaces that accommodate pest species within home and allow these animals to feed off the home itself. Pests represent the inadequacies of homemaking and cleaning activity, signifying the presence of dirt within the domestic, including the dirtiness of the human itself. Killing practices thus become an essential component of homemaking, a tension that is managed through reference to the scientific and modern nature of pest removal processes and through practices that separate human from pest by facilitating disembodied and detached killings. The gender politics of pest removal advertising are striking. Advertisements are targeted at women and construct two key subject positions: the woman as fearful and the woman as warrior. Women’s role as homemaker is activated through each of these positions which place responsibility for pest management and home protection in the hands of the mother. The masculine subject position has not been discussed in this paper, but is significant in positioning the male figure in three key roles. First, the masculine subject position is tied to DIY home construction: men are depicted as fathers and husbands who have the responsibility to choose construction products that are pest resistant to ensure a solid and stable home environment. Second, men are positioned as expert through a range of advertisements: they are the scientist, professional pest controller and public health authority rolled into one who warn women about the risks that pests afford within home. Third, and 148 perhaps most interestingly, pests themselves are gendered as male. Advertisements refer to pests using male pronouns such as ‘him’ and ‘he’ (see for example Figure 2) and, as shown in Figure 4 even as a ‘guy’. The threat to home is a masculine one. This connects with broader discourses of home as a domestic and feminine space that is separate from the outside and ‘public’ spaces, which are associated with men and masculinity. The pest as male offers an enhanced threat to the domestic, a threat that husbands and fathers must combat through the provision of a solid and stable home and that women as mothers and wives must combat through ongoing and vigilant homemaking. In this way pest advertising connects with broader discourses of home and homemaking, perhaps underpinning the efficacy of these advertisements and the importance of pest control within everyday understandings of home.