Theorising the everyday

This article reflects on the gender politics integral to theories and cultural histories of the everyday in the contemporary Humanities and (to a lesser extent) Social Sciences. Since the 1990s feminist scholars have observed the gender bias integral to many canonical twentieth-century theories of the everyday. In spite of these observations, I suggest that much everyday life theory and recent studies that map a cultural and intellectual history of the everyday continue to reflect this gender bias. I suggest that one possible reason for this is women's historical exclusion from the realm of theoretical discourse broadly conceived, and propose that in order to trace alternative critiques and histories of the everyday feminist scholars need to look to alternative modes of cultural and discursive production - for example, literature, the essay and art - through which to trace implicit and explicit analyses of the everyday by women. The second part of the article turns to the work of the twentieth-century photographer Dorothea Lange as a case in point. While Lange's work has never been discussed in studies of the everyday, the concept underpins her practice and her work offers some suggestive points of comparison to approaches to the everyday both in Lange's time and in contemporary theory. Focusing on her little-known essays 'Documentary Photography' and 'Photographing the Familiar' and some of her images of rural California during the Depression years, I examine her account of the role of the 'familiar' and everyday to the social, aesthetic and ethical potential of documentary photography as a medium at the time.