Rajiv Surendra's Home Rules: Gender and the Media Culture of Domestic Advice, Reconsidered

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.