Holding and Being Held: Handbags as Container Technologies

Abstract

This paper explores the handbag as a material and symbolic container technology. Deploying Zoë Sofia’s “Container Technologies” theory and the phenomenological work of Iris Marion Young, it analyzes the handbag in terms of both what and how it contains. The mobilities that the handbag facilitates are considered alongside how carrying such an object impedes bodily mobility. The handbag’s particularities as a container make it a portable domestic lifeworld—here called a microworld—and a way to take the indoors outdoors, a way to mediate private and public spheres. I consider ways that handbags are connected to feminine ways of being in space, in terms of both enabling and disabling, and their roles in pedagogies of femininity.