Time,Space, and Memories

ABSTRACT

This article traces the ways that gendered and generational family practices were remembered across time in the context of working-class homes in Victorian Britain. Two everyday domestic objects—the father's chair and the grandfather clock—are examined and analyzed, drawing on John Gillis' work on ritualized family spaces and contested notions of time (Gillis 1996). Both these objects resonate with the contested use of domestic space and the layered meanings of family time in working-class lives, not least because both are often remembered in autobiographical accounts of home and family. The special place of the father's chair highlighted the feminizing of the home and accompanying development of rituals to welcome and ensconce the father in his domestic domain each day. The sound of clocks underpinned the bringing together of industrial time, separating leisure and work for those at school or employment away from home, and at the same time conveying the cyclical nature of family life and its everyday routines from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation. Memories of chairs and clocks embedded in autobiographies offer important evidence about the images, sounds, and sensory experiences that resonated most powerfully when remembering and composing the hierarchies and tensions of working-class family life.     

At Home with Media Technology

ABSTRACT

People's engagement with media devices in the domestic sphere varies greatly, as do the decisions they make regarding when, where, and how the devices are utilized. How do we organize our houses for media consumption and/or creation? How do our houses' spatial configurations affect our media consumption and habits? How does time play a role in media engagement? These questions directly relate to design—our homes are both spatially and temporally designed—by us, and for us. The design issues of creating and maintaining a “home” are compounded by the various media devices we use—telephone, TV, stereo, Internet-enabled computer, and so on. We not only “design” how we use these devices, but where and when they are used. In this context, media devices are not passive objects, but rather through our engagement with them, they alter domestic space/time, and may ultimately challenge how we understand and define domesticity. Media technology simultaneously constructs new, and interrupts existing, domestic territories. We will explore the reciprocal impact of domestic space/time and media technology, with a view to revealing the ways in which this nexus becomes a question of design.     

Queering the Home

Abstract

In the West, the private sphere of the home is traditionally associated with the heterosexual nuclear family. Through social, cultural, and legal processes, the heterosexual bond has been constructed as central to the family home. Despite these dominant discourses, the home is also a space in which heteronormativity (or the unacknowledged assumption that heterosexuality is the natural and normal form of sexuality) may be subverted. This article considers how the domestic lives of lesbian and gay couples in England challenge the heteronormativity prevalent in dominant discourses of the home. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbians and gay men, the article continues to extend and build on the existing literature on queer domesticity by focusing on how lesbian and gay couples divide and understand domestic labor in their homes. The perceived normativity of coupled domesticity and childrearing means that on the one hand the lesbian and gay participants in this study could be seen to fit in with normative ideals of domestic family life. On the other hand, I show how these couples subvert heteronormative assumptions about gendered household practices through their approaches and attitudes towards domestic labor and parenting. In particular, the article focuses on the complex ways in which lesbian and gay couples destabilize traditional domestic gender roles and queer the spaces of the home through the seemingly unremarkable, mundane practices and negotiations of domestic labor and childcare.     

Seventeenth-Century Pronk Poppenhuisen: Domestic Space and the Ritual Function of Dutch Dollhouses for Women

ABSTRACT

A number of pronk poppenhuisen, or “dollhouses for show” were commissioned in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Netherlands for adult women. The large wooden cabinets with multiple partitioned spaces construct a fully furnished Dutch home in miniature, complete with dolls representing family, servants, and pets. The dollhouses have been primarily regarded as sophisticated collections enjoyed by elite female connoisseurs. This study will investigate the surviving dollhouses of Petronella de la Court, Petronella Dunois, and Petronella Oortman as complex didactic objects that prescribed an ideal domestic identity for Dutch mothers and wives in the early modern Netherlands, in part through a three-dimensional structure that encouraged a tactile, physically interactive relationship with the viewer. Manipulation of the dolls within selective, gendered architectural spaces allowed the dollhouse owners to visualize the ideal Dutch home and “perform” their appropriate role within it as productive, disciplined, and orderly wives, mothers, and domestic managers.     

Growing Home

ABSTRACT

Using the concepts of “throwntogetherness” and disorder this article offers another perspective on the role of domestic disorder in making a family home. with original data generated within a qualitative research project with same-sex parented families in Sydney, Australia, the article considers some of the everyday ways parents “use disorder” to regulate and reconcile expectations of family life with lived reality, as materialized through reconfiguring existing home spaces. At the same time, the discussion fills in some empirical gaps in contemporary geographies of family by presenting some family home cultures that remain underrepresented in the empirical work on home and family: the domestic, everyday routines, and rhythms of same-sex parented families.     

Alternative Domesticities

Abstract

This special issue responds to a growing body of literature at the nexus of studies on queer/sexuality and home/domesticity. It builds on this existing research that seeks to destabilize the heteronormative ideology of home and domesticity, while also opening up this important space—and its constituent practices—for a plurality of identity formations and subjective experiences. Additionally, it addresses calls from lesbian, gay, and queer studies to shift our attention from public spaces and community places to the domestic. This special issue introduction speaks to continuing investigations of how different groups of people seek to creatively construct intimate relations across time, space, and place. Towards this end, the five articles in this special issue are introduced in the context of their contribution to a cross-disciplinary approach to alternative domesticities.     

Gay and Lesbian Couples at Home: Identity Work in Domestic Space

ABSTRACT

Social research into gay/lesbian experiences of home has tended to posit domestic environments as alienating for gay/lesbian subjects, silencing their sexual identities. Meanwhile, work on the spatiality of sexual identity more broadly has largely focused on individuals or communities, not couples or households. In this context, this article aims to recover the importance of home for gay/lesbian couples. I explore how cohabiting gay/lesbian couples generate shared identities through domestic space, examining various ways in which these couples use homes to establish and consolidate their partnerships. Empirical data is drawn from twenty-three in-depth interviews with gay/lesbian Australians who are cohabiting, or have cohabited, with a long-term partner. The sample is largely limited to white, educated, middle-class gay men and lesbians living in urban Australia, providing an ethnographic window into the domestic identity-formation of a particular community of practice. Four key themes regarding “coupled identities” at home emerged from the interviews: (i) the importance of privacy and control at home for enabling gay/lesbian partnerships; (ii) the negotiated creation and use of shared domestic spaces; (iii) the accumulation and arrangement of household objects in those domestic spaces; and (iv) the importance of maintaining separate “personal” spaces for each partner for the well-being of the relationship.     

“And Let the Grove,If Not the Parlour,Stand”: Home,Memory, and Gender in Mary Leapor's “Crumble-Hall”

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Mary Leapor's “Crumble-Hall” and attempts to shed light on her gendered/class poetics. It argues that the poet uses the house as a metaphor for gendered (male) and social class (gentry) dominance as well as that through memory she assumes (poetic) control over it, demolishes and remakes it, thus forging her female/literary identity. The article also demonstrates that Leapor makes use of both social and psychological space in her poem. By appropriating the country-house convention, she creates a dialectical relationship between external space—the architectural structure; and internal space—the kitchen maid's unconscious; and points out that as the former crumbles, the latter stands because of the significance it acquires. Indeed, her memory of Crumble-Hall not only spawns years of suppression and hardship but also becomes the stepping-stone for her rebellion as well as for the creation of her verse. Her poetic empowerment is projected through the image of the grove surrounding the country house, a multifaceted symbol signifying the interrelation of home, memory, and female literary production. Overall, Leapor re-creates the past glory of the gentry house, depicts her subservient state, conveys her subversion, and finally, establishes her newfound identity as a female poet, all within the framework of fragmented memories. Consequently, she succeeds in promoting the need for gendered and class transgression, in the hope that her sisters can bring about the “crumbling” of their own “house” and remake their “home.”     

“My Two Homes”Children’s Picture Books and Non/Normative Imaginaries of Home in Post-Divorce/Separation Families

Abstract

In spite of a burgeoning interest in children’s home lives, we know little about the meaning and experience of home for children living in post-divorce/separation families who often spend time in more than one parental home. As a starting point, in this article I analyze the way in which thirteen “therapeutic” pictures books for younger children aged 3–8 represent home for such children (and their parents) through their text and images. I argue that the books contain four dominant tropes of domestic transition through their representation of the disruption, journeys, thresholds, and materialities of home. However, at the same time, the books also present the ordinariness of domestic home life in post-divorce/separation family life with a counter-narrative of the mundane time spent being together and gender-neutral parental care practices at home.     

Strengthening the Domestic and Family Violence Workforce: Key Questions

ABSTRACT

The significant impact of domestic and family violence in Australia calls for a workforce that is both highly skilled and capable of meeting the demands of complex and challenging jobs. Yet despite the increasingly national visibility of domestic violence, the workers—and work itself—have largely remained invisible. We argue for a shift in conversation, highlighting the need for a workforce approach that is not only strategic but that also applies a theorised lens to domestic and family violence work inclusive of both gender and Indigeneity.

IMPLICATIONS

• The domestic and family violence workforce and workers should be made more visible to better support development in this sector.

• A workforce development strategy is needed to build knowledge about who is doing this work, the nature of the work, workplace structures and cultures, and work environments and conditions.

• The significance of gendered power relations, Indigeneity, high risk, trauma environments, and emotional labour in domestic and family violence work cannot be ignored in development strategies.

     

A Global-Middle-Class House?1 Cultural Capital,Taste, and Kitsch

Abstract

In this article, I show how the category of the migrant house, as has been recently discussed in much scholarship, can be expanded to include another subcategory—the global-middle-class house. Recently, the migrant house has generated much research in migration studies and in disciplines of the built environment. Consequently, it has been examined through various perspectives, including home and belonging, materiality in the home, and the transnational home. It has not been examined, however, through the concepts of cultural capital, taste and kitsch, as developed by Bourdieu and others. This article applies these concepts in the exploration of the migrant house through a case study of one house and its transformation from old to new in suburban Melbourne. The article shows how the concepts of cultural capital, taste and kitsch can be utilized to expand the category of the migrant house to include the global-middle-class house. Following a theoretical discussion, the article analyses the old family house, the decision to demolish, the construction process and the redevelopment of a new house, together with an analysis of material objects in the new house and around it. The article argues that this is a specific kind of a migrant house, a global-middle-class house, because it combines popular global taste with objects taken from the ancestral past of its migrant residents.     

On the Modalities of the Domestic

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on experiences of the domestic—of houses, of intimacy and privacy—and what relation these bear to the kinds of sentiments about life which are given expression as fragile, endangered or fleeting. We think of singularity as lying in the potential for multiple domesticities that emerge at different times and are neither coterminous with family nor indeed with household. Based on fieldwork with African-American and Caribbean families in Miami, Florida and Baltimore, MD, the article tracks how intimacy and alienation marks the constant moves from, to, and through households. This oscillation engenders an itinerant domesticity and life lived in the interstices of the house, the clinic, the prison, and the street. These spaces and places come to bear on what comes to be marked as so-called “African-American kinship.” Given the disproportionate incarceration of African-American men in US prisons, the article contemplates the permeable relation between carceral institutions and the home, as well as the constitution of kinship as “criminal.”

All names used in this text are pseudonyms to protect the confidentiality of respondents.     

Curtains and the Soft Architecture of the American Postwar Domestic Environment

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the role of “soft architecture” and interior effects—including window treatments, textiles, and electric lighting—in the physcial and social construction of the postwar domestic environment in the USA. In this period the American home became an increasingly visual and visible space, defined more by the view out and the view in than by traditional conditions of domestic enclosure. Popular how-to columns and home decoration articles offered homemakers a variety of mechanisms for sustaining the appearance and psychological comfort of the modern domestic setting. Examining a range of popular decorative strategies used to mediate residential picture windows and window walls, this study challenges the deep-seated cultural and disciplinary biases associated with both the design and study of domestic architecture and interiors. Drawing upon historical documents and contemporary theorizations of the interior, this paper argues for the agency of “soft architecture” in the domestication of modern residential architecture.     

British Expatriate Belongings: Mobile Homes and Transnational Homing

ABSTRACT

This article explores the mobile homes and transnational homing of British expatriates in Dubai. In the article, I analyze ordinary domestic objects that play a special role in the homemaking practices of their expatriate owners, drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research including participant observation and home-based interviews. I argue that thinking about belonging through belongings is productive because it is empirically and theoretically attentive to the way in which the home is experienced simultaneously as both a material and immaterial, lived and imagined, localized and (trans)national space of belonging. Furthermore, the homes of expatriates make explicit the fluidity and multiplicity of home as process. This article focuses on three things found in British expatriate homes in Dubai: a painting, a plastic bowl, and a DVD.     

Body dissatisfaction,neuroticism, and female sex as predictors of calorie-tracking app use amongst college students

ABSTRACT

Objective: This study investigated body dissatisfaction, neuroticism, and sex as potential predictors of calorie-tracking app usage amongst undergraduate college students. Participants: College students (N = 491) were recruited from a large northeastern university in October 2015. Methods: Participants completed an online survey asking about their sex, body dissatisfaction, neuroticism, and use of apps that track calories. Results: Analyses revealed that female sex and body dissatisfaction—but not neuroticism—were direct predictors of calorie-tracking app usage. Analyses also provided support for a causal sequence wherein neuroticism and body dissatisfaction mediate, in serial, the relationship between female sex and calorie-tracking app usage. Conclusions: The results from this study suggest that female college students are more likely to use calorie-tracking apps—a phenomenon which may be attributable to their higher levels of neuroticism and subsequent increased body dissatisfaction.     

Transformative Homes

ABSTRACT

In the era of global workflows and massive migrations, it has been suggested that the notion of home is breaking free from its material aspects to become a set of exportable routines and practices. On the other hand, it is argued that the materiality of spaces and objects can support migrants' well-being in the new destination. Drawing on the ethnography of a Moroccan household in Rome, Italy, we illustrate how actions pertinent to the material home can favor identity development and the exercise of agency. First, we discuss squatting as a collective action of appropriation and transformation, which led to the identification with a transnational, intercultural category of migrant. Second, we illustrate the activities of furnishing as the locus of syncretic and reflexive processes, in which elements of the host country and themes from the migratory experience are mixed and reinterpreted in novel ways. Our analysis supports the view that the materiality of the home and the actions it affords play a major role in the socio-psychological adjustment of migrants and—on a wider scale—in processes of cultural dynamism and renovation.     

Exploring the needs of parents for achieving reunification: The views of foster children,birth family and social workers in Spain

BackgroundFamily reunification refers to the process through which children and adolescents under a measure of temporary separation (foster care or residential) return to live with their biological families. The research has begun to reflect a paradigm change in intervention and support for these families that affects the consolidation of reunification and the prevention of new processes of separation and reentry into the protection system.ObjectivesThis article examines the needs of parents who are susceptible to an educational intervention from a positive focus that contributes to the consolidation of family reunification.MethodEighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted and 22 discussion groups were convened with 135 participants (63 protection-system professionals, 42 parents and 30 children and adolescents). The data were analyzed through content analysis and were subject to peer revision.ResultsA series of parents' specific educational needs when their children return home was recognized. These needs can be the objects of family intervention based on a positive focus directed toward highlighting parents' strengths and are related to awareness of family progress, emotional management, giving and receiving help from other families and social support. The participants' comments show that feelings of self-sufficiency and positive reinforcement are fundamental for consolidation of the process.ConclusionsSocial support through formal and informal networks may be a path to explore for providing more and better support after returning home. Empowering families so that they can be agents of support for other families can be a way to consolidate reunification, allowing families to be active agents in the reunification process. In addition, listening to children's voices can be a good strategy for family consolidation.     

Using Visual Art Workshops with Female Survivors of Domestic Violence in Portugal and England: A Comparative Reflection

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a reflection on the use of visual art workshops in an interdisciplinary feminist project with female survivors of domestic violence living in refuges in England and Portugal. The paper discusses the fieldwork in each location with attention to the interaction between participants, between participants and the researcher/s, and the cultural and institutional structures influencing the research and the images produced. Despite some key differences in the context, the analysis highlights key resonances and commonalities amongst the objects that survivors of domestic abuse depicted in each location. We use the feminist notion of ‘giving voice’ as an analytical tool throughout the paper. The paper argues that ‘giving voice’ was not unproblematically accomplished by using visual methods and suggests that our understanding remained partial and often reliant on verbal narratives accompanying the visual images produced. We also highlight issues of power emerging when exhibiting art generated through the study.