Reading the Queer Domestic Aesthetic Discourse

Abstract

The stereotype of the gay man as arbiter of domestic style and design is widely recognized. Robin Williams humorously referenced this in a joke: “We had gay burglars the other night,” he notes, “They broke in and rearranged the furniture.” What remains unclear is the ways in which stereotypes relate to the lives of ordinary people and the homes they inhabit. This article brings together the idiosyncrasies of queer design that circulate at a number of levels in a mainly transatlantic discourse—thanks to the help of mass media, television programs, and a niche of scholarly literature—with a study of ordinary homes belonging to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) lives in a global city. It is argued that this wider queer aesthetic penetrates everyday space and shapes homes in complicated ways; there is a tension between these two domains. The empirical research draws from in-depth semi-structured interviews with Londoners gathered as part of a larger project on sexual minority identity at home in London, UK. Looking to these domestic case studies allows for a spatialized reading that challenges celebrated and exclusive interiors. Offering a timely and distinct architectural approach looking to the everyday users of ordinary domestic space aims to modestly move in another direction towards a model of diversity, opening up queer domesticity and sexual minority identity to multiple representations.     

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.     

Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies,affective ties,transformative community

ABSTRACT

This introductory article considers the importance of queer woman of color theorizations of affect in thinking more fully the recent interdisciplinary turn to affect. The affective turn has vitally invited culture and feminist critics to interrogate emotion beyond the individual to examine the political and cultural production of emotion. Even as women of color are often associated with excessive affect, the theoretical contributions women of color make to the field of affect studies are often overlooked. Our introduction and this special issue more broadly examine how this solipsism shapes projects invested in critical knowledge production, as well as the stakes of centering a queer woman of color genealogy. For instance, we argue for the importance of retaining U.S. third-world feminist concepts—like interpellation, oppositional consciousness, and the generative force of negative affects—even as they fall out of favor within affect studies. Centering theory that emerges from the vexed spaces of queer women of color lived experiences generates a vital interdisciplinary conversation that contributes to the ongoing political task of mobilizing affect for social action as a critical praxis. In the articles that follow we see this critical praxis at work in the form of community organizing, music, poetry, and performance art.     

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.     

The Meaning of Queer Home

Abstract

This article positions two proto-queer texts together in order to demonstrate how the development of American “queer subjectivity” arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to “home.” Written before the arrival of the queer category, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1982) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (Alyson Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, original work published 1993) concentrate upon the home as a site conditioned by twin concerns that would become central to queer politics: “the home” as narrative metaphor and homes as real-world shelters. Queering the home stretches and scrambles the home category (“dyke bar as home,” “Black lesbian sisterhood as home,” “body as home”) while insisting upon self-defined, material structures of protection and comfort for queers. The article performs a “reading through skin” of queer scholarship and of sociological data. It argues that these queer-emergent texts helped establish notions of “queer home” via exploring metaphoric and empirical axes related to domestic space.     

The Child and the Home

ABSTRACT

This article considers the relationship between the child and the home in Europe since the Middle Ages. It notes that ideas about both childhood and domesticity have varied over successive periods, and that class and gender as well as age influence individual experience in the home. It therefore moves on from the common assumption that both childhood and the home are modern inventions.     

The labour–nature relationship: varieties of labour environmentalism

ABSTRACT

This special issue is a contribution to environmental labour studies, which aims to investigate the practices and theories that integrate labour and nature, by focusing on labour environmentalism. While nature is privately appropriated and exploited by Capital, workers’ organizations tend to construct nature as labour’s other, a place to enjoy or a place to be protected from destruction at best. In the following introductory article to this special issue, we present our view of what environmental labour studies are investigating and might investigate in the future and the place of labour environmentalism within this broader agenda. We also suggest an analytical framework to evaluate the depth, breadth, and level of the agency of the variations of labour environmentalism. We suggest that environmental labour studies can be a way of studying not only the intersections between social and environmental justice, climate change and working conditions but can also contribute to building a bridge between environmental theory and practice.     

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.     

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.     

Making environmental sociology sociological

Three basic sociological distinctions—viewing the environment as home or place of sustenance, separation of home and workplace, and “thing” work versus “people” work—are used to illuminate such sociological concerns as environmental degradation as a social problem, social specialization and pollution, and the demographic profiles of environmentally concerned people.     

Towards Critical Intersections of Ageing,Housing and Well-Being

ABSTRACT

Across the life course, far-reaching socio-demographic and health related transformations are influencing the meaning of home in the UK. The collection presented in this Special Issue of Home Futures critically interjects into the ‘where and when’ of dwelling during the process of ageing with key concepts explored within this introductory article. It argues that, change is seen through the disruption of conventional ideas of ageing ‘at home’, traditional understandings of ‘the older person’ and its corollary social imaginaries, alongside the relationship between care practices and homes. Many of these shifts are being addressed through a range of emerging housing (and collaborative) alternatives. The article concludes by considering how discussions in this special issue disclose the home, from a range of social and material angles, as a diverse process and experience of meaning making over time, deeply entangled with health and well-being, disrupting traditional understandings of ‘place making’ in later life.     

Queer Questions

Abstract

As rights claims on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity occupy an increasingly prominent place in international politics, it seems clear that the long-running Woman Question has been supplemented by a set of variously articulated “queer questions.” Drawing on postcolonial, feminist and queer theory, and readings of queer literary and cinematic texts from India and Iran, this article explores moments of resonance, intersection and tension between the Woman Question and queer questions. It argues, first, that contemporary queer questions echo the preoccupations of the Woman Question even as they are uncannily prefigured by it; second, that these questions have been mutually disruptive of one another, so that queer questions are not simply a rerun of the Woman Question; and third, that differences between these questions are problematically flattened out in projections of shared futurity articulated in the abstract universality of “human rights.” Navigating the shared pasts, fraught presents and imagined futures of Woman and queer questions, the article brings queer critiques of temporality to bear on the concerns of postcolonial queer activism. It elucidates opportunities and challenges for alliance between the subjectivities interpellated by these various questions. In addition, it asks how the proliferation of new subjectivities under the sign of “queer” troubles notions of universal human rights.     

LGBTQ + community organizations under neoliberalism in Ontario,Canada: Contradictions and disconnects

Abstract

This study examines the impact of neoliberal policy—which introduces competition for funding and pressure to professionalize and bureaucratize—on the working conditions and precarity of a purposive sample of southern Ontario (Canada) organizations dealing with LGBTQ?+?health. Findings from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 community-based organization stakeholders and government bureaucrats confirmed that neoliberal policy pressures these organizations to professionalize and bureaucratize, while restricting political advocacy. Queer Liberation Theory’s three central tenets of anti-assimilationism, solidarity across movements, and the political economy of queer health are used to understand the situation and possible futures for third-sector organizations within the LGBTQ?+?movement.     

Stories of Work and Home in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT

It is widely accepted that nineteenth-century ideals of middle-class domesticity involved the valorization of a family-centered home life and its conceptual and physical separation from the economically productive work that supported it. Whether this was the case in working-class ideas is less certain. However, discussion continues about how widely such a separation was adopted and about its inherent contradictions. Using an interpretive approach to household inventories, this article adds to that discussion through a close examination of the household arrangements of three unexceptional mid-century individuals, each of whom worked from their residence. Taking into account the individuals' personal circumstances and the requirements of their particular work as well as circulating normative ideas, the article investigates what sort of distinctions, if any, these people made between home and work and how they put them into practice.     

Old and New Spaces

Abstract

Traditionally, the Mexican domestic interior has been characterized by a propensity to accumulative decoration and solemnity in the public areas of the house. The present study of residents of a central area of Mexico City shows that this situation has changed as forms of urban lifestyles, environmental attitudes and house ownership have developed that affect the use and decoration of the house. Here, I will focus on those changes that affect the public rooms of the house (living room, dining room, kitchen) with the aim of describing new forms of domesticity in the lifestyles, consumption practices, leisure and home life that no longer respond to the model of the traditional bourgeois home, but to life patterns in which the symbolic experience of home suits a particular spatial and economic reality.     

Introduction

Abstract

This special issue aims to formulate a 'worlded' version of American Studies to deal with emergent complexities of Asia/Pacific as well as North–South trans-Americas flows and imbalances characterizing today's empire of neo-liberal globalization. Scholars of this sublimated new world order face a strange and uneven moment of international globalization-cum-decolonialization. Disciplinary critique and field transformation are urgently needed. This issue would help forge a 'cross-roads' vision of US area studies refracting North/South and East/West transactions, theorizing comparative discrepancies, trans-oceanic linkages, and a cultural studies refiguring of the transnational field-imaginary.     

Restoring and Sustaining Home: The Impact of Home Modifications on the Meaning of Home for Older People

ABSTRACT

The importance of a supportive home environment to successful aging has been well-established in the literature, with home modifications increasingly acknowledged as ways of removing barriers to function and increasing independence for older people. Home modification literature and practice primarily focus on the home environment as a physical space in which to perform tasks and on the impact of modification on competencies and function. Home, however, is much more than a physical environment. Within a transactive framework, people and places are seen as engaged in a dynamic, reciprocal relationship through which home becomes a place of significant personal meaning. Through a qualitative framework, this study examines the experience of older people living in the community who are recipients of a home modification service. It explores the impact modifying the physical environment has on their experience of home as a place of meaning and provides insight into how home modifications can strengthen the home as a place of personal and social meaning as well as improve safety and comfort for the older person at home.     

“Brown girls can’t be gay”: Racism experienced by queer South Asian women in the Toronto LGBTQ community

Abstract

The absence of scholarship on South Asian discrimination in Western queer discourse contributes to a narrative that South Asians are not subjected to racially charged forms of discrimination in the LGBTQ community, which is fundamentally untrue. This article presents narrative-based accounts of nine queer South Asian women in Toronto, Canada, to examine the ways in which they experience racial discrimination in the LGBTQ community, and the impact that this mistreatment has on identity formation and connectivity to queer spheres. It finds that queer South Asian women experience racial discrimination in the form of racially charged microaggressions, which are evidenced through expectations of assimilation to Western-normative performances of queer identity and erasure of South Asian culture in the LGBTQ community. Further, it reveals that Toronto’s LGBTQ community perpetuates a culture of White privilege that discredits the intersectional identity of queer South Asian women, and consequently invisibilizes, alienates, and revokes agency from these women who do not fit the majority’s conceptualizations about what a queer woman looks like.     

“No Place Like Home?”

Abstract

The concept of “home” is subject to individual interpretations; a “home” may be conceived of as a physical space, such as a building/house, a geographical space such as a street, a town or a community, or a place where meaningful social relationships and/or kinship are fostered. Consider, then, what would happen to our understandings of “home” if seen from the perspectives of young people that are “home-less” and estranged from their families and kin groups, sometimes due to their sexual orientation. This article presents results from a research project conducted together with Kentish homelessness charity Porchlight. The aim of the research is to formulate an understanding of the lived realities of homeless LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) youth (ages 16–25). Young people who identify as LGB or T are often victims of hate crime, bullying, harassment, violence, oppression, discrimination, and social exclusion in the home, in schools, and in the community at large. In many cases, these factors can contribute to alienation from the family home and subsequently result in homelessness. Here, I look specifically at how young people experience home and homelessness in relation to kin and social relationships, and drawing from anthropological literature on “the house”, “home”, kinship and “liminality”, I consider how these concepts can better inform our understanding of LGBT youth homelessness.     

House Haunting: The Domestic Novel Of The Inter-War Years

In this article we attempt to historicize and address the literary manifestations of the meaning and idea of home culture in the English domestic novel of the inter-war years. During this period, the cult of domesticity was avidly promoted by the government and popular magazines. We discuss how both houses and novels furnish a dwelling place that invites the exploration of private and social relations. In their turn to domestic space and the domestic interior, domestic novelists of the inter-war years inaugurated a turn to interiority, feminine subjectivity and the everyday.