Thinking through Domestic Pluralities

Abstract

This article reflects on the meanings of home and domestic space among a group of women, who over the past five decades or so have sought to create alternative public and intimate living spaces. The protagonists who enact the ethnographic narrative are a small group of older lesbians, mainly feminist activists, residing in the metropolis of London. In this article, their life experiences are recounted through memories of domestic space, mainly that of the kitchen. I explore the way the domestic kitchen is experienced, spoken about, and imagined by this specific group of women. In this ethnography, the kitchen emerges as a contested, transformative, and political domestic space. Throughout, I illustrate how this seemingly private space is in fact entangled with larger notions of culture, society, kinship, and politics; and, like the everyday, is fraught with norms, codes and pluralities, and also with emotions, deviations, contestation, and transgression.