Showing papers in "Home Cultures in 2015"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the materiality of change in urban Africa, focusing particularly on the kitchens of a group of first-generation pro-lifers in the Ivory Coast.
Abstract: Meaning is inscribed in the material/built environment and this article considers the materiality of change in urban Africa, focusing particularly on the kitchens of a group of first-generation pro...
635 citations
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TL;DR: How young people experience home and homelessness in relation to kin and social relationships is looked at, and drawing from anthropological literature on “the house’, “home”, kinship and “liminality” is considered how these concepts can better inform the understanding of LGBT youth homelessness.
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 fac...
29 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a special issue responds to a growing body of literature at the nexus of studies on queer/sexuality and home/domesticity, building on existing research that seeks to destabilize the heteronormative ideology of home and domesticity, while also opening up this important space and its constituent practices.
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.
20 citations
TL;DR: The Scarab as discussed by the authors is a Shingle-style house built by poet and professor Katharine Lee Bates as a home for herself and her partner Katharine Coman, a social economist and labor activist.
Abstract: “The Scarab” (1907), a sprawling Shingle-style house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was built by poet and professor Katharine Lee Bates as a home for herself and her partner Katharine Coman, a social economist and labor activist. Both women had lived and taught at Wellesley College, founded as a single-sex institution for higher education in 1870, for over a quarter of a century. In their new home they adapted many of its hybrid spaces for living and working, surrounding themselves with friends, family, colleagues, and students to form a lively and engaged community of women. While it decisively broke with familiar conventions in both plan and program, “The Scarab” nonetheless fits comfortably in its leafy, suburban neighborhood, demonstrating that this committed couple could “hide in plain sight” while radically queering the terms of early-twentieth-century domesticity.
13 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the way the domestic kitchen is experienced, spoken about, and imagined by a specific group of women, who over the past five decades or so have sought to create alternative public and intimate living spaces.
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.
13 citations
TL;DR: In this article, two proto-queer texts are placed together in order to demonstrate how the development of American "queer subjectivity" arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to 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 o...
11 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a study of ordinary homes belonging to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) lives in a global city is presented, which draws from in-depth semi-structured interviews with Londoners gathered as part of a larger project on sexual minority identity.
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 iden...
10 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, the domestic lives of lesbian and gay couples in the UK were investigated, focusing on how they divide and understand domestic labor in their homes and how they challenge the heteronormativity prevalent in dominant discourses of 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 n...
9 citations
TL;DR: In this article, an experimental anthropological method for researching memories about the communist past in Bucharest, Romania is presented, focusing on collections of ordinary objects in individual households and examining how domestic spaces function not solely as repositories for artifacts of remembrance, but as containers for things that have been forgotten.
Abstract: This article presents an experimental anthropological method for researching memories about the communist past in Bucharest, Romania. Focusing on collections of ordinary objects in individual households, it examines how domestic spaces function not solely as repositories for artifacts of remembrance, but as containers for things that have been forgotten. Viewing these items as triggers of Proustian/Benjaminian ‘involuntary’ or inadvertent memories, rather than intentionally commemorative souvenirs, I explore how these new encounters offer alternative insights into perceptions of Romania’s past, present, and future. Such an approach reveals forms and contents of remembrance work that counter dominant academic and popular discourses about how Romanians are currently reflecting upon their communist past.
8 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a Swedish wooden burgher house, the mid-1660s Burmeister House, was adapted over the course of 250 years to satisfy everchanging expectations of thermal comfort.
Abstract: This article discusses how a Swedish wooden burgher house, the mid-1660s Burmeister House, was adapted over the course of 250 years to satisfy ever-changing expectations of thermal comfort. The inv ...
4 citations
TL;DR: The Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste by Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts as mentioned in this paper is a collection of essays about the history of Kitsch and its application in home culture.
Abstract: (2015). Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste by Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts. Home Cultures: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 123-125.
TL;DR: Winchester's Mystery House has been a popular haunted house tourist destination, attracting millions of visitors from around the world as discussed by the authors. But the house is not haunted by the ghosts of all the people killed by the famous Winchester rifles.
Abstract: Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, began building what would become a six-acre mansion in 1886 in San Jose, California. Almost from the very beginning of the house’s expansion, neighbors and journalists speculated about the motivations for its construction, especially as it incorporated unusual architectural features and continued to grow well past conventional expectations. By the time of Winchester’s death in 1922, a mythology about the house and its architect had blossomed and included the notion that the house was haunted by the ghosts of all the people killed by Winchester rifles and that Winchester believed that as long as she continued building she would not die. Since 1923, the house has been a popular haunted house tourist destination, attracting millions of visitors from around the world. This article analyzes the cultural mythology surrounding the Winchester Mystery House to determine what these myths reveal about American culture more widely and about the way Am...
TL;DR: For instance, the authors analyzed how antlers and stag heads were displayed as a symbolic expression of gendered social power and class status in the American shelter publication Domino between 2005 and 2009.
Abstract: This article analyzes how antlers and stag heads were displayed as a symbolic expression of gendered social power and class status in the American shelter publication Domino between 2005 and 2009 Influenced by hipster styles circulating in New York City coincident to the magazine's fouryear run, Domino's postfeminist lifestyle narrative promoted practices of curation and a poetics of irony to rationalize the unexpected display of real and faux taxidermy in feminine homescapes, blending the edginess of the hipster's attraction to rural "others" and kitsch with the prestige accorded taxidermy in imperial-era Western museums Domino's editors sought to articulate a millennial, postfeminist domesticity, and decisively masculine, ambiguously classed antlers became a means of expressing feminine social power Drawing upon postfeminist tropes of progress, choice, and irony, the magazine's editors and writers taught readers how to decorate and relate to their homes, playfully refracting the masculinity of the stag and the domination inherent in the act of hunting through a brightly hued lens of an unapologetically consumerist feminine subjectivity Tempering the "trashy" masculinity of hipster kitsch with a liberal ethics and nostalgia for elite early-twentieth-century museology, the tastemakers at Domino deployed antlers and stags to symbolize a new domesticity for a new era
TL;DR: In this article, the authors critique the promotional material for two neo-traditional residential communities located on the outskirts of the city of Kelowna in the interior of the province of British Columbia, Canada.
Abstract: This article critiques the promotional material for two neo-traditional residential communities located on the outskirts of the city of Kelowna in the interior of the province of British Columbia, Canada The videos and copy on websites for the Village of Kettle Valley and Wilden simultaneously appeal to a green technocratic future and a nondescript Anglo white past not tethered to the colonial history of the region The rhetoric of sustainability and a sunny disavowal of diversity in advertising copy allows for the management of these spaces as Anglo spaces Early-twentieth-century real estate development in the Okanagan was tethered to explicit appeals to Anglo white prospective owners These contemporary advertisements as evidenced by the analysis of these two websites more subtly cue viewers to a comfortable affluent space that perpetuates neocolonial and neoliberal values that are often at odds with a more diverse multicultural green urbanism
TL;DR: Ogata as discussed by the authors presents a collection of playthings and places in Mid-Century America by Amy F. Ogata, with a focus on the creative child and their families.
Abstract: (2015). Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America by Amy F. Ogata. Home Cultures: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 115-117.
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TL;DR: A study of residents of a central area of Mexico City showed 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 as mentioned in this paper.
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.