A Queer Idea Of Home: Introduction

For anthropologist Mary Douglas, the home is a normative structure. To make a home is to try to control space over time—to introduce daily routines and rhythms to provide the feeling of order and coordination. In her essay “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space,” Douglas (1991) gives the example of mealtimes, which demand “synchrony”: everyone is expected to eat at the same relative pace, and there are no second helpings until the slowest eater has cleaned their plate. For Douglas, that demand for synchrony is also at the heart of the home's tyrannical operations. Yet home might as easily be defined by the queerness that haunts its edges—how easily its order is overturned. The strictness of the home's norms makes their disruption all the more certain.

For this forum, we asked five scholars from across various disciplines, subfields, and stages of their careers, “How does the space of home figure in your work? How does thinking about the queering of domesticity help us to understand home better?” The five short essays here reflect on the home's various normalizing pressures and how home may be queered. Home is, or can be, for these authors, a site of state violence and homonormative surveillance as well as the grounds for queer erotic expression, crip care, and Black freedom making. Home is at once the potential locus of the revolution and a depoliticized retreat from collective struggle. Taken together, these essays provide no easy answers, but they bring us closer to the home's queer contradictions. They challenge us to think more deeply about the promises and the traps the home holds out for those queered in some or many ways by cis- or homonormativity, racism or displacement, poverty or ableism. If the home offers a vantage point beyond the traumas of our present, these essays suggest, it will be only insofar as we can resist its disciplining tendencies and strive for solidarity with one another.

Reference