Alternative Domesticities: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Home and Sexuality has now been published on Taylor & Francis Online and is in the latest issue of Home Cultures, Issue 2. The special issue brings together anthropologists, architectural historians and cultural geographers on the theme of home and sexuality with historical specificity. A free copy can be downloaded from here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ukqQ4fQ9PhYwuMeKF7Ch/full

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.

Keywords:
alternative domesticities, queer, home, cross-disciplinarity, LGBTQ identity

The collection begins with two articles that uncover lesbian experiences of queering the heteronormative home, one historical and archival in focus, and the other contemporary and ethnographic. The first, from an architectural historian based in an art department, and the second from a social anthropologist based in a school of social science. Both are political in nature and show the ways in which women negotiate their non-heterosexual identities, same-sex relationships, work commitments, and families against a backdrop of gendered, classed, and sexed expectations. Alice T. Friedman illuminates how the domestic architecture of “The Scarab,” the 1907 home of Katharine Lee Bates and her partner Katharine Coman, offers a challenge to convention, in plan, program, use, and occupation. At home, the women found love and companionship, while “hiding in plain sight” in suburban Wellesley, Massachusetts. Friedman’s article not only offers a touching love story, but it highlights the intimate link between historic domestic architecture and queer identity. Rachael M. Scicluna’s article uncovers the experiences and meanings of making a home in contemporary London, through anthropological research with older lesbians. Focusing on the kitchen as a contested and political space, Scicluna argues that these women have been able to transgress heteronormative ideals. In these domestic narratives it becomes clear that the kitchen in both a physical and metaphorical sense becomes the means through which conservative ideals and rigid boundaries are broken down through alternative intimate practices and lesbian-feminist politics.

Sticking with the contemporary, the following two articles—one from a human geographer, the other from an architectural historian—show the ways in which close readings of everyday queer domesticities offer insightful challenges to normative ideals, specifically by revealing the complexity of everyday life. First, Carla Barrett’s study focuses on the management and facilitation of domestic labor in homes belonging to a group of lesbians and gay men. Drawing on in-depth interview material, the article makes the case that organizing and doing everyday household chores is a key activity through which normative understandings of the heteronormative home are subverted. In making this argument, Barrett shows how the domestic’s seemingly mundane activities offer an affective politic that reaches beyond the boundary of the home. Then Brent Pilkey continues a reading of ordinary domestic space and contrasts this with “a queer domestic aesthetic discourse”—the ideals and stereotypes of queer home representations that are propagated by media, television, and even some architectural discourse. Through referencing qualitative research with LGBTQ residents in London, Pilkey argues that a tension exists between the lived realities and celebrated spaces: while these representations are widely known, they affect ordinary domestic living spaces in a number of complicated ways. The article adds to the work on queer domesticities by bringing in a discussion of both identity stereotypes and tropes of queer architectural design—which the opening quote of this introduction hints to.

The final article continues the discussion of domestic boundaries by looking at minority sexuality as a factor leading to homelessness, forcing one to depart the family home. In her study, connected with a homelessness charity in southeast England, social anthropologist Carin Tunåker aims to understand lived realities of homeless LGBT youth (ages 16–25). Sharing these gathered personal narratives, Tunåker argues that social exclusion operates both within and beyond the home that destabilizes the notion of the domestic as a space of refuge. The article importantly shows how, for example when living with non-related kin in a new domestic environment, sexuality and homelessness are a framework through which conventional understandings of home are reworked and opened up.

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