Suchergebnisse

This thesis offers a London-based contemporary study of sexuality at home. I draw from architectural history, feminist and queer theory as well as geographies of sexualities to interrogate the stability of domesticity. Highlighting everyday homemaking practices of more than 40 non-heterosexual households in London, I seek to complicate one overarching regime of power that dominates our cultural value system: heteronormativity – the idea that normative heterosexuality is the default sexuality to which everyone must conform or declare themselves against. The project is a response to three decades of academic research that has looked at the spatialised ways in which sexual identity unfolds in, for the most part, peripheral zones in the 'Western' metropolis, spaces beyond the domestic realm. This thesis takes a different architectural approach; one where through interviewing 47 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) Londoners, as well as eleven domestic tradespeople that work in these homes, agency is given to small-scale domestic interventions and everyday actions. The concept of 'queering' is important to the framework, which, in the context of the thesis, is understood as an on-going process that LGBTQ people are engaged in through homemaking and daily living. Although some participants may not see this as a political act, I argue otherwise and suggest queering at home is a form of political activism. Through mundane domestic actions the overarching structure of heteronormativity might be challenged. I contend that queering the home unfolds in various, complex and conflicting ways. The thesis seeks to provoke both queer theory and politics, by opening up existing approaches and remits to allow room for a domestic method. In addition, the thesis seeks to challenge assumptions within architecture but also in the wider sense. I aim to break down stereotypes surrounding non-heterosexual homemaking practices that architectural studies and media representations problematically reproduce.

This paper investigates the relationship between heteronormativity, queerness, and neoliberal capitalism. By reinterpreting the 1997 Recognition-Redistribution debate between Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler through a social reproduction lens, I show that Butler's position is broadly consistent with a social reproduction analysis of heteronormativity. Through stabilizing the gender division of labor, promoting the normative heterosexual family, and contributing to the internal stratification within the working class, heteronormativity fulfills critical social-reproductive roles. Queer emancipation, therefore, cannot be realized without an overhaul of the political economic structure. As relations of reproduction change under neoliberal capitalism, what is constituted as queer is also altered in ways that incorporate queerness into capitalist value production. Mainstream narratives of LGBT progress obscure the emerging division between queers with capital and queers without, a division undergirded by familiar contradictions of racialized, heteronormative, reproductive capitalism. JEL Classification: B51, B54, P16

The writings of Judith Butler are now canonised in the fields of feminist and queer theory, yet her contribution to politics and her role in the field of political theory remain uncertain. I argue, perhaps uncontroversially, that Butler's is a politics of subversion; I also contend, perhaps more contentiously, that Butler's understanding of subversion only takes clear shape in light of her implicit theory of heteronormativity. Butler's work calls for the subversion of heteronormativity; in so doing her writings both illuminate the general problem of normativity for politics and offer a robust response to that problem. Butler resists the tendency to treat norms as merely agreed-upon standards, and she rebuts those easy dismissals of theorists who would take seriously the power of norms thought in terms of normativity and normalisation. Butler's contribution to political theory emerges in the form of her painstaking unfolding of subversion. This unfolding produces an account of the politics of norms that is needed desperately by both political theory and politics. Thus, I conclude that political theory cannot afford to ignore either the theory of heteronormativity or the politics of its subversion.

This book presents an exploration of heteronormative discursive practices in the English countryside. A lesbian teacher describes her experiences in the rural school community in which she lived and worked. She prospered at the village school for almost ten years by censoring her sexuality and carefully managing the intersection between her private and professional identities. However, when a critical incident led to the exposure of her sexuality at school, she learned the extent to which the rural school community privileged and protected the heteronormative discourse. An autoethnographic method of inquiry provides intimate insight which is supported by external data, including email and text message correspondence. As the critical incident eventually became a police matter, police records and evidence from the UK Crown Prosecution Service were sought for use in the research. However, the collection of these data proved problematic, providing an unexpected development in the research and offering additional insight into the nature of rural life. This research offers a vivid insider perspective on the experiences of a lesbian teacher in a rural school community. It examines the incompatibility of private and professional identities, investigates the moral panic that surrounds teacher sexuality in schools and considers the impact of homophobic and heteronormative discursive practices on health, wellbeing and identity. Crucially, this research offers compelling insight into the steps that those in positions of power will take to protect and perpetuate the heteronormative discourse of rural life