Suchergebnisse

This article looks at older gay male homemaking experiences of engaging with domestic material objects. Using London as a case study it draws from 11 in-depth semi-structured interviews. These narratives are used to argue that the homemaking practices of older gay men can advance a queer theorised goal of queering heteronormativity. Throughout the article, domestic materiality and participants' relationship to their sexual minority identity forms the central focus; the empirical analysis highlights the obvious, subtle and even hidden ways interviewees subvert heteronormativity through relating to possessions in the home. On top of this, the article also looks to transcript excerpts to show that some interviewees consciously avoid relating their sexuality in the process of engaging with material objects in the home; this too, it is argued, can be understood as a political act challenging normative understandings of home. The article aims to complement a small but growing body of literature situated at the intersection of feminist work on domestic materiality, geographies of gerontology, ageing masculinity and queer theory.

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.