Gender, sexuality and home: young non-heterosexual women and their experiences in domestic space rooms in a medium-sized city in Catalonia

Abstract

Feminist critique has challenged the traditional conception of the home by emphasizing it as a politicized space, such that its meanings and how it is experienced are linked to complex social processes and relations. A focus on the home thus enables us to understand some important social practices and politics. Home, and in particular specific areas within it, have however not received as much academic attention as they merit. Here we examine how ten young Catalan women with dissident sexualities experience different rooms of their family home, with the aim of analysing how they manage their gender and sexual orientation. We thus contribute to the development of geographies of home by focusing on both the restrictions and the resistances that configure and contest the gendered processes of heteronormalization and adultification of the home space, shedding light on the material and symbolic dimensions of home, as well as on its relations with public space, power and identity.