Turning the Tables: Generational Domestic Battles

Abstract

By thinking through domestic pluralities, we move away from the dominant concept of the heteronormative household which bridges the real and the symbolic through meaningful social relationships and experiences founded in emotions, kinship, friendship, care, and the different flows of power within and beyond the household. This shift away from heterosexual domestic living arrangements has many roots, mainly those in feminist anthropology and queer studies, which criticised the oppositional categories of the domestic and the public. The domestic was seen as coterminous to female subordination and ingrained in an asymmetric social, political and economic system (Ortner 1974). The political as well as academic concerns by feminists advocated for an egalitarian social and cultural order which ought to be open to women in the same way as it is open to men (Rosaldo 1974). Simultaneously, the rise of what the sociologist Ken Plummer calls the ‘Golden Age of gay and lesbian studies’ enhanced this debate further and brought about new opportunities in research, teaching and scholarship (1992: 3). This burgeoning field—since the 1990s—has largely focused on public and communal spaces. Perhaps this is due to the fact that modern ‘queer’ consciousness developed out of three elements: ‘a struggle for identity, a development of sexual communities, and the growth of political movements’ (Weeks 1985: 195). According to Weeks, the sense of community movements has in an important way become expressions of community strength, emanations of a material social presence. Such developments have changed the experience of homosexuality, posing new issues, personal and political (ibid).