The Home Flashcards
The home is a …
matrix of social relations.
A home is a place often idealized but, it is…
not ideal for everyone
Home as a place
- Gendered place
- Increasingly a place of work
- Sites of domestic violence, oppression, conflict, resistance
- Place of consumption
A home is often seen as
Safe Space Comforting Positive Supportive A “nest”
… but not always the case.
Defining a home (7)
HOME AS…
Shelter Hearth Heart Privacy Root Abode Paradise
Home as SHELTER
(minimum we expect of a home), physical security
Home as HEARTH
comfort, warmth, relaxation
Home as PRIVACY
boundary between dweller and the world
Home as ROOT
Place, identity, meaning, legacy, ancestry, origin
Home as ABODE
a cold notion of home, a place you stay at that isn’t really a ‘home’, not all residences can be homes to people.
Home as PARADISE
ideal form of the household
Home as HEART
center of an individual’s life, family, love, affection, support
What is gendered in a home?
Tasks (optionally, but sometmes to a point of contention)
The notion of housewife
Portrayed as an ideal life for women, but was not
The external life that a woman may carry out is diminished.
This is to such an extent that the entire structures of city were/are still gendered.
Imprisonment: Women often didn’t have the time to pick up the kids and drop them off and be home in time AND go to the city.
Housewives felt…
Women felt isolated Depressed High rates of suicide Felt useless Felt unproductive
“A home is a woman’s _ and a man’s _”
A home is a woman’s place and a man’s castle.
He rules over the household, everyone else is his servant
Locus of women and men in the 60’s
Women lived in the suburbs
Shopping centres were in suburbia
How did the notion of home imprison women?
Women often didn’t have the time to pick up the kids and drop them off and be home in time AND go to the city.
Betty Friedan talks about…
50’s suburban America and housewives
Homes as places of consumption
- Build it
- Buy it
- Appliances/Furniture
- Our financial existence = social existence
- Decoration
- Cultural ideal of living in a large home
“The existence of the entire economy depends on your ___________________”
“The existence of the entire economy depends on you spending more than your can afford.”
Silverstone Hirsch - “the household is a part of the moral economy”
in that it is ‘part of a transactional system, dynamically involved in the public world of the production and exchange of commodities and meanings’
According to silverstone, the home is a
Social-cultural economic unit actively engaged in the consumption of objects.
Stages of integration of objects into a household
Appropriation
Incorporation
Objectification (objects are objectified)
Conversion (objects are converted)
Stages of integration into a household:
APPROPRIATION
- Acquiring the object
- Negotiation, purchased, gifted, found
- As items are appropriated, relationships in homes are altered.
- Object takes on new meaning in a household
Stages of integration into a household:
INCORPORATION
Object becomes incorporated into the daily routine of the household
Negotiation around the physical place of that object.
(Who decides?)
Stages of integration into a household:
OBJECTIFICATION
- Object takes on deeper meanings
- Signifiers of identities, symbols and meanings.
- The way in which the objects see that item as signifying parts of ourselves (books, art)
Stages of integration into a household:
CONVERSION
- The way in which there is public discourse around objects that impact on external relationships and our personal identities.
- Items can be used to construct social capital.
