The Reshaping of Home, Privacy and Identity During a Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The ways we experience and construct our homes help us know and define who we are. The digital age and the immense presence of social media in people's lives have led to the redefining and, some argue, erasures of the boundaries between ‘private' and ‘public' spheres. Recently, with wide-scale lockdowns and the mass movement of workspaces to homes in response to COVID-19, these boundaries have been altered particularly radically and universally. This paper explores the changing role and function of the home as more than simply a house – or a physical, concrete space – but as multiple, fluid and sometimes intangible spaces. Analysing Australian digital audio fiction series The Fitzroy Diaries, it investigates how individuals negotiate structures of power in these spaces during COVID-19 to create a sense of home but also a sense of self. A close textual analysis illustrates the ways that those living through the pandemic witness and negotiate on the one hand the shrinking of their internal worlds, but on the other hand the opening up of these into ‘outside’ realms, and how individuals are positioned in relation to these changing spaces of home according to their access to power and privilege.

KEYWORDS:

• Home
• identity
• COVID-19
• pandemic
• privacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 [1] A distinction is made here between identity and subjectivity as they are deeply interwoven but distinct forces and experiences, which together encompass our cultural, social, and emotional worlds, and our conscious and unconscious selves. Aligned with Michael Roper’s differentiation, identity can be understood as that concerned with the social and ‘cultural resources that actors draw upon to construct a sense of self’, while subjectivity refers to the emotional, unconscious, and bodily experiences of an individual. This paper largely examines identity rather than subjectivity. See Roper (2007, 253).

2 Examining a Marxist feminist conception of the home and labour is beyond the scope of this piece.

 

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Longley Arthur

Paul Longley Arthur is Vice-Chancellor's Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity to migration and human rights. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has held visiting positions in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America.

Isabel Smith

Isabel Smith is a Research Associate in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, with particular interests in digital storytelling, cultural and oral history, and the relationships between memory, narrative and identity. She has previously worked as a History Curator at major state museums in Australia and as a social researcher in the UK.