Contesting Domestic Ideals: queering the Australian home

Abstract

The Australian home is a crucial site for both normalising and contesting acceptable modes of sexual identity, desire and behaviour. Social norms and government policies have imbricated the detached suburban dwelling with the heterosexual nuclear family form, consequently heterosexualising the ideal Australian home. But this discourse is simultaneously challenged by the domestic practices of gay men and lesbians, who use their homes to consolidate gay/lesbian identities, relationships and communities. As such, they unsettle the normative heterosexuality underpinning dominant, ideal conceptions of home. In this paper I present four vignettes which illustrate how some gay men and lesbians queer the ideal Australian home, generating domestic spaces which affirm sexual difference. In doing so, I highlight two key ways in which this process of ‘queering home’ works. First, through certain uses of home—activities taking place within domestic space. Second, through changes to the materiality of domestic space itself wrought by some homemaking practices, effectively embedding gay/lesbian identities and relationships within the physical environment of the home.

Keywords:

• Domestic ideals
• sexuality and home
• Australia
• gay/lesbian identities
• domestic practices
• domestic materiality

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted while the author was with the Department of Human Geography, Macquarie University. The author is grateful for their support; particular thanks are due to Robyn Dowling. The author would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for positive, constructive feedback, and to Gordon Waitt and Louise Johnson for further advice. Any errors are the author's.

Notes

1. One possible exception is the trend towards inner-city apartment living in Melbourne and Sydney. In assessing images of high-rise living in Melbourne across the twentieth century, Costello (2005, p. 59) contends ‘that children and heterosexual nuclear families are Othered in high-rise discourses’. Similarly, Fincher (2004) found that the ‘absence of children’ characterised developers’ narratives of high-rise housing provision in Melbourne—target markets were ‘childless couples’ and ‘empty-nesters’. But I suggest the discourse of high-rise living is increasingly complex. Recent articles in the Sydney Morning Herald assert the growing popularity of apartment living for conventional nuclear families with young children (Mason 2005; Lipman 2007; Pryor 2007). This could signal the appropriation of the family-occupied apartment within the normalised discourse of the nuclear family home.

2. This argument complements work on migrant homes, which shows that ethnic domestic practices also complicate the ideal Australian home. Lozanovska (1994) argues that the distinctive interior and exterior architecture of migrant homes contests the homogeneity of Anglo-Celtic Australian culture. Thompson (1994) demonstrates that homes are sites of power for migrant women where ethnic identity can be expressed and affirmed through the display of meaningful cultural objects and the continuation of everyday cultural practices. Pulvirenti (2000) shows how Italian migrants’ drive for home ownership was not a product of assimilation into the ‘great Australian dream’ but was impelled by the experience of migration, helping consolidate an Italian-Australian identity.

3. The inverviews were collected between Spetember 2004 and May 2005. Twelve autobiographical essays are from Shale's (1999) Inside out, and four from Wotherspoon's (1986) Being different. Gorman-Murray (2007a) discusses autobiographies as rich data sources for geographies of sexuality.

4. Autobiographical narratives were coded by hand. Interviews were coded using NVIVO and by hand; ‘manual’ coding was used to remain sensitive to the complex themes and connections apparent in the narratives (Blunt 2003).

5. Interviewees’ names have been changed.

6. Likewise, autobiographer Adrian Dixson contends that house parties were ‘a vital, sustaining element in the gay subculture’ in 1950s Sydney, with few other viable meeting spaces (Wotherspoon 1986, p. 80).

7. ‘Love nest’ is Lyn's description.

8. Melbournian autobiographer Toby Zoates provides a similar example: he lived with Ruby, whose ‘garage had been converted into a fuck room—with walls of black plastic around a huge bed’ (Wotherspoon 1986, pp. 165–6).

9. For more on gay/lesbian couples’ homemaking practices from these interview data, see Gorman-Murray (2006c).

10. I could not analyse parenting practices as few interviewees or autobiographers are parents.