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.

Keywords:

• Bisexual
• family
• heteronormativity
• lesbian
• private space
• youth

Acknowledgments

Our warm thanks go to all the women interviewed. We thank the reviewers and editors for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article, as well as Júlia Badrenas Gorchs for her help in editing the Relief Maps. Funding: PID2020-118661RA-I00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

Disclosure statement

This work has been done in the framework of the Interuniversity Doctorate Program in Gender Studies: Cultures, Societies and Policies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Júlia Pascual-Bordas

Júlia Pascual-Bordas ([email protected]) is a PhD Student in the Doctoral Program in Gender Studies: Cultures, Societies and Policies promoted by the Inter-University Women and Gender Studies Institute, researching on LGBTI youth and private space.

Maria Rodó-Zárate

Maria Rodó-Zárate ([email protected]) is a Serra Hunter fellow at the University of Barcelona. PhD in Geography, her research focuses on feminist geographies, geographies of sexualities and of youth with a special focus on intersectionality theory.