Home

The home is both a material place—a building, often with garden or yard attached, located in a particular neighborhood—and a space in which identities and meanings are constructed. Over the years, geographers have assumed the home to be a site of unchanging and stable social geographies, but more recently this assumption has been challenged on a number of fronts as conventional meanings of home have been scrutinized and deconstructed. As a result, the home has become a more fluid and contested space.

Traditionally, the home has been characterized in terms of key meanings that were summarized by Peter Somerville as (a) shelter: not only protection from the weather outside but also a place of physical security; (b) hearth: a place to relax and to be comfortable (“at home”) and from which to offer welcoming hospitality; (c) heart: emotional security, with the home providing a site of love and affection; (d) privacy: a legal and sociocultural haven in which questions of “who enters” and “what are acceptable practices” can be regulated; (e) roots: a place in which to belong and which can be an expression of our identity; (f) abode: a place to stay and to sleep; and (g) paradise: an idealized expression of the emotional pleasures of belonging, being safe, and feeling secure. Interestingly, many of these meanings have also been related to the scale of nationhood, indicating the inclusions (and exclusions) of a home country.

These traditional assumptions about the nature and social relations of home have been challenged from at least three different perspectives. First, geographers have recognized home as a place of labor. Positive attributions of meaning about the home are predicated on the idea that home is separate from, and may be contrasted to, work. Feminist geographers in particular have critiqued any formula that separates out the “private” space of home from the “public” space of work, arguing that such a formulation unhelpfully conceives the home as a “woman's place” and that the domestic effort of making and maintaining the home cannot be distinguished from paid labor outside the home. With the increasing participation by women in the paid labor force; the growing mix of paid and unpaid labor in the performance of domestic duties such as child care; cleaning, and gardening in middle-class households, and the upsurge of home working and work brought home, previous distinctions between home and work have become increasingly untenable.

Second, home has been recognized as a space of oppression. Contrary to the idea that a home provides a safe, secure, warm, and loving haven, there is evidence that the home is a significant site of violence, fear, and male tyranny for women, children, and older people. Domestic abuse is the second-highest category of violent crime in the United Kingdom, and there now are specific refuges in every city for women forced to leave the home to escape such abuse. By its very nature, however, domestic violence often is carried out in private and concealed from public view, meaning that the scale of the problem is significantly underrepresented. Similarly, physical and psychological abuse of children contradicts the idea of home as haven. Geographers have provided evidence of how expressions of male domination, dysfunctional “family” circumstances (e.g., the introduction of new and unsympathetic stepparents), or issues relating to alternative sexuality can lead directly to oppression of young people in their home, and teenagers leaving home are accounting for increasing proportions of the homeless population. Perhaps even more hidden from public view is elder abuse—the physical, psychological, and/or financial abuse of older people, either in their own homes or in institutions of care that become their “homes” in later life.

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