This book explores the meanings and experiences of home among a group of lesbians who over the past five decades have sought to create alternative intimate and public living spaces. The protagonists who enact the ethnographic narrative are a small group of older lesbians, mainly feminist activists, residing in the metropolis of London. The meaning of home and domestic space emerges from unique life histories informed by the wider social and political context, and moves from the earliest memories of their childhood kitchens to their contemporary domestic lives.

Leaping from the radical lesbian feministcollectives and squats of the 1980s to the ordinariness of home life, the kitchen emerged as a tangle of cultural norms, customs, duties, ideas, aspirations, expectations, and values that tells us about the thinking process and behaviour of this specific group of older lesbians. In this context, the kitchen brings out the experiences of social inequalities experienced by these older lesbians, mainly brought out by the hegemonic institution of heteronormativity and patriarchy.

This ethnography will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in anthropology, sociology, geography and feminism.

Presents experiences of a group of lesbians over 5 years Explores the multiple meanings of homes across cultures Looks at the domestic kitchen across time

Autorentext

Rachael M Scicluna is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, UK.

Klappentext

Scicluna's richly ethnographic study of older lesbians' experiences of kitchens [] takes the reader through the intricacies of the politics of gender relations and sexuality by focusing on a key domestic space in which they are played out, and sometimes fought out, on a daily basis.
Sarah Green , University of Helsinki, Finland

The scrupulous attention to detail and emergent analysis reveal that the taken for granted has powerful potential for exposing hitherto hidden political, personal issues.
Judith Okely , University of Oxford, UK

** This 'back story' of lesbian life has been missing from studies of political and social organizing [and is] a very welcome addition to the growing literature on daily life, material culture, and aging.
Ellen Lewin , University of Iowa, USA

Inhalt

Introduction:The 'other' side of the kitchen.- Part I: Home and sexuality.- 1. Multiple meanings of homes: a changing social and political domain across cultures.- 2. The domestic kitchen across time.- Part II: The domestic as a tool for ethnographic inquiry.- 3. Towards alternative domesticities.- 4. The kitchen is good to think: the kitchen as a place for theorising.- Part III: The other side of the kitchen.- 5. The kitchen as a place for politics: a contested and subversive place.- 6. Turning the tables: generational domestic battles.- 7. The kitchen as a place, of and for, memory and narration .- Conclusion: The political liveliness of the domestic