Lesbians’ embodied and imagined homes: ‘It’s an internal journey’

Abstract

This article explores how nine lesbian women in Australia embody and imagine ‘home’. Using visual methodology, each woman was invited to bring along an artefact and tell a story about how it represents home for her. The methods for producing the data involved a focus group and individual interviews. Following a school of thought known as the sociology of emotions, the data were analysed for insights connected to participants’ emotions. The study highlights the importance of the internal journey in how these women primarily embody and imagine home.

Keywords

Emotion home sexuality visual methodology

Sexuality and home

Home is a multidimensional (Mallett, 2004) and politically contested concept (Elwood, 2000). On the one hand, home is discursively constructed as an ‘ideal’, and on the other hand it is materially embodied and experienced as a ‘reality’. Often home is ‘remembered’ as a journey that occurs across time, places and spaces, and relates to feelings, practices and identities (Mallett, 2004: 69). Home is the ‘real or imaginary place’ where all people wish to ‘feel safe, loved and validated’ (Egerton, 1990: 76).

A number of authors from multiple disciplines, including geography (Gorman-Murray, 2012), anthropology (Scicluna, 2015) and history (Cook, 2014), have argued that sexuality is central to one’s experience of home. The ‘queer home’ has been theorized as both a safe and subversive space from different disciplinary perspectives including women’s studies (Oerton, 1997; Traies, 2015) and social, political and cultural geography (Barrett, 2015; Gorman-Murray, 2007, 2012; Johnston and Valentine, 1995; Kentlyn, 2008; Kitchin and Lysaght, 2003). More specifically, Australian sociocultural and political geographer Gorman-Murray (2007, 2012) argues that the entwinement of domesticity and sexuality in gay/lesbian understandings of home and homemaking can be both congruent with, or challenge hetero-normative understandings. Hetero-normativity is a term that Jackson (2006: 108) explains is ‘shorthand for the numerous ways in which heterosexual privilege is woven into the fabric of social life, pervasively and insidiously, ordering everyday existence’. Gorman-Murray (2007: 229) found that some gay or lesbian people reinterpret the hetero-normative home by generating ‘homes that affirm sexual difference’ through domestic and home-making practices. These activities include displaying meaningful objects and possessions, creating aesthetic furnishings, holding parties and social gatherings that change the materiality of the home.

Home through objects and the domestic

When considering home as experienced through domesticity and objects, anthropologists and architects have contributed further to this body of knowledge by focusing in particular on ‘material homemaking’ practices (Cieraad, 2006 [1999]: 87), and on experiences of home through memories, objects and the designed environment (Goodall, 1991; Hoskins, 2006). These works show how domestic experiences of home include a sense of family and residential spatiality, contained within political, cultural and legal social relations. To explore women’s experiences and memories of domestic objects, Tolia-Kelly’s (2004) research with South Asian women in north London locates the process of cultural identification in memories that are produced through narrated histories and domestic artefacts in the British Asian home. However, domestic spatial arrangements can extend beyond understanding the ‘house as home’, to include aspects of political, public, collective and community life. For example, anthropologist Scicluna (2015: 179) researched the perspectives of a politically active group of older lesbians in London about the multitude of ways in which they experience, speak and imagine the domestic space of the kitchen. She found the kitchen to be a valuable domestic site in which the women were able to contest hetero-normative relationships, and imagine and then forge new ways of relating. She also found that squatting by lesbians has historically been a form of resistance and a grassroots ‘spatial tactic against patriarchy’. Thus, she contends that the domestic ‘is fluid and porous and always in a dialectic relationship with the larger forces of ideology and culture’ (2015: 176).

The domestic and home can also refer to feelings and relationships with people. For some authors, the use of the term ‘domestic’ has advantages over the term ‘home’ (Das et al., 2008; Scicluna, 2015). Das, Ellen and Leonard (2008: 352) argue that the ‘domestic’ includes objects, feelings of intimacy/alienation and proximity/distance, and involves grieving for the past. They contend that the objects or ‘things that we think with’ cannot be separated from memories, social relations and emotionality or ‘sentimentality’ (2008: 352). As well, sociologist Gibson (2004: 285–286) uses the notion of ‘melancholy objects’ to discuss the emotional effects of objects and emotional transitions through objects, particularly in relation to grieving and the memory of grieving. For example, photographic images and clothing can be a way of ‘reclaiming and rehousing (making homely) the remains of a life now gone’ (2004: 297). Whilst many of these anthropological and sociological authors have not attended specifically to sexuality, anthropologist Scicluna (2015) has focused on lesbians and home, as mentioned earlier.

This recent work resonates with earlier literature on lesbian feminist organizing within a specific physical house (Ross, 1990) or in shared houses (Egerton, 1990) that have been found to provide supportive collective domestic arrangements and spaces for activism. Yet, these collective places are not necessarily free of conflict and discord (Egerton, 1990; Johnston and Valentine, 1995; Ross, 1990). Gay/lesbian homemaking practices include political activism and challenging unwaged domestic labour as gendered work (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Kentlyn, 2008: 334). In the UK, social historian Matt Cook (2014) also explored gay sexuality and domesticity in his book Queer Domesticities. He explored changing gendered domestics in the homes and family lives of queer men across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from the experiences of politically engaged gay men in squats in Brixton, to more affluent districts. He noted that the ‘queer home’ intersects with gendered, racialized and classed social relations, and is subject to scrutiny by heterosexual family, relatives, neighbours and friends.

These understandings are supported by the work of cultural geographer Elwood (2000), who argued that meanings of home in the lesbian experience are complicated by multiple public and private realities. On the one hand she found that the home-place, community and neighbourhood are ‘a place of liberation where lesbian identity and community are fostered’, and thus ‘nurture, maintain and actively assert lesbian identity’. On the other hand, and yet simultaneously, she found that the home-place could be ‘a site of oppression within which lesbian identity is frequently confined’, such as when it is ‘a place of surveillance by a dominantly heterosexual and sometimes hostile world’ (2000: 12, 14, 25). Indeed lesbians have experienced considerable housing impermanence. They have encountered barriers to accessing housing (Egerton, 1990), have often lived in temporary households, and have been under constant threat and subject to acts of hostility by a homophobic outside world (Green, 1997).

Homophobia: Alienations and resistances

Although same-sex relationships have always existed, the heterosexual, nuclear family home is most often promoted as the ‘emblematic model of comfort, care and belonging’ (Ahmed et al., 2003; Fortier, 2003: 115). In the context of this institutionalized heteronormativity, homophobic practices can contribute to the loss of home and the onset of homelessness (Gold, 2005; Jackson and Scott, 2010). Homophobia in the family home and the wider society particularly affects young people’s risk of experiencing homelessness (Dunne et al., 2002). Young people often flee unsupportive family homes in the process of ‘coming out’ to more freely express one’s sexual identity (Pilkey, 2013: 159). In Kent UK, Tunåker (2015: 250, 252) found that LGBT young people (aged 16–25) in the ‘liminal space’ of a homeless hostel, experience home (and homelessness) in relation to kinship, family and social relationships, and perceive being estranged from family as being ‘properly homeless’. Pilkey (2013: 159) examined the spatial mobility and homemaking imaginaries of eight Londoners who identify as LGBT. The exploration of their narratives for imaginings of past, present and future ‘homes’, he contends, provides a useful lens for understanding changes to their homemaking practices and their sexual identity formation across the life course (2013, 2014). His works show how nostalgic imagination of the childhood family home is important in the creation of the participants’ present homes and in their hopes for future homes. He also found that the parental home can be an isolating space where sexual identity is often closeted or modified, while the adult or ‘new home’ provides the opportunity to express sexuality differently. This finding was also evident in Johnston and Valentine’s (1995) earlier study of lesbian identity construction in the home.

In contrast to the idea of the nuclear family home as being fundamentally homophobic, Gorman-Murray (2008) considers the experience of GLB youth who are well supported by parents and siblings. He argues that family homes do not necessarily generate heterosexist reactions and attitudes, but rather can become sites of resistance to wider practices of heterosexism, and that heterosexual identity can thereby make space for non-heterosexual subjectivities (2008: 31). In more recent work he argues that ‘making home’ involves an embodied negotiation between ever shifting experiences of belonging/alienation and resistance/conformity (Gorman-Murray, 2012: 2).

In relation to home and emotion and feelings, Waitt and Johnston (2013) studied lesbian mobilities and homemaking in Townsville, Australia. They found that feelings of ‘home’ are embodied and connected to a sense of belonging to different geographical locations and lesbian subjectivities. While Kawale’s (2004: 565) study of lesbian and bisexual women who lived, worked/studied and socialized in London found that emotion work is central to performing sexuality in the context of the ‘institutionalization of heterosexuality that regulates emotional behaviour and perpetuates spatial inequalities between sexualized groups’. Lastly, Egerton (1990) and Elwood (2000) examined lesbians’ access to and maintenance of a home and housing and found that they (akin to single women) can experience discrimination, harassment and financial disadvantage.

These bodies of knowledge, just cited, provide the social context for this article that explores how nine lesbians variously embody and imagine home (and homelessness). This study is part of a broader project aimed at examining how home (and homelessness) is embodied and imagined by people across the sexual spectrum, using visual artefacts as a key aspect of the methodology and emotions as the unit of analysis.

Methodology

Emotions as a theoretical framework for the study

Anthropological and sociological authors are increasingly concerned with how culture is inscribed on the body. They argue that bodies are constituted by the expression of subjectivity and emotions (Csordas, 1994). Social anthropological authors such as Sarah Pink (2007), David Howes (Howes and Pink, 2010) and Tim Ingold (2011) have fiercely debated the importance of ‘senses’ in cultural life. Moreover, the value of emotion in knowledge production has been long pioneered by social researchers such as Hochschild (1983), Denzin (1984) and Jagger (1997 [1989]), and then developed into a concerted school of thought by a number of sociologists (Barbalet, 2002, 2006; Bloch, 2002; Burkitt, 1997; Holland, 2007; Lupton, 1998; Williams and Bendelow, 1996, 1998). Emotion can be distinguished from feeling in that it involves a person appraising their bodily response and then making a cognitive interpretation of its meaning that is culturally constituted; thus emotion has both a physiological and a cognitive component that in tandem appears simultaneous (Jagger, 1997 [1989]). While people can have emotional experiences in a range of situations, including non-human interactions, the sociology of emotions attends to those that arise in the social context, as an emotional experience between people. As Barbalet (2002: 4) observes, ‘[t]he emotion is in the social relationship’. Furthermore, the particular emotions that people experience are thought to arise from the structure of the power relations in which they are involved. Indeed, Jagger (1997 [1989]: 396) observes that some emotions, which she calls ‘outlaw emotions’, arise from non-hegemonic emotional responses and can valorize unjust social conditions. She argues that the emotional responses of subordinated groups of people are epistemologically more reliable than those of dominant social categories, as they offer the potential for ‘subversive’ insights into minority experiences, and thus can challenge the status quo (1997 [1989]: 400). For example, a person attracted to others of the same sex or gender is likely to experience homophobic jokes as distressing, rather than as amusing. Thus an ‘outlaw emotion’, like ‘distress’, to a homophobic joke can make visible the socially unjust nature of such daily practices, and may then provide the impetus for subversive actions that challenge homophobia. Emotions can, therefore, provide a portal through which to view otherwise invisible power arrangements in current social relationships and conditions. It is this astute feature that makes the study of emotions so valuable for social research. Furthermore, ‘by bringing the body back in’ to social analyses, these embodied emotional experiences can provide a rich source of data for understanding social phenomena (Lupton, 1998: 31), such as lesbian experiences of home.

The sample

Lesbian communities are heterogeneous. That is, whilst individuals might share a common sexual identity, they might differ in their ‘race, class, religious, or ethnic identity’ (Elwood, 2000: 11). In this study, the women were Anglo-Australian, tended to be middle class and both Protestant and Catholic upbringings were represented. The women were aged between 49 and 68, employed in professional and trade occupations, and all were currently in stable housing as owner occupied, aged care or rental accommodation, except for one woman who was camping and ‘housesitting’. Two thirds were first-generation migrants from England and Ireland who left the UK at various ages around the 1970s and 1980s and the rest were born in Australia. Some of the women migrated to Australia with their husbands and only later ‘came out’ as lesbian when in Australia. None were currently married but some did have children, from whom some felt estranged since ‘coming out’.

In the UK, many lesbians during the late 1980s experienced impermanence in their personal lives (Green, 1997) when local governments implemented Section 28 that prevented the promotion of homosexuality at work places (later repealed in the 2000s). This had a devastating impact on the lives of gays and lesbians, and thus the private home emerged as a safer space to socialize and network. None of the women in this study mentioned this legislation but they did allude to the importance of having a ‘welcoming’ home. The political situation referred to by those participants that migrated to Australia related to the ‘IRA bombings’ and the conflict between the Irish and English or Protestants and Catholics.

Method

To recruit research participants, the research was advertised widely in newspapers and community services in Adelaide, South Australia. Three women and two men were interviewed after directly contacting the researchers by email to participate in individual interviews. The participants for the focus group were recruited through snowballing. A visit to a local LGBTIQ service by the researchers led to one woman offering to invite people in her network to a focus group. The six participants for the focus group were recruited through this woman who suggested that we use her home to facilitate the focus group. The data for this article were produced through a two and a half hour focus group with these six women friends and through one-hour semi-structured individual interviews with three further women. The pseudonyms for the six women friends are Niamh, Claire, Noleen, Kerry, Pamela and Maeve, and the other three women are Emily, Fiona and Belinda.

Following the works of Kuhn (2007) and Pink (2007) on visual methodologies, we asked women to bring along an object or artefact that represented their experiences or imaginings of home. Designed to prompt emotional reflection, the initial focus group question asked: Can you speak about the feelings roused by what you have brought along today? Given that the women in the focus group were familiar with each other and a level of trust was apparent, we encouraged the women to ask questions of one another after each account about the artefact they had bought along. The researchers kept their level of intervention to a minimum, mainly taking on a time-keeping role to ensure that each person was provided the opportunity to speak. The women in the focus group all took turns to speak about the artefact/s that they bought with them. They asked each other clarifying questions (such as when was that? or how did you feel when that happened?) and often added to the point/s being made, by drawing on a collective sense of belonging (such as ‘yes that’s really strong with us’).

The three individual interviews with women lasted for over one hour with one held in her home, another on the telephone and one in her workplace. The woman interviewed from interstate on the telephone had thought about and recounted her connection to particular object/s on the telephone. The other two brought along to the interview important artefacts and photos that symbolized their journeys and disconnections and/or connections with home.

Visual artefacts

Visual and auditory objects ‘place’ a person within the space and the emotional connections that embed them within a ‘home’ (Gibson, 2004). Also, visual methods have been found to evoke people’s emotional experiences and narratives at a deep level (Kuhn, 2007; Pink, 2007). Likewise, we found that the artefacts prompted women’s recollections of deeply held emotional experiences and understandings of home that varied widely. The women discussed photographs of themselves or family members at significant times in their lives; certificates of (proud) achievement; craftwork they had created; books by particular treasured authors; rocks that symbolized family members and histories; objects such as china, linen, and tea-cosies that connected to the warmth and comfort of home; symbolic objects from their childhoods; photographs and objects that related to an adventure or journey; and paintings of a once lived-in community house. These artefacts connected strongly at an emotional level to each individual’s history and identity.

Analysis

The starting point for our analysis involved scanning the data for emotional expressions prompted by these artefacts. Similar emotional states were then grouped together, much like the coding process undertaken within thematic analysis. In the final analysis, four main emotional states were identified. These emotional states are discussed in the next sections under the headings of ‘Feeling worthwhile and valued’, ‘Feeling safe’, ‘Feeling blessed’, and ‘Feeling a sense of belonging’. As Cataldi (1993) notes, thoughts and feelings are tactilely intertwined. While the women experienced these affective states as feelings, they are indeed emotions that they have appraised and interpreted cognitively (Jagger, 1997 [1989]), which then provide them with impetus for action – such as leaving or going home – (Barbalet, 2002; Lyon and Barbalet, 1994). These emotions highlight the inextricable link between how the women feel about themselves and their experiences of home.

Findings and discussion

Overall, home for this group of lesbian women is a profoundly meaningful experience that is connected with their self-identities (Marcus, 2006). Home is primarily, as Maeve (aged 59) puts it, ‘an internal thing’. Emily (aged 55) also describes home as ‘my internal journey’. She elaborates further: ‘It’s the journey over time and how you come to it within yourself’. The metaphor of a journey in ‘finding home’, ‘coming home’, ‘going home’ or ‘making home’ featured in the women’s narratives (see Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014). What is particularly noteworthy is the emphasis in the data on how the journey is primarily an internal experience. The women’s changing experiences of home were also closely entwined with their sense of selves at a point in time, as Kerry (aged 53) illustrates:

Home is not about a roof over my head. Home is what sits with me – it’s exactly how I feel about myself as to whether I am at home or not.

Similar to Tolia-Kelly’s (2004: 7) work on migrant women’s homemaking (which did not refer to sexuality), this emotional memory-work located lesbian identities within mobile geographies and past to present journeys of home. The embodiment of home was highlighted through the discussion of emotional connections to domestic objects. For example, referring to a tea-cosy as a symbol of home, Claire (aged 61) explains that it represents ‘a feeling about how home is where you are and how you can take it with you’. This journey of home through objects and homely possessions is also discussed in scholarship about queering home and the homemaking practices of gay and lesbian couples (Fortier, 2001; Gorman Murray, 2012; Pilkey, 2013).

Feeling worthwhile and valued

A common embodied response to the women’s various experiences of home involved feeling valued. For Kerry, ‘feeling worthwhile’ had involved a lengthy process of finding home. Her artefact, a certificate for completing a long-distance running marathon, represents a gruelling physical and psychological journey she had once embarked upon. Immensely proud of her achievement in the rally, she came to finally realize that she is an okay person: ‘Home is when I feel okay in the world’. The journey of ‘finding home’ also involved Kerry accepting and trusting that she is worthy of being supported, believed in and liked by other people: ‘To my astonishment, friends stuck with me when coming out as a lesbian. To trust someone – that is a sense of home.’ This statement is telling in that it represents how institutionalized homophobia (or the dominant ideology of hetero-normativity) permeates everyday life. Consistent with the work of Gorman-Murray (2012), home has been a changing political space for each of the women in this study depending on the extent to which their sexuality and sexual expression has been supported by others, such as family, friends and communities, over the course of their lives.

The idea that home encompasses an inner sense of feeling worthwhile and valued also featured in Maeve’s narrative. Pointing to numerous photographs of family and friends on the shelves in her living room, she says that they remind her that she is:

worthwhile and good and valued and loved and that’s the home thing. When I say I am going home, it means that I am going to see the folk who love me. I get to hang out with people who love me.

In line with Elwood’s (2000) work, these findings show how homes can be multiple ‘locations’, relationships and emotions beyond the domestics of homemaking practices. For the women in this study, home involves an embodied feeling of belonging, safety, and being worthwhile in the world.

Feeling safe

Feeling safe featured in all the women’s narratives of home. For example, Noleen’s (aged 62) artefact of a model canoe represented a journey to a South Pacific destination that she took earlier in her life where she immediately felt ‘at home’. Although she notes that the journey held risky adventures, the model canoe also represents a feeling of safety in her passage towards finding home:

I’ve never felt so at home in a place when I arrived. This is bizarre but I feel really, really comfortable in this place. I think for me home is not a concrete thing … it is just like finding your community wherever you go. I think that a canoe, so being in something like that is sort of like – I feel really comfortable, I feel safe. The canoe symbolizes what home should be – like the boat should be a passage to freedom.

This quotation illustrates how a ‘safe’ and ‘free’ home is more than a site. Symbolized in a mobile structure such as a ‘canoe’ (that could equally be a tent, boat or caravan), home is not static but rather a dynamic experiential journey. The portability of home is also evident in other studies, including British research on diaspora communities, expatriate life in the United Arab Emirates, domesticity, belonging and migration (Blunt, 2005; Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Walsh, 2006). However, the ‘passage to freedom’ in this quotation also alludes to women feeling free to express their sexuality within a supportive community and ‘finding your community wherever you go’.

The importance of feeling safe and being ‘free’ in the women’s experiences of home is linked intimately to earlier incidents of abuse, discrimination and exclusion on the basis of their sexual orientation. Fiona (aged 60) recollects being excluded from community life while living in Tasmania. She recalls that:

[t]he shopkeepers didn’t talk to us, they’d be really unfriendly, they knew who we were and they just did not, because we were lesbians and we were greenies.

Fiona’s narrative highlights the multiple subject positions and identities taken on by the women (such as being lesbians and ‘greenies’), which contribute to their sense of emotional marginalization. This finding resonates with Johnston and Valentine’s (1995) studies of lesbian identity performance in the home in the UK and New Zealand that highlighted self-surveillance, family hostility and neighbours’ acts of property damage and physical violence. Fiona’s embodied response to this community rejection was one of extreme anxiety, distress and fear:

I just was shaking and curled in a fetal ball shaking each morning until I could come out of that and get on about the day. [I was] just completely immersed in fear of some sort … it was in the body.

Here we see a distinct example of what Jagger (1997 [1989]) calls an ‘outlaw emotion’, one that is born from discriminatory subjectification and that provides insight into unjust social conditions.

The women, who are all over 50 except for one who was 49, pointed to a number of historical, societal, generational and familial influences that contributed to being rejected on the basis of their sexual orientation. They note how these experiences of exclusion have been instrumental in their impetus to reinvent their own homes, as Pamela (aged 68) illustrates:

… certainly with the generation that we all are, or fit into, home in our childhood, rejected who we are, so it was that sense that we do have to make our own homes and that’s really strong with us.

This finding resonates with sexuality literature on the policing of gendered and sexual behaviours in the hetero-normative family home and the queering of a ‘new’ home (Fortier, 2001; Pilkey, 2013). As mentioned earlier, the subsequent emotion of ‘being strangers’ in the childhood home can contribute to the mobility of women who identify as lesbian, ‘seeking communities of belonging’ elsewhere (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Waitt and Johnston, 2013: 147–148).

Thus, the internal journey of home often involved the women finding safety, peace, or as Emily describes it, ‘sanctuary’. For Niamh (aged 65), who brought along a piece of her grandmother’s china, this sanctuary involves making a home that is inclusive and welcoming. She expounds:

It’s important that people feel comfortable in my home because I didn’t always feel comfortable in my home as a child.

This emotion points to the importance of finding safety and supports literature about the lack of safety in lesbian experiences of the family home. Family homes are frequently places where ‘lesbians may be targeted for harassment or forced to hide their sexual identity’ (Elwood, 2000: 14).

Feeling blessed

There was a strong sense within the data that the women, now that they have found sanctuary (or a safe home), feel privileged. This recognition of privilege, however, has been born primarily out of experiences of disadvantage, discrimination, exclusion or hardship as discussed earlier, and of having glimpsed homelessness. As Egerton (1990: 78) notes, lesbians had difficulties accessing housing during the 1970s and 1980s, and ‘many of the housing difficulties which lesbians encounter overlap with those of single women in general’. This can create impermanence as evident in Belinda’s (aged 49) account, who, unable to afford house rent, travelled for some years with her young daughter ‘WWOOFing’ (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) at various locations. However, she recalls feeling ‘blessed’:

I was blessed … We were doing it tough but we weren’t doing it as tough as lots of other people have. I didn’t have a mental illness. I haven’t got a disability – much worse out there.

The women recognized the fragility of their current state of sanctuary and how easily it could be rocked by life’s trials and tribulations. As Claire muses:

We can’t take home for granted can we? No matter how solid we’re feeling, we just never know the moment when something can shake that.

Therefore, although women see themselves as fortunate and appreciative when connected to a feeling of ‘home’, they also have a sense that this is an ‘ever shifting’ social location (Johnston and Valentine, 1995), reinforcing the importance of feeling a sense of belonging.

Feeling a sense of belonging

Home was found to be deeply intertwined with women’s feelings about themselves and their sense of belonging, as migrants and members of the lesbian community. Most of the women confirmed that the lesbian community provided them with a sense of belonging at some stage of their lives, although most had expanded their social networks as they had aged. Pamela reflects on identifying with the lesbian community and connecting with other lesbians as ‘home’, ‘We have met people all over the world because we are dykes … doors have opened everywhere.’ This comment alludes to home being about belonging to communities in which people can express their sexual identity more freely, yet again the emphasis is on mobile rather than fixed communities. Consistent with previous research of sexualities, the women connected collective sexual identities (Gorman-Murray et al., 2013) with feelings of belonging. For example, as a migrant from Ireland where her sexuality was stymied, Maeve recalls the immediate sense of belonging, of ‘coming home’ into a lesbian community in Australia:

Just to hang about with lesbians when I had never hung about with lesbians before was the greatest joy to me and that was the feeling of coming home … This feeling of, this is me, I’m coming home, at last I am coming home and I know it was to do with being able to live completely as I was – as a lesbian woman.

As migrants, women’s deep-seated feelings of belonging were initially connected to their home country, and were then usurped by the role the lesbian community plays (or has played) in their lives and self-identities. Niamh speaks of ‘going home’ to the UK but feeling a sense of belonging to her lesbian community in Australia:

… that changed when I became a lesbian, when I came out as a lesbian because then the people that I started meeting seemed to be my people. They seemed to understand me … My sense of myself is now here, it’s not back there.

A complex engagement with home is central to one’s ethnic and sexual identity (Blunt, 2005; Fortier, 2003). However, the women in this study predominantly refer to an embodied sense of ‘myself’ as being ‘home’ by feeling a sense of belonging to the lesbian community as ‘my people’.

While this article has attended to the main findings about the internal journey of home, there were a few women whose sense of belonging connected to geographical landscapes, such as their country of origin, rural and/or urban locations (see also Gorman-Murray et al., 2013). For these women, home involved imagining physical spaces and localities (such as houses and geographical landscapes), as well as the identification with communities of shared interest, such as lesbian communities and environmental movements. Two women felt a sense of belonging to rural locations and the women spoke of geographical ‘landscapes’ giving them a sense of home. However, for one woman, this conflicted with her sense of belonging to the lesbian community, which was located in a city location. This less dominant finding is discussed in greater depth elsewhere (see Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014).

Footnotes

Conclusion

The experience of home as an internal journey was the primary finding of this research. This insight was garnered by exploring the deeply embodied emotions about the home experiences of nine lesbians evoked through reference to, and discussion about, particular personal artefacts. In this study these objects powerfully connected the women to both material, domestic experiences and to feelings of home. In particular the women’s experiences of home are closely linked to the emotional states of ‘feeling worthwhile and valued’, ‘feeling safe, ‘feeling blessed’, and ‘feeling a sense of belonging’. While the findings must be carefully considered in the light of the small size of the sample, there are discernibly similar experiences amongst the women in this study that home is experienced as an internal journey towards ‘feeling okay in the world’, an embodied emotion that they can take wherever they go. Yet it is also important to note that all except one of the participants are in stable housing, and thus the influence of this factor on the findings is unclear. In line with Kuhn’s (2007) and work on the value of visual methodologies in research, the effectiveness in this study of utilizing personal artefacts and domestic objects to tap into participants’ deeply held feelings and emotions points to the value of this methodological tool for future research in both this field and beyond.

Funding

This study was supported by an internal grant from the University of South Australia. The Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of South Australia approved this study.

Margaret Rowntree PhD is currently undertaking research on gender, sexuality and sexual violence for the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia.

Carole Zufferey PhD is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia. She has been researching home and homelessness for over two decades.

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