The Stuff of Family Life by Michelle Janning

Author:Michelle Janning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Reflecting on Our Stuff

Homes show how the boundaries between public and private matter for families. Public and private realms are becoming blurry in many ways. But they’re also still divided by gender. The public world is disproportionately men, and the private world is disproportionately women. And even in the home, the notion of spaces as being hidden or secluded or reserved just for one type of person suggests that spaces in our domestic lives are defined as either mostly public, mostly private, mostly his, mostly hers. When we take the idea that men and women, despite increasing equality, are still socialized into roles that are different, this can turn into inequality. Public spaces and things are sometimes deemed more valuable, especially economically and politically. So, continuing to label private home spaces as feminized not only fails to capture the experience of families with non-traditional gender roles, it also results in women continuing to have less access to valuable resources than men.

Homes tell us about individual families, but also about broader social issues. Social researchers find it important and interesting to analyze what happens when people cross over into a different gender realm, as with status-reversed couples. What happens when I start drilling holes in the wall, or when my husband starts baking cookies? The fact that I am the one in our household who shops for power tools can be understood as not too big of a deal because women are more likely to have power tools than in the past. But it also needs to be considered in light of the fact that it is still unusual. And when things are unusual, they end up highlighting what’s normal. My having power tools, as long as that’s deemed unusual by the man working at the home improvement store or anyone, reinforces the notion that men are more likely to have power tools. And this can translate not only into strange looks in a hardware store, but unequal access to life experiences that are divided unfairly by gender. While stories about power tools seem not too serious, they can symbolize other parts of family lives that show how power may make family dynamics not only unequal, but also really problematic. Our real lives are often filled with ways that we cross boundaries, including with gender roles. But there are so many ways that our decisions surrounding home spaces and objects are subject to a marketplace and a set of societal expectations that reinforce these boundaries as quite distinct.

Homes are not only symbolic, but also shape our lives. Sarah Pink has said that “the agency of the house [is] sometimes a constraint to the agency of the individual.”[25] While we may see our homes as places of refuge and locations where we can act freely, they can simultaneously do things that constrain us. From people who require home remodeling so that they can fit their wheelchair under a kitchen counter to do the dishes, to those who want to keep up with

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