Home-Land: Romanian Roma, Domestic Spaces and the State by Humphris Rachel

Author:Humphris, Rachel [Humphris, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Emigration & Immigration, Minority Studies, Discrimination & Race Relations
ISBN: 9781529201963
Google: uVgqygEACAAJ
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T05:13:57+00:00

The home: space, relationships and values

First, this section explores how spaces are imbued with meanings, with effects for the home encounter and the interactions that take place there. I build on previous scholarly attention to the dichotomy between public and private space. I draw on this literature to demonstrate how and why particular values and norms of behaviour have developed around the home with implications for citizenship. Second, this section shows how these values come to have specific meanings in particular situations. Third, it explores the contradictions within the public and private space that are revealed and exacerbated when frontline workers enter the home. Finally, it concludes to bring these three elements together to argue that the location of encounters in the home fundamentally affects how Romanian Roma form relationships with frontline workers and shapes the performances and negotiations that are able to take place.

The fact that interactions took place in the home brought many other aspects of migrants’ lives into view. All of these aspects then became part of the encounter and affected how the label Romanian Roma developed for frontline workers and increased the number of different aspects that mothers had to negotiate to be seen as a ‘good mother’ (see ‘Staging the home’ later in this chapter). Moreover, meanings began to be formed before a frontline workers had set foot inside the house; for example, gardens were discussed to make meanings about Romanian Roma mothers (see ‘Thresholds and gardens’).

Relationships between support workers and mothers were shifting and contingent. The following encounters explore the fragility through which value judgements about mothering are constructed and negotiated within home spaces. In addition, the crucial importance of these relationships for navigating legal statuses in the UK are demonstrated, as well as the constrained positions that mothers are placed in because the encounters occur in ‘private’ space.

It is important to note the underpinning for the dichotomy between the ‘public and private’. The dichotomy has multiple uses and has been deemed one of the most ‘powerful signifiers of how our social worlds are ordered’ (Davidoff 1999: 268). Nevertheless it must also be remembered that this division is a fiction, but a fiction that is mobilised in particular ways and has very real consequences. The private-public distinction is often used to describe the split between the state and the family. It has roots in how liberal democratic nation-states are organised. An underpinning logic of this organisation is how those living within the territory of a nation-state are turned into citizens with individual rights and responsibilities. The role of the citizen in this formulation is deeply permeated by gendered imaginations of family and personhood. Gendered expectations split the public space as a privileged space for men and the private and ‘domestic’ as the sphere for women (see Pateman and Phillips 1987: 119; Chapman and Hockey 1999: 10–13; Massey 2007: 237–8).

The space of the home has come to be recognised as the quintessential physical and emotional setting for intimate lives in European welfare states and in

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