Queer Domestic Architectures: Theorizing Kinship and Communal Modernism

Although I have been living alone for a few years, I still remember having roommates and how communal living shapes domestic space and the rhythms of daily life. I remember how thin walls, bleary mornings, and long evenings in shared kitchens and living rooms inevitably lead you to learn more about your cohabitants than you’d perhaps like, the mutual exposure to daily patterns of work and leisure, mood shifts, and the vicissitudes of bodies creating an intimacy that emerges from the slow development of asking someone “how was your day” and “will you be around when I do this or that” over and over—lives united through the sharing of space. Ordinarily, such roommate arrangements are viewed as strictly temporary and somewhat juvenile, a blip in the normative script, flyover terrain on the way to the “proper” adulthood of partnered or nuclear family life. But the reality is more enduring and intimate. Think about it: how, exactly, do you share your home with others, share kitchen space in the morning, lounge space in the evening, wall space at night? What do we make of the fact that people are often at their strangest at home? Modernist novels attend to the question of what happens when you consider spaces filled with bodies, rather than separating out spaces and bodies, with striking frequency. Beyond isolating studies of private space like the home and public space like crowds, I’m drawn to queerer spaces that blend categories and create different ties. Scholars of modernity, space, and the social have tended to treat the public commons and the private domestic as somewhat distinct entities, overlooking communal domestic spaces that sit at the intersection of public and private and which offer a unique perspective on relationality and domesticity not oriented toward the nuclear family.[1] In this post, I propose a theory of communal domestic spaces that asks what it means to share one’s private life with strangers and what happens to relationality and space when those strangers become kin without the normative trappings of romance and children.

I suggest we turn our attention from the public commons to communal domestic living arrangements, away from traditional heteronormative families, and toward more liminal or atypical domestic arrangements such as convents, tenement buildings, boarding schools, and old age homes—spaces that collapse, or complicate, neat boundaries of public and private. They hide in plain sight, so the ubiquity of these spaces in modernist novels may be surprising at first—it certainly surprised me—but the novels I examine here show that sharing emotional and physical space is no stepping stone or stopping point, but rather emerges as the center of attention for questions of relationality, intimacy, and domesticity that offer new kinship models which complicate our ideologically loaded notions of home and family. As a queer orientation, this argument develops through close reading and critical juxtaposition as well as through creative praxis. I conclude this post with an analog photography series that tests the parameters of domestic, shared space through a more personal lens of home, aesthetics, and gestures of intimacy.

Queering the Home

A privileged site of inquiry for scholars in both the British and the American context, the home only continued its upward trajectory on the theoretical ladder after World War II.[2] At the midpoint of the twentieth century, after modernist writers and theorists had reckoned with the dissolution of the upstairs-downstairs model that characterized many Victorian homes, the home was the discursive space of the nuclear (heterosexual) family. With privacy a new and urgent concern, the home became a space that was safe—and must continue to be kept safe—from outside incursions by the state and by uninvited strangers. Accordingly, and despite challenges by 1960s and 1970s countercultural and feminist thinkers, the home has persisted as the central site of intimate (romantic) affiliation and family.[3]  This privileged association in turn led to a dismissal of the domestic by queer theorists who struggled to reconcile queerness with what they viewed as a heterosexualized domain, which seemed predicated on an idealized and normative model of the home as the central site for the nuclear family. In this understanding of the home as the site of the traditional heteronormative family, queer theory oriented towards the domestic space as a site of the closet, rather than a space of freedom or unconventional kinship-making.[4] Newer interventions into queer kinship have begun to soften these hardened fronts, but there is still little overlap between studies of queer kinship and domestic space.[5] In joining them together, I heed Kadji Amin’s call in “Against Queer Objects” to reanimate concepts that have been dismissed or neglected by queer theory.[6] My readings demonstrate that domestic space—both its physical architectures and conceptual worlds—and queer theory productively deform conventional notions about both intimate life and the built environment.

In architectural theory, “home” comes to describe both a feeling and a material structure. For instance, in his influential 1986 book about the confluence of home and domesticity, Witold Rybczynski suggests that “home meant the house, but also everything that was in it and around it, as well as the people, and the sense of satisfaction and contentment that all these conveyed.”[7] Similarly, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa posits that architecture, as the study of the spaces in which we live, “continues to be the art with the most irrefutable and unavoidable grounding in social life.”[8] Home is the building that shelters and contains people, as well as the feeling of belonging. Jack Jen Gieseking sums it up as follows: “home is a place and an idea,” contingent upon and intertwined with a whole set of issues of sociality and coexistence.[9] The dual meanings of architecture and feeling suffuse much scholarship on the home, revealing the radical potential of attending to queer spaces in a range of living arrangements and the affects those environments engender.

Living with people who are not immediate family is no utopian project, though. Although these living arrangements can offer inhabitants many benefits, they also demand a pragmatic reappraisal of available models of relationality and intimacy in a queer framework; similarly, the arrangements these novels describe are not idealized, but wrested from difficult, fractious, and messy human relations. The struggle of sharing living spaces creates new conditions of familial possibility. Communal domesticity is queer domesticity: intimacy, and especially domestic intimacy, is not the sole domain of heterosexual intimate (romantic) affiliation and of nuclear families. The architecture of the home, therefore, can be productively expanded to encompass more of these experiences. The following readings offer quick snapshots of this dynamic, meant to demonstrate the range of queer domestic architectures in modernism. Like many bodies in a room, this scholarly assemblage offers what I hope will be a useful overview of queer spaces and kinship dynamics.

Kitchen Nightmares: Domesticity in Warner’s Convent

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1948 novel The Corner that Held Them thinks through the promises and failures of domesticity as it describes the slow, plodding intimacy that emerges from life in a convent. Her novel about women who pledge themselves to a life of celibacy among fellow devotees thus emerges as an apt case study of new forms of domestic intimacy. One morning, the prioress Alicia looks on her forever co-tenants and thinks:

they are like a tray of buns. . . . In some the leaven has worked more than in others, some are a little under-baked, some a little scorched, in others the spice has clotted and shows like a brown stain; but one can see that they all come out of the same oven and that one hand pulled them apart from the same lump of dough. A tray of buns, a tray of nuns.[10]

Alicia despairs at the proximity, put off by the closeness in which she lives with the other nuns: like buns on a tray, they stick together, unable to get away unless someone pulls them apart. But although the novel entertains Alicia’s despair, it ultimately refuses to give in to it. The convent’s architect is a man too caught up in what the convent can do for him to consider the nuns who actually live there together. Accordingly, much of their time is taken up by reconstruction projects, an effort to shape the space to their needs for household maintenance. The convent’s architecture, in a very real sense, often fails the collective, their space both shelter and threat, much like the oven that crowds buns until they are irremediably stuck together. The nuns’ physical closeness in the convent space is often uncomfortable, but it is never reducible to a simple equation whereby proximity and domesticity deaden intimacy. Instead, the novel plays with slippage, substituting buns for nuns and trailing off into ellipses (and the openings in space they hint at)—to trace a joyful leap into the unknown, in the face of thwarted expectations of normative intimacy and architectural failure.

As intimacy is deformed and reformed in the business of everyday household maintenance, new conditions of familial possibility and domestic intimacy are created in the convent home. Lauren Berlant posits that intimacy involves “an aspiration for a narrative about something shared.”[11] Berlant’s theory initially takes the dyadic romantic couple as its object, but later makes allowance for “more mobile range of attachments,” (Berlant, “Intimacy,” 4). And indeed, the intimacy of a daily routine need not be tied to romantic, or even normative familial structures. Rather, a state of close familiarity is developed in the process of being around somebody for extended durations of time: you come to be intimate with someone through exposure. The Corner that Held Them presents an understanding of intimacy as a durationally extended process by which one comes to love and dislike the people one lives with in complex ways. If intimacy is a function of closeness more generally, rather than of one particular relationship model, it becomes capacious enough to hold the messy entanglements of people sharing space and daily routines over a long time without recourse to romance or reproduction to hold the household together.

Smell You Later: Thin Walls and Intimate Adjacency in Rhys and Selvon

Being in touching range of other people is not the only way to share space. In Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, the peripatetic protagonist Sasha is most deeply attached to rooms in which the smell of other people lingers “faint, almost imperceptible.”[12] Though she lives in spaces that might be considered inherently transient, Sasha tends toward attachment even when she is by herself, reconstituting the rooms around the olfactory traces left by other guests. The ghostly aromatic presence of those who have stayed in the same rooms before her brings back memories in an almost Proustian way (though her memories are much more traumatic), and attaches her to countless boarding houses and tenement rooms, even as she moves on and on.

And where Sasha insists on making “where [she is] in the present”—to use a phrase from bell hooks—not a temporary fix but a desirable positionality, however precarious, Samuel Selvon’s novels tell the story of West Indian immigrants to London, who sway between the pull of “where [they are] coming from,” and the push toward “settling down,” both as Londoners and in relationships.[13] In The Lonely Londoners and later The Housing Lark, life in the bedsits of London is made intimate by shoddy construction and greedy landlords. These are buildings so crowded that sleepless listeners can hear singing across the street, voices in empty rooms—the ghostly presences of friends lingering after a night of merrily crowding into someone’s bedroom—and walls so thin that one neighbor can complain to another about a blown fuse without having to open her door or coming downstairs. Moses and his friends in The Lonely Londoners grapple throughout with the absence of “proper” home spaces, the lament of “we can’t get no place to live” dogging the edges of their presence in London.[14]

And though marriage is the stated aspiration in both of Selvon’s novels—its normative heft as an institution promising belonging—the novels resolutely remain in the queer sphere of living with strangers and friends. Both The Lonely Londoners and The Housing Lark end in the bedsit, but for Moses in The Lonely Londoners the space now has the feeling of “something solid after feeling everything else give way,” and Bat in The Housing Lark “look around the walls. . . . as if he wishing he could strip the lot and carry it go in new house.”[15] And though homeownership is expected to go along with marriage, in The Housing Lark it is for a house shared between couples and singles. The fantasy of married life is thus made architecturally commensurate with shared space, and through the intimacy of adjacency created by lingering smells and thin walls, hotels and bedsits become home.

Rather than inimical to attachment, then, boarding houses, bedsits, and tenement flats—thin-walled and  porous to sound and smell and the presence of others’ bodies—thus allow for an exploration of alternative models of home. This goes against the more common reading of rented accommodations as markers of urban marginality in modern metropoles, suspended between an ideal of domesticity associated with private, single-family dwelling and the reality of crowded modern life.[16] However, read in terms of communal, non-familial domesticity, boarding houses, bedsits, and tenement flats emerge as more than purely transient spaces; over time they become queer homes, their permeability becomes baked into the domestic arrangement as a form of connection and intimacy. And so, in the refusal to equate the marginalized urban dwelling with placelessness, home emerges as neither static nor settled, but a search; and belonging will be created during the search as much as upon its completion. 

Housing Teen Spirits: Boarding Schools in Richardson, May, and Spark

In her theory of minor feelings, Sianne Ngai examines the negative emotions that arise in ambivalent situations of “suspended agency” and mediate between the aesthetic and political in a nontrivial way as “predicaments posed by a general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as such.”[17] I am particularly interested in the submerged formulation of distance and proximity that undergirds Ngai’s chapter on irritation, where she posits that irritation is an emotion that puts off and rubs the wrong way. In the context of shared domestic space this effect creates distance as well as unwanted proximity, often in a seemingly inescapable cycle, and thus usefully describes what I see happening in a non-idealized version of the home: if intimate spaces give rise to ugly feelings, the friction points are created by a queerer sense of agency throwing into relief the proximity to and incompatibility with normative scripts as much as they are about just wanting to have breakfast by yourself for once.

In the boarding and convent schools of Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs, Antonia White’s Frost in May, and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,  the challenges and frictions of proximity are complicated by caretaking relationships. Boarding school novels oscillate between utopian depictions of spaces where young people can enjoy their innocence and playfulness, protected from “the world,” and horror stories about neglectful carers and pressure-cooker explosions of minor squabbles into full-blown catastrophe.[18] Relationality can turn from nourishment into a deadening force when youthful feelings boil over. The school, being the most highly regimented and disciplinary of the spaces at discussion in this post, is designed to form normative behaviors and habits,[19] to create structures of discipline, and companionship is “a perpetual question.”[20] Being different is near unendurable, as Nanda learns in Frost in May when she feels “branded for life” because she is to take a bath each morning, unlike the other girls at the school.[21] Companionship, like community, is a perpetual question, too, in light of frequent conflict and shifting allegiances, not only in May and Richardson, but also in Spark, where Emily Joyce remains forever a Brodie set hopeful but never becomes a part of the set, and Mary—once a Brodie set member—is dismissed by Miss Brodie herself in a cruel aside as “a little pathetic” and “most irritating.”[22]

Early in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the Brodie set contemplate married life, the fact that their mothers and fathers have “sexual intercourse” instead of schooldays, a thought that is still as “stupendous” to them as the thought of a man wearing pajamas (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 21). The domestic life of husband and wife seems impossibly far away, almost “unbelievable,” but they accept it as the inevitable next step after school. But more often than not the structures of normativity are undermined by the ways in which relationships are shaped by the negative affects that come from jostling for space and resources, even sharing air, with others, being electrified—for better or for worse—by the traces of strangers’ bodies in one’s private space, the hurt of wanting to be part of a group and not being wanted in return. At the same time, it seems to me that the school in boarding house novels offers fertile ground for what Kathryn Bond Stockton has called “lateral growth,” a holding pattern in which there is no telos, but just as household maintenance is a daily task in a house of holy women, these seemingly “empty” years are filled with the intimacy of sharing space with changing bodies.[23] Taking care of those bodies becomes a collective practice, even if it does not always engender intimacy. There is the hair-washing day in Richardson, infinitely coarser than what Miriam is used to, whose hair “had never been washed with anything but cantharides and rose-water,” but at the same time a communal event so central to life at the school that Miriam, at the opening of the chapter, despairs at the thought that she may have missed it (Pointed Roofs, 35). On the other hand, at bath-time in Frost in May, the girls never take off their long cloaks for fear that nakedness may lead to impure thoughts. The school space thus becomes a marker of community that traces, even if it doesn’t always deform for good, the edges of normative possibility as its inhabitants work through ugly feelings and questions of companionship. 

Not God’s Waiting Rooms: Old Age Homes in Taylor and Carrington

Old age homes often have bad associations, as places for elders to be kept conveniently out of the way. However, the shared space of a hotel inhabited by a group of elderly people becomes a surprising site of a late-in-life romance in Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.[24] At the novel’s outset, it seems that care and sexuality have been outsourced and abandoned. Yet they come roaring back after Mrs. Palfrey, who moved into the Claremont hotel because her relatives failed to care for her, has a fall, is rescued by a young man, and passes him off as her grandson to the hotel’s other residents. Over the course of the novel, Ludo becomes carer—in his role as the sham grandson—and erotic object at once, moving fluidly between the roles, feeding Mrs. Palfrey from his own fork at dinner, and making her blush with flirtatious comments. This fluidity is made viable, I argue, in the communal arrangement of the long-term residence hotel: it is a space that collects old folks who have been abandoned by their relatives, but at the same time is under a less strict and regimented order than a hospital or nursing home proper (or a school)—there is plenty of room for new beginnings. The community and reciprocal care at play in the novel are made possible by and create a distance from the nuclear family and its norms and values, and allow romantic and familial relationships to emerge and subside fluidly in the common rooms of the hotel and Ludo’s private flat alike.

While Taylor’s romance story refuses to omit the catalog of pains and losses of old age, nor turns away from ugly feelings that old age engenders, in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet the surrealist mode becomes a phenomenology of old age. Carrington’s protagonist Marian Leatherby feels “by no means impaired by age,” despite the obvious frailty caused by hearing loss, weakening vision, and physical ailments such as toothlessness and rheumatism.[25] Drifting in and out of consciousness, experiencing a loosening grasp on the passage of time, or which parts of her old age home are real, and which are painted on—elsewhere possible signs of decline, in The Hearing Trumpet they are surrealist techniques. The frank acknowledgement of her infirmities is paired with a complete refusal to view them as deficiencies in rejection of society’s obsession with youth and femininity. Although she is by society’s standards unbeautiful, Marian views her short grey beard as “rather gallant,” and she clings to “this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself” (The Hearing Trumpet, 5, 17). And just as Taylor refuses to read age as sexless, Carrington refuses to degender it. The novel presents a catalog of gender expressions: besides Marian with her short grey beard, there is the martial Marquise Claude la Checherelle who has “hair cropped like a man” to match a man’s name; the transwoman Maude, the most feminine, timid, and sensitive among them with her “dainty flowered blouses” and “crêpe-de-Chine cami-knickers;” the gender-fluid Abbess, subject of a painting that Marian becomes obsessed with, who disguises herself as a man on several occasions; and the bald Carmella who delights in wearing the loudest wigs possible (37, 128, 115). The novel refuses to ever settle down, moving ceaselessly through and between spaces, identities, and even civilizations: halfway through the novel, the world ends and Marian creates a new society based on communal care and friendship, assembling a collective of loved ones—though not family members—to travel the world in a fantastical sled. Here, the communal domestic space persists even beyond the end of the world.  

Moreover, and all throughout, Taylor and Carrington combat the idea of old age as the loneliest time through the architectural rearrangement of their characters’ lives. After an initial adjustment period—moving into a new space and a new way of life after decades of living in a particular way takes some getting used to even for literature’s most intrepid and formidable old women—the communal space serves as a structural enabler of shifts in space but also understanding of social norms. Juxtapositions of the heterodomestic home and the shared domestic arrangements deflate ideological investments in the nuclear family as the only locus of belonging and care, and reinforce the characters’ expanding conceptualization of their own bodies and desires. Without the communal living arrangement of the old age home, elders’ lives would be immeasurably emptier: there would be less exposure to others’ ideas and bodies, many of which conflict in productive ways with the characters’ understanding of themselves, prompting re-evaluation of long-standing beliefs and habits. There would be less connection and companionship, too, fewer occasions for trying out new attachments and relationships outside the nuclear family home. Taylor and Carrington demonstrate that moving out of the nuclear family home and into the communal space of the old age home is shocking, disorienting, but ultimately freeing.

Queer Kinship as Creative Praxis

At first blush the texts I have discussed could be seen to emphasize the loneliness of the individual who disappears in the crowd—and a number of them have certainly been read this way by scholars. However, attending to the affordances of shared domestic spaces offers a more complex picture of the seemingly unremarkable dimension of the home, showing that the spaces we think are most beholden to normative scripts and mundanity are in fact deeply strange and full of electrifying contradictions. Read together in the way I propose here, the texts instead highlight not just the difficulty but also the potential that inheres in the lack of a predetermined (family) script and space.

Moving through the communal domestic spaces these novels explore situates domesticity as not just a space, but a practice. It therefore reveals the emotional architecture of the everyday, and the everyday’s ordinariness—the business of maintaining the fabric of the life (materially speaking)—to be deeply queer. For “home” is not just about shelter or space, nor is it just about the “right” way to share one’s own space with others. Rather, it describes a sense of relating to others: these novels about communal domestic space are animated by a view of the whole (the building) as well as a concerted examination of the friction and frissons (the “ugly” and the electrifying) of relationships between the buildings’ inhabitants. Attending to the spatial formations of the shared home—“home” in an expanded sense—makes strange both the conventional home and the fantastical home, in the process inviting us to think about what home looks like, who makes home look like that, and what else it might look like. It does not let go of a sense of material reality that will try to make it impossible for those homes to succeed, but it still allows us to dream, to fantasize, to speculate about the queerness of everyday life. These novels encourage us to reexamine the spatial lexicon of queer theory by taking another look at the collective domestic's architectural, intimate, and erotic charges, offering new possibilities for productively deforming and re-forming conventional notions about both intimate life and the spaces in which it takes place.

 In the process of writing this piece, I found myself recalling my own lives in shared domestic spaces and set out to “queer” my own method and to deepen my readings and theoretical engagements —in the spirit of Amy Elkins’s inspiring call to push modernist experiment into praxis and the cluster on “Modernist Setting”—with a series of photographic triptychs that restage moments and memories of bodies in shared spaces. “Queer photography does not exist,” write Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon in the introduction to their book Queer Photography: A History.[26] And just as there is no queer photography, there is no inherently queer domestic space, either, yet my paper has tried to show the capacity of the domestic for queerness. As a response, I staged, shot, and developed three photo series, which are my attempts to visualize memories of shared domestic situations from my own life. Taken with a Fujifilm disposable camera and a Pentax PC-550 analog camera, respectively,[27] they restage contemporary moments of conviviality as memories from decades past, testifying, in Susan Sontag’s words, to “time’s relentless melt.”[28] In recreating these memories of shared space in photographic form, I have looked to, among others, the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, for the rich texture and immediacy of detail, Tracy Emin’s commentary on the messiness of everyday life, the neorealism of Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series, and the offhand, family-snapshot-esque compositions of Nan Goldin’s photographs.

“Feast” reaches furthest into the past as it recalls the kitchens of my undergraduate flatshares, which were often the messiest rooms in the house because they were the most lived in. Flatmates would make their meals and leave behind a dirty knife here, an empty plate there, forgetting to put away the bread or return the milk to the fridge. Different packages of food would pile up, each instance of meal preparation adding a layer to the archaeology of the shared common space. Paying homage to the experience of being the last to cook a meal in a shared kitchen, in the image of multiple plates that recall how every last utensil and piece of crockery in the sparsely furnished kitchen is used for every meal, and in the crowdedness of a kitchen table that strains to hold the leavings of many people’s meals, they also recall the dinners in Taylor and Carrington, the intimacy shared through the sharing of food.

“Touch (hands)” is a tribute to house parties, bodies crammed so tightly into small spaces that they’re touching at all times, gesticulation compensating for not being able to hear your counterpart over the noisy chatter that resounds between and through thin walls. All candids, the images in this series gesture to the ways in which house parties reconfigure the architecture of the domestic, as groups of various sizes fill spaces that are and aren’t made for gatherings, everyone always just a bit too close for comfort, but exhilarated by the crossing of familiar faces—flatmates, friends, neighbors—and strangers. Bodies leaning into each other to hear over the din of dozens of other conversations, gestures animated in the attempt to convince a stranger of one’s opinions, the images in this series evoke the closeness of the nun-buns of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s convent and the parties in Selvon’s basement flats, improvised and spontaneous, shared well beyond the thin walls of rented accommodations.

“Bodies / light” emphasizes the utopian side of living together and sharing space, the dream of sharing care and affection that inheres all communal domestic arrangements, even they are not available all the time. Taken on the day of the total eclipse, the light in these images, still a bit strange from the recent totality, promises, as it spills over faces and bodies assembled in celebration, the warmth and intimacy of community in shared domestic spaces as a timeless experience, one that may not always be present in the moment, but that is always available as a state to be aspired to. Here I’m drawing parallels to my piece’s boarding school novels and their simultaneous optimism about and critique of futurity imagined in the contact between subjects and the continuous reception and remaking of shared domestic space. The photographs emphasize that home is always more than the private space of the nuclear family. By visualizing the material traces of bodies in these spaces, they speak to the ways in which creative praxis enlarges scholarship on queer kinship-making and domestic space.