ABSTRACT
Dominant discourses of domesticity that present home as a heterosexualised, nuclear family space are reproduced and reinforced through policy, house design and popular media imageries. State, commercial and media endorsements on interior designs, styles and spatial layouts of home are heterosexualised within normative assumptions about the daily domestic routines involved in maintaining homes and households. These gender-circumscribed discourses of home set limits on family arrangements, often restricting alternative family and household configurations. This chapter moves beyond the heteronormative ideology of home and domesticity to identify modes of homemaking that contest and transform them. Alternative domesticities are identified that signify struggles and contestations over traditional meanings of home in late modernity: from conventional family values to postmodern notions of mobility, agency and change. New domestic living arrangements between householders are addressed by chronicling changes in intimate affiliations, for example among lesbian and gay couples, and by assessing how these changes have been mediated by popular media accounts of home.
