ABSTRACT
The sensory experiences are real to modern western house dwellers as those associated with kinship, witches and the ancestors are to the Songhay. Such sensory experience, knowledge and practice are a fundamental to the articulation of traditional and contesting gender identities in the home. By comparing the forms departures from notions of housewifely practice take in two different cultural contexts – England and Spain – this chapter explains how the individual practices can be situated in wider processes of changing gender as it occurs in specific cultural contexts. Drawing from anthropological uses of Butler’s theory of gender performativity, it explores how the expressivity of everyday gender and the human agency it implies engage with the material agency of the home as formulated by Miller and Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zuniga. The chapter provides some background on changing gender and the home by outlining first a wider sociological analysis of change and then the closer context of homes themselves.
