ABSTRACT
Space is where power/knowledge relations are realized materially (Foucault 1977). Foucault remarked that, “A whole history remains to be written of spaces —which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural)—from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat” (quoted in Soja 1995:14). The investigation of spaces has, however, tended to concentrate on the great strategies rather than the little tactics. Cities, urban and suburban development, public spaces such as prisons, schools, museums, railway stations, great squares and thoroughfares, have been analyzed in political, socioeconomic, and psychological terms, but the “little tactics of the habitat” exemplified by the household or domestic living space have had less attention. It is, however, in those domestic spaces inhabited, on a consistent daily basis, largely by women, that gender power relations are often starkly revealed and played out.
