ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the negotiation of bodily boundaries between young teenagers and their parents at home. As many young people report feeling awkward about their physical development during puberty, it is perhaps unsurprising that they tend to become increasingly private about their time in the bathroom. While privacy has been a central theme in a range of work exploring the micro-geographies of domestic space (Allan and Crow, 1989; Sibley and Lowe, 1992; Madigan and Munro, 1999; Gurney, 2000a, 2000b; Mallett, 2004; Robinson et al., 2004), the socio-spatial dimensions of intergenerational interactions concerning the bathroom appear to have received minimal attention within the literature. Despite its relative marginalization in analyses of home, I contend that the largely tacit negotiations over young people’s solitary time in the bathroom are key to the management of pubertal bodies within families. As such, this chapter contributes to a growing body of work which explores the construction of affective boundaries within families (Halley, 2007; Gabb, 2008). Furthermore, by highlighting the significance of parent-child bathroom negotiations within accounts of ‘growing up’, this chapter responds to calls for greater documentation of young people’s self-definitions and their own views on the transition from childhood into teenage years (Valentine, 2003; Weller, 2006).
