ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses middle-class housing, dispossession, and links between body, house, and home-life. Often viewed in conjunction with disadvantaged and poor, displacement and shifts in middle-class neighborhood composition also occur as houses-homes are transformed into commodities through global financial processes. The ultimate occupants, often women, are devalued and jettisoned along with the life of the home. This chapter considers how a geo-centered and collaborative visual and poetic exploration can conjure and engage with the spectral human presence held in material objects. The author collaborated as poet-geographer with artist Ursula Brookbank whose ongoing project, She World, constructs an archive of women’s material effects. This chapter explores the gendered loss of family home as experienced through the feminine body. It asserts that the archive of the women’s material effects, the artwork, and the poetry resist the disappearance of the house, and dispossession of home-life. This methodological approach allows artist and poet-geographer to strive to break down boundaries between researcher and subject, while expanding the resulting artwork-scholarship. It looks to the materials for its methodological starting point, believing they will suggest their own ways of being researched.
