ABSTRACT
What is this place we call ‘home’? How does it feel? How do lesbians and feminists inhabit it? What kind of affects emerge in this process? What does ‘coming out’ entail? How do feminists and lesbians imagine and talk about home? This chapter explores the narratives of activist lesbians and feminists in Athens on home and belonging. It unravels the notion of ‘home’ as an affective spatiotemporal category on which activist lesbians and feminists attach multiple and divergent meanings and desires: From the childhood home experienced as exile and imbued with feelings of estrangement and loss to the family home seen as a site of remembrance and self-reconciliation. The notion of home is further explored in relation to a non-confessional mode of ‘coming out’ as well as a kind of ‘arrival’ to an identity. The makings of the queer and lesbian feminist community are loaded with homely desires and fantasies of an ideal queer home. All in all, home is represented as a place to which one arrives, leaves, returns, moves back-forth, attaches to people, relationships, objects, and smells, only to realize that she/he already feels a ‘stranger at home’.
