ABSTRACT
Chapter 13 focuses on sexuality and home, which responds to the call for making visible the invisibility of everyday sexuality in social work research, practice and education (Dunk, 2007; Rowntree, 2014). Multidisciplinary authors, including in geography (Gorman-Murray, 2012) and history (Cook, 2014), have argued that sexuality is central to one’s experience of home. Heterosexual domesticities and the ‘queer home’ intersect with gendered, racialised and classed social relations and are subject to scrutiny, including by social workers. Sexuality in social work has been examined across the life course, including focusing on disability, sexual health, sexual abuse, mental health and sexual exploitation (Bywater & Jones, 2007). The normalising practices of social work are imbued with heteronormative assumptions and their intersections with unequal racialised, abled, classed and gendered power relations that shape how home is experienced and understood. The queering of social work and research can reveal and disrupt heteropatriarchal power and normalising intervention strategies (Self, 2015). This chapter examines social work responses to home and sexuality, which includes highlighting lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) and queer identified people’s experiences of home and community.
