ABSTRACT
This chapter is about evocations of the 'original' family home in narratives of queer migrations, and how this 'home' is differently figured and refigured in relation to different movements: leaving home, returning home and homing. It aims to decentre the heterosexual, familial ‘home’ as the emblematic model of comfort, care and belonging. The chapter contains leaving home/moving home, returning home, and homing. It discusses theoretical narratives of queer migration as homecoming, where ‘home’ is both origin and destination. The chapter considers the movement back home and how home is reimagined or reconstituted through memories that challenge the ideal of home-as-familiarity. It offers a different version of ‘returning home’ – homing – and wonders how memories of home can relocate queerness resolutely within the home. The chapter proposes to extend Avtar Brah’s definition of ‘homing desire’ to include its embeddedness within what call ‘motions of attachment’.
