ABSTRACT
How does Populism map onto the symbolic imaginary of home, family, and private property? From the Bundy standoffs in Nevada and Oregon to the gun-toting McCloskeys standing on their St. Louis mansion’s front yard, images of “ordinary” “real Americans” defending their right to own against the imposition of established and elitist interest groups are easily made legible within the dominant tropes of media coverage. Private property and the protection of the home and the nuclear family are often presented as the assumed baseline of public discourse while also serving as the organizing metaphors for Populist contumacy. Further, at the center of populism is a drive to define the ordinary and normal. In contrast, alternative forms of home, family, and intimacy that do not match these tropes due to their social and spatial organization or their material exclusion fail to be fully legible in popular discourse and are often reduced to extreme cases or routine statistics. This imbalance is manifested in both the act and subsequent outrage of the Meyerses, a Black family, purchase of a Levittown, PA home. The chapter explores the ways in which conventional formulations of home ownership, whiteness, and patriarchal kin relations are co-constructed with populist movements and consequently how racialized or “queer” forms of home and kin are rendered as a threat.
