ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the everyday domestic practices of housework and parenting in lesbian homes in order to illustrate the spatialised ways that sexualities and genders are reproduced. This literature emphasises that homes can also be used by lesbians and gay men to express their sexual identities and consolidate their relationships, challenging normative understandings of the home as naturally and normally heterosexual. In contemporary Western societies, an ideal discourse of domesticity equates the home with the heterosexual nuclear family. Government policy, popular culture and the mainstream media construct an ideal notion of the home as a detached, suburban house in which married heterosexual couples consolidate their relationships, reproduce, and raise their children. In the absence of traditional gender scripts structuring the division of housework or childcare in lesbian and gay relationships, the apportioning of this labour is often flexible and negotiated.
