The Gendered Meaning of Home: What is Public, What is Private?

En collaboration avec le GERME

Jan Willem Duyvendak
(Universiteit van Amsterdam)
 

Abstract
The meaning of “home” is changing, both in the United States and Western Europe, under the influence of the gender revolution. There are the daily struggles to balance care and work and to create places where we can “feel at home”. Feminist sociologists, like Arlie Hochschild, who strongly supported the breakdown of “home” in the 1960s and 1970s-since women were the prime homemakers-plea for a re-appreciation of the meaning of home now that nobody seems to care for home anymore and the private sphere is overwhelmed by work and commerce. In his new book, The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States (2011, Palgrave), Duyvendak analyzes what is actually happening in terms of feeling at home and what to think about a world where home becomes work, and work becomes home.

Biography
Jan Willem Duyvendak is full professor in Sociology at the Universiteit van Amsterdam since 2003, after he had been director of the Verwey-Jonker Institute for Social Research (1999-2003) and Professor of Community development at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. He has widely published on gay and lesbian identity politics, as well as edited multiple books on the same topic, such as The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics. National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement (with B.D. Adam and A. Krouwel) and Lesbian and Gay Studies. An Introductory, Interdisciplinary Approach (with T. Sandfort, J. Schuyf and J. Weeks). Moreover, Duyvendak’s other fields of research are disadvantaged neighbourhoods in large cities, community development, multiculturalism, social movements and urban renewal. He has recently published The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States (2011, Palgrave), which examines notions of feeling at home and belonging. Recent publication also include a research on anti-gay violence in Amsterdam called Als ze maar van me afblijven. Een onderzoek naar antihomoseksueel geweld in Amsterdam (with L. Buijs & G. Hekma).