Georgina Downey is an art historian who has published widely on the domestic interior in art. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Adelaide, and has received an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travel Grant (2006) and University of Adelaide small research grants. Her most recent books are Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns, (2013) and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (edited with Anca Lasc and Mark Taylor 2015) both published by Bloomsbury. Her research interests are: the interior in modern and contemporary art, design history, cosmopolitanism and critical animal studies and the creative arts.
By some bizarre fluke of temporal synchronicity, two colleagues and I have just signed a contract with an academic publisher to produce what will be my third book Domesticity under Siege: When home isn’t safe. It’s a multi-author anthology and I will be co-writing the Introduction with my fellow editors as well as contributing a chapter.
It’s about the agents, tangible and invisible, that undermine notions of home. Spookily, right from early days back in 2018, we were interested in the undermining of home by viruses, or what, pre-Pasteur/bacterial times, folk referred to as ‘miasmas’. So, we’re currently trying to think through the global effects of Covid-19 home quarantining on the domestic world, so we can incorporate these and make the book as timely as possible.
We never thought in our wildest imaginations we would be writing the book itself ‘under siege’ or in lock down. Now in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Brighton, England respectively, we editors are stuck without choice in the very space of our research, and our deepest interest. Suddenly, our elegant theoretical precepts get to be lived out.
The idea of ‘home’ we want to challenge is its age-old positioning as ‘as a refuge and place of repose for the family, a nurturing environment for children, and a safe place for visitors. There are worse places to be confined to, it would seem. Today however, with the world in lock down at home, the boundaries of nurturing domesticity are colliding confusingly with outside and inside agents.
We might start by asking what is ‘home’ when you are confined in it 24/7? Culturally speaking, in the democratized, post-industrial West, with its intense focus on the rights of the individual to move freely back and forth between public and private space, the usual connotations of being confined to home are mostly negative.
We use the term ‘home detention’ to describe the condition of prisoners – usually with electric monitoring devices attached to their bodies. We’re accept, as societies, for the need to support individuals with physical or psychological challenges to mobility so they can move with ease between registers of space. We are aware, even though social supports are inadequate and/or underfunded, of the need to ensure that those at home caring for a new-borns, and at the other end of the scale, the elderly, can exercise some choice in getting in and out of home.
However we have not been nearly aware enough, of individuals confined at home with violent partners. Mandatory lock down to combat COVID-19 now means that they are effectively trapped at home with their abusers, isolated from the people and the resources that could help them. Some abusers are using COVID-19 to further isolate their victims. Hotlines and shelters in the US, UK and Australia are reporting an increase in calls. In China in February, according to one source, calls for help tripled as a result of lock down.[1] In Australia, authors of the 2016 Royal Commission into Domestic Violence are also worried. At the very least, their findings have to battle for news space, and that the ‘momentum for reform will be halted by the [COVID-19] crisis’.[2]
The notion of home as shelter is risible also for the stateless, for refugees in detention and for those who have been living under curfew in their homes in Gaza, in Syria, and other repressive and violent regimes. What can you do if the army patrolling outside won’t let you leave your house? And if you do, they will shoot you.
So you can see with just these few examples that while ‘home’ has had a good rap over the millennia; the idea we have of it as shelter, providing an almost mystical form of sanctuary, doesn’t always hit the mark. Yet most cultures are deeply invested in its myths. Home is where ‘mother’ is, its where our first memories are crystallized, it’s the place we go back, either in memory or reality; its extends to nation – to ‘home’ land, which consists of an inside, and a beyond, a notion political leaders from the beginning of recorded time have been quick to evoke during periods of perceived internal and external threat.
Governments around the world are now relying on the myths of home to activate new self isolating behaviors. Notwithstanding, the home is still a place where we can contract illnesses – from people, ‘miasmas’ and objects – agents that need to go in and out in order for ‘home’ to function. What we might gather from this collectively is that home is neither always ‘shelter, nor is it a fortress; it’s actually more like a kind of a permeable membrane.
Please stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow, where I discuss some of the more ‘viral’ memes that people are sharing on social media to keep morale up, and how these relate to our ideas of home.
[1] https://time.com/5803887/coronavirus-domestic-violence-victims/
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-29/coronavirus-family-violence-surge-in-victoria/12098546
