‘Unhomely moments’: Civilising domestic worlds in colonial Australia

Abstract

This article explores the multiple connections between the colonisation of Australia in the nineteenth century and the formation of domestic worlds as the site for 'civilising' children. The affective bonds of family were often regarded as an indispensable element in the nurture and training of children, but where the bonds of 'natural affection' seemed to pose an obstacle to the civilising project, they were ruthlessly severed.

Making Homes Unhomely: The Politics of Displacement in a Gentrifying Neighborhood in Chicago

“…According to Massey, ethnicity and gender are, for instance, intricately connected to whether and how we have access to home. Earlier scholars have argued that the space of home is marked by war, colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy (Bhaba ; Bui ; Hooks ; Kaplan ; Russell ; Vale ). A more recent wave of scholarship describes how political economies unmake domesticities, and how homes are unmade through lack of recognition of unwanted others, how agents of displacement such as corporate landlords and state offices are “absent present” in homespace, and how making and unmaking processes occur simultaneously (Baxter and Brickell )…”

Theorising the gig economy and home-based service work

“…Platforms for matching domestic workers with households have never been neutral in the way that they conceptualise the nature of home-based service work and its status in comparison to other forms of work. In the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, the prevailing ideology governing domestic service was that of the ‘private sphere’, a conceptualisation of the home as a haven of moral and social protection (Russell, 2009: 328) that was emphatically non-industrial and in which women were expected to perform the work of care for spiritual, emotional and moral, rather than pecuniary, reward. A sense of ordained hierarchy, overseen and authorised by a Christian God, was crucial to this world view.…”