GEOG 1410 Lecture 12: GEOG 1410 - Place and the politics of home
3 May 2018
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Department
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GEOG 1410
October 17, 2017
Home and the politics of Place
What we think of Home and the connotation associated with it:
● An intimate and private place
● Residence or a place of shelter; the suburban house
● The symbol that we use for places that aren’t our shelters: “Homepage”
● A place from which we orient ourselves within the rest of the world, our starting place
is home; what grounds us
● A symbol of safety and comfort - “home is where the heart is” “home is where you
keep the fires burning”
● Familiar and personal; to feel homesick is to long for the familiar.
● In baseball, home is the starting place and the ending place
● We talk about having a home town, a homeland; places where we ideally return
● We talk about things being homemade, there’s a sense of something being
homemade as being more personal, familiar, feels more genuine, made with love, not
impersonal
● When you tell immigrants to “go home” is to say “go back to where you belong”
○ That there is some sort of spatial order, that some homes belong to some
people and not to others
● An engendered place
○ Women are the people that produce the environment of comfort, safety and
care
○ As women have left the kitchen, it remains mostly women who care for
houses and children
● Home is a bordered space, demarcates a line between public and private space
○ Private, specific to a family
○ Mark it with fences and locks
○ You can have multiple homes
○ You can relocate home and reinvent it, so it can have the same processes as
the original home
● In the United States you have a literal border that creates “Homeland Security”
○ Connects the idea of the nation as a home
○ Suburban, fully detached home represents “home”
● The use of “Home” to associate with country
○ “Join the army for home and country”
○ Home is something that needs to be protected, home is a place that needs to
be safe and protected
○ Home and country are interrelated
○ There is a process of making home, as making it ours and exert some sort of
control over it, “make yourself at home” so you may feel familiar and safe.
● Doing this is a process of territorialization, easy to flip between country and home
because they are both territories
● Gender: traditionally women have not had power within or outside of the home
○ Women were excluded from the world because their place was “at home”
Document Summary
What we think of home and the connotation associated with it: Residence or a place of shelter; the suburban house. The symbol that we use for places that aren"t our shelters: homepage . A place from which we orient ourselves within the rest of the world, our starting place is home; what grounds us. A symbol of safety and comfort - home is where the heart is home is where you keep the fires burning . Familiar and personal; to feel homesick is to long for the familiar. In baseball, home is the starting place and the ending place. We talk about having a home town, a homeland; places where we ideally return. We talk about things being homemade, there"s a sense of something being homemade as being more personal, familiar, feels more genuine, made with love, not impersonal. When you tell immigrants to go home is to say go back to where you belong .
