House of Terror: Domestic Spaces and Queer Counter-Spaces in 21st Century British Novel

While home and domestic life are vital to one’s being, queer’s relationship with interiors remains a complicated one. Seen as a threat to everything domesticity symbolises —family, reproduction, childcare— queer people find themselves outside the domestic realm. While alternative families have become more visible in recent years, especially after the legislation of gay marriage, they often reiterate the heteronormative nuclear family model. In queer theory, one strand locates queerness in a place that contrasts every social structure and form, while a relatively recent scholarship that engages with bodily experiences of queerness complicates its relationship to social structures that are glossed over by the former. Drawing from the latter stance of queer theory, this dissertation looks at domestic practices and queer homes in literary narratives through an embodied perspective. If “sex is understood to be as various as the people who have it” (“The Trouble with Normal,” 35) as Michael Warner says, so are the domestic experiences as various as the sheer range of sexualities. In this sense, there are a myriad of queer forms of mundane life, queer homes, and home-making practices that are absent from both academic and public imagination. This dissertation considers literature and literary narratives as a medium that can communicate the vast possibilities of queer domesticities. In doing so, it provides accessible, comprehensible and actionable forms of queer domestic practices that emerge from the texts in the hands of contemporary novelists without sealing them into a totalising singularity. Furthermore, looking at how queerness enters the texts creates novel effects in narrative techniques. The analysis expands the narrative role of space and offers a new understanding of conventional narrative categories, language, and style. Therefore, the main objectives of this project can be formulated as follows: firstly, it aims to show that 21st century novels challenge dominant cultural forms of domesticity and offer alternative forms of queer domestic spaces through the interactions between the use of narrative space and other narrative categories —theme, plot, perspective, metaphor, allegory, and metonymy. Secondly, and more broadly, it demonstrates how these forms can contribute to and provide different mediums and tools for queer political agenda. Accordingly, its methodology consists mainly of queer and feminist, narrative, and phenomenological theory with a practice of renewed, politically oriented formalist analysis. It examines a range of 21st century novels that differ in their plot line and narrative style, but all that inscribe queerness. It considers these forms as a political strategy that provides a site of resistance in which power relations and social categories of gender, race, and class are contested. Drawing on the concepts that mediate between literary and queer studies, and geography, this project renders new ways of understanding what it means to be home.

Keywords: Queer, form, space, narrative, home, belonging, sexual identity, relationality.