sacrilege in the sitting room: contesting suburban ... - Fritz Haeg

HOME CULTURES
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MARTIN DINES
insecurity the “perverse dynamic,” “that fearful interconnectedness
whereby the antithetical inheres within, and is produced by, what it
opposes” (Dollimore 1991: 33). Gay suburban narratives commonly
seek to engage with and manipulate this allegedly threatening hybridity.
Instead of merely denigrating the suburbs from a safe distance,
these texts attempt to defile suburbia. Through acts of symbolic
subversion, specifically, by disrupting suburban-domestic with the
assertion of a homosexual presence, gay characters aim to undermine
hegemonic heterosexism. Such acts of desecration are facilitated by
rendering the domestic interior as a religious space—usually quite
straightforward given, as I will discuss, certain rooms’ established
centrality to the rituals of family.
Such attempts to destabilize heterosexist hegemony, however,
are usually quite limited in effect. In the texts that I discuss below,
dominant forms of sexual and social relations are rarely altered
substantially, and never permanently, by attacks made against them
at the level of the symbolic. Indeed, the same texts serve rather to
puncture the optimism arising from certain debates in the field of
sexual geographies, in particular, the practice of “queering” space.
When queer activists address issues of space and sexual oppression,
for instance, they typically aim first to demonstrate the ambient
heterosexuality of ostensibly neutral, public environments, and then
to undermine the hegemony of straight space by foregrounding its
contingency and performativity (see Bell and Valentine 1995: 18–21).
The novels I examine in this article suggest, at least, that simply to
indicate that a power relation is neither natural nor inevitable is not
in itself necessarily disabling.
The inability of gay suburban narratives to undermine heterosexual
familialism is further compounded by the tendency, as alluded to
by Sinfield, to become deeply attached to the family home and its
environs. Suburban homes readily conjure the most soothing aspects
of early life: the stability and comfort of the domestic interior and
the calming predictability of the ubiquitous suburban exterior. Just
as reassuring as soft furnishings and iterative streetscapes are the
strong affective ties of family. Indeed, these material backdrops often
metonymically represent, respectively, maternal and paternal roles.
The familial environment is valued so highly because it constitutes
a pre-sexual space. If emergent adolescent sexuality, one of the first
drives that breaks the containment of the family, generates at least
as much shame as it does pleasure, then the family home is very
likely to be viewed nostalgically as a pre-lapsarian ideal.
Yet, as suggested above, suburbs are often also sites of sexual
discovery. So, evidently, there is a potential contradiction between
two appealing aspects of the suburbs: the pre-sexual confines of
the family and the sexualized landscapes of suburbia. Equally,
attempts to validate suburban territories, such as sites where men
meet together to have sex, conflict with strategies of subverting the