GAY MEN’S HOME-MAKING AS AFFECTIVE PRACTICE IN TURKEY: THE PURSUIT OF SAFETY AND COMFORT

Abstract

The geographies of home are discerned as having a particular significance in the lives of gay men. The individual homes of lesbians and gay men are amenable to affirming non-heterosexual identities and subverting the cultural norms of heterosexual family life. This study contributes to understanding this construction of lesbian/gay identity at home. Drawing on gay men’s everyday experiences within Turkey’s cultural context, I deal with home as a spatial domain laden with diverse meanings and affective registers. I suggest that Turkey’s cultural context structures gay men’s habitus and informs their knowledge of possible actions that are available to them. In this discursive terrain, they attribute specific meanings of safety and autonomy to their homes. However, these meaning-making practices should not be reduced to an experience of closeting, as gay men’s domestic life opens up a space of comfort for gay identities. Insofar as gay men can re-inscribe their homes as sites for the comfort of gay identities, these homes seamlessly become a performative domain. Within them, the men’s situated activities pave the way for creation and affirmation of gay identities, in both individual and collective ways. Therefore, I suggest that gay men’s affective dispositions (namely safety and comfort) arise out of their relations with people, objects and places, and lead to restructuring their habitus in a way so as to validate their gay identities in domestic life. Yet this is an unfinished project and needs to be renegotiated to ensure gay men’s safety and comfort in their everyday lives.