V Seminar of the Geography and Gender Research Group Course 2023-24: Obrint les portes de casa: Experiències i resistències de joves LGBT+ del Bages a l¿espai domèstic

Next Friday, June 14, will thake place the fifth Seminar of the Geography and Gender Research Group of the academic year 2023-2024.

In this activity, we will be able to enjoy the last presentation of the thesis before its defense by Julia Pascual Bordas (Doctoral candidate. Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Gender Studies: Cultures, Societies and Politics. Researcher on LGBTIAQ+ youth and domestic spaces in Catalonia. Department of Political and Social Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University).

     "Obrint les portes de casa: Experiències i resistències de joves LGBT+ del Bages a l’espai domèstic"

The conception of the home as a safe space has been problematized from feminist and LGBTIA+ perspectives. These approaches have highlighted how the home can be a space of conflict, struggle and negotiation, which can generate tensions for women and LGBTIA+ people between feelings of belonging and isolation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear. From the social sciences, research has focused primarily on the study of public space, leaving private space in the background, especially in the case of the LGBTIA+ collective. However, the private sphere and, specifically, the home is a relevant space, since it is an everyday place where power dynamics that are important to analyze for the understanding of social inequalities are manifested, (re)produced and transformed. This doctoral thesis proposes to focus on the home as a central space to investigate how young LGBTIA+ people experience discrimination and generate transformative resistance in their daily lives. Through a qualitative methodology, we analyze the well-being/discomfort, experiences and emotions of thirty-seven young LGBT+ people in different spaces of the family home and their own. The research is located in the Bages region, outside the metropolitan area of Barcelona, in order to respond to the lack of studies in small, medium-sized cities and rural areas, thus expanding knowledge about LGBT+ realities in different contexts. This research uses the intersection of three categories (age, gender and sexual orientation) to learn how these combine resulting in power dynamics and coping strategies in different home spaces. The results highlight how adultism and cisheteronorma operate in everyday spaces shaping the experiences of young LGBT+ women. Faced with a cisheteronormative context, young women with non-normative sexual and gender identity respond by developing strategies of resistance and transformation. The thesis shows the importance of putting the focus on the home to understand how social norms operate and offers a complex view of private space, as a conflicted space with negotiations, (in)comforts, power and contradictory emotions that allows a deeper understanding of how social norms operate in domestic spaces.

The activity is linked to the PhD in Geography program.