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Topophilia and Topophobia

The Home as an Evocative Place of Contradictory Emotions

University of Extremadura

People’s relations with places are frequently saturated with emotions. For places, it is possible to have feelings and bonds similar to those that are established between people and equally ambivalent. The perception that one has of places plays an important role in the production of emotions and, in this sense, the home provokes in those who reside in it, although especially in housewives, both negative and positive emotions. The testimonies given by a group of rural women from southwestern Spain allow me to establish a series of metaphors and antinomies of the home that transform it into a source of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Understood in this way, the home is neither a natural and desirable setting for women nor the locus that lays the foundation for their alienation but also a place of creation and of recreation of women; a fortress, prison, a place of conflict and of security.

Key Words: domestic space • topophilia • topophobia • gender ideologies • cultural meanings

Space and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 2, 193-213 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1206331204273984


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