Multiple homes, emotions, selves: home narratives of women who abandoned unhappy homes in Istanbul

Abstract

Home is both a material and an affective space formed by emotions, belonging, and memories, as well as safety and economic hardship. This article investigates how home and homemaking practices effect women’s sense of belonging and relationship with their ‘selves’, and how different women’s multifaceted experiences differentiate the relationship with home and allow multiple home ideas to arise. To examine this argument, I conducted a qualitative research based on a series of in-depth interviews with two different groups of women, who left their homes and established new homes in Istanbul, Turkey. In line with the processual- and relational-space perspective, I aim to explore how home feeling and self-realization are intertwined with women’s relationships with the home and homemaking practices. The study emphasises the significance of home feeling for women’s sense of belonging, homemaking practices as a survivor strategy to withstand abuse and home as a space with the potential to construct self.