Setting up home: The role of domestic materiality in extended family identity formation

Abstract

This paper examines the role of domestic materiality in the construction of extended family identity. It investigates how extended family members experience tensions during new family formation and the ways in which materiality contributes to the resolution of these tensions and the construction of a new family identity. Our findings suggest that the intersubjectivities centred on domestic material objects cause tensions in relationships. However, it is through a process of negotiation stimulated by these intersubjectivities that a new extended family identity emerges. We identify four materiality capacities in this process of negotiation: catalysing, associating, disassociating, and bridging. We posit that these negotiations are an essential part of the process of identity formation given that they motivate a new understanding of competing family discourses, changes to individual and collective status, and a restructuring of family, especially family structure, character, and intergenerational orientation.