On constructing the self (deciding what we are and what we are not)

 Iris Marion Young

Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays

‘Thus home is often a metaphor for mutually affirming, exclusive community defined by gender, class, or race’ (p.147). The objects used to construct a sense of identity allow Young’s exclusive community of home-builders, to separate themselves from violence and others. However, this exclusivity is permissible as the operation of it freezes ‘the conventional into the natural’ (2005, p.63).

Judith Butler

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

 Judith Butler’s (2006a) idea that who “I” am is intrinsically bound up in the other. According to Butler: ‘we cannot represent ourselves as merely bounded beings, for the primary others who are past for me not only live on in the fibre of the boundary that contains me . . . but they also haunt the way I am, as it were, periodically undone and open to becoming unbounded (p.28).

On constructing space

bell hooks

Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics.

Building a home (or a safe space) is a ‘radically subversive political gesture’ (1990, p.43).

Nirmal Puwar 

Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place 

‘A muted sense of terror and threat underlies the reception of racialised minorities and women in predominantly white and masculine domains. ‘Known’ through a limited set of framings, these bodies jar and destabilise an exclusive sense of place. As the ‘unkown’, who defy conventions and boundaries, they represent the potentially monstrous, whose somatic arrival invades the social and psychic’ (2004:11).

Sara Ahmed

A Phenomenology of Whiteness

‘… spaces acquire the ‘skin’ of the bodies that inhabit them…’ (2007:157).

Shannon Jackson

Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics 

‘enabling systems often go unregistered in the moment that we use them’ (2011, p5).