What would happen in home corner if it transformed into a refuge for queer kin?
Shared by AFFRICA TAYLOR
What would happen in home corner if it transformed into a refuge for queer kin? Years ago, I co-authored an article that featured the queer home corner antics of a boy who became princesses and a girl who became a horse. Recently, Haraway proposed that we need to make non-human kin in order to collectively recuperate damaged worlds. She’s written her own speculative fiction (SF) about ‘the children of compost’ who do this recuperative work with queer-symbio animal kin. Her stories prompt me to re-imagine home corner anew – beyond the standard design and play that reproduce hetero-normative domestic relations. As a provocation to ECE scholars interested in experimenting with feminist common worlding methods and writing their own SF stories, I ask … What would the architectures of home corner look like if designed to accommodate all manner of refugees, dispossessed and displaced beings instead of nuclear families? What kinds of recuperative queer kin rituals, practices and relations would emerge in this purposely-reconfigured collective safe space?
References
Haraway, D. (2017) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Taylor A. & Richardson, C. (2005) Queering home corner, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6 (2): 163-173.
