Gender Territories

Looking at House Hunters

Since its debut in 1999, the House Hunters TV franchise has become a staple on HGTV, an American cable channel devoted to domestic lifestyle and property TV (Everett 2004). House Hunters focuses on the United States, whereas spin-off House Hunters International chronicles people looking for homes around the globe. Other variations and specials showcase temporary vacation homes, luxury houses, or recreational vehicle (RV)s, or repackage the standard half-hour episodes from House Hunters and House Hunters International into hour-long themed specials. The format is readily susceptible to repetition and recombination, manifesting a neoserial adaptability that extends to how it is programmed in the HGTV schedule. It regularly airs in different day-parts throughout the week, including prime time, with two to six episodes shown back-to-back, most of them repeats; it is not unusual for a dozen or more episodes of House Hunters and House Hunters International to be shown in the course of a day. HGTV sometimes schedules daylong marathons in random assortment or thematically grouped. By clustering episodes in programming blocks, each becomes part of a larger, ongoing story, even though there are no continuing characters.

The House Hunters’ rendition of finding a home seems straightforward. Each episode introduces a house hunter and equips them with a local realtor who shows them three properties that generally fit the buyer’s requirements with respect to budget, location, space, and style. The buyer assesses each property, weighs the options, and chooses one of the houses. Episodes conclude with the buyer settling into the new home, from a few weeks to several months later, often entertaining guests. In its broad contours, this is a common structure for real estate TV programs about people who are trying to rent or buy a place to live. But there is something fundamentally weird about this format. In particular, it is not obvious that following the vicissitudes of a succession of strangers looking for homes in varied locales would hold intrinsic or sustained interest for television viewers. Yet this is exactly what the shows do.

This article focuses on the original House Hunters and the nature of its attractions in the context of the American HGTV channel and the American real estate market. The program is American by design, presenting people buying houses within the geopolitical borders and realty-economic conditions of the United States. The program and its home channel HGTV trade on the values and meanings of American home ownership and its strong affiliations with arrival, success, and security, even achieving the American Dream (Cullen 2003). The program does not directly trumpet this theme, although first-time buyers occasionally mention that owning a home gives them a piece of the American Dream. The value of home ownership is taken for granted, especially as HGTV is wholly dedicated to domestic lifestyle programming—variations and permutations of home remodeling, decorating, and landscaping shows, and programs about people buying, renting, or selling homes. Occupied domestic space is the ground zero for HGTV, because you have to live somewhere to decorate or renovate in the first place. All of HGTV’s programs perform the appeals, challenges, and values of home life through aesthetic, affective, and consumerist practices. Although the programs have a distinctly American cast, they also engage more diffuse and heterogeneous perspectives, extending beyond strictly national boundaries and identities.

House Hunters mobilizes diverse buyers, budgets, and locations, representing the American domestic real estate market in terms of variety and difference. The inclusiveness embraced by the show is based in the affinitive appeal of home ownership, assembling participants and viewers in a common, projected vision of national diversity through the accumulation of disparate, local real estate transactions. A summary of just a few buyer stories can provide a better sense of this diversity. Corey and Shoshanna are looking for a home in Savannah, Georgia, for less than $200,000. They want to be close to their downtown business, a natural soap and candle shop, though they know they could get a larger place for the money outside the city. Jamillah Moore, recently appointed president of Los Angeles City College, is buying a condo in Los Angeles. With her budget of $400,000, she is looking for a two bedroom/two bath property. Colin and Alisabeth live in Parker, Colorado, with their two children. He is a research scientist, and she is a psychologist. They want to move closer to Denver to cut down on their daily commute, and can spend up to $1.6 million on a new home. Amanda, a special education teacher, and Christie, a nurse, recently celebrated their civil union, and are looking for a house on the New Jersey shore. Christie wants to be near the beach, but with their budget of $375,000–$425,000, Amanda might prefer a larger house farther from the water. Amateur pool champion Sheila is ready to move out of her mother’s home in Birmingham, Alabama. She seeks a home with room for a pool table on a budget of $150,000. Jake and Rudi have had it with their long-distance relationship, so Rudi, who restores houses, is moving from Palm Springs to Los Angeles and buying a house with Jake, a corporate lawyer. With their $1.4 million budget, they want at least three bedrooms, two baths, a home office, and a pool.

American households and home buyers turn out to be a heterogeneous lot. The program routinely demonstrates that ideas of “home” are variable and multiple. For everyone whose house hunt involves moving back to the place where they grew up to be close to their family, there is someone moving away from their childhood home, close friends, or familiar territory to pursue other (personal or professional) interests. The very possibility of going home or finding a home requires a search, a house hunt. In one way or another, everyone on the show is leaving home to move to another. Through this process, House Hunters makes manifest trajectories of national mobility, of people and property, as it represents individuals who move, the places where they alight, and the property they buy. Between the numbingly repetitive structure of the show, and the diversity that it advances, house hunting is portrayed at once as an extraordinary and a mundane experience, whether one is moving across town or across the country, back home, or someplace new.

On the American House Hunters, as buyers assess homes, ideas about household needs, comforts, and ideals proliferate, with particular implications when it comes to gender and household space. Through repetition, gender differences accrue weight as familiar cultural touchstones inflecting the ways people imagine living in houses. At the same time, the program’s constitutive diversity unleashes prospects for other ways of seeing. In addition, the international spin-off demonstrates that the program’s formula readily extends to global participants and contexts, further expanding the range and variety of perspectives. House Hunters International follows the identical narrative format, ¹ and the two programs are routinely shown back-to-back on the HGTV program schedule. This reinforces the impetus to think about houses and buyers’ perspectives on them through the interactions and interferences between multiple episodes. Ultimately, across episodes, the programs together provoke and negotiate contradictory but mutually dependent visions of mobility and domesticity, adventure and security, novelty and familiarity, normativity and eccentricity. Indeed, the programs suggest that you can’t have one without the other. In this context, specific gender differences emerge as one persistent field of reference, perhaps even a structure of partial containment, in the original, American House Hunters. But these only appear from within a denser and more variable nexus of meanings about homes and domestic spaces, both in the United States and around the world.

The Diverse Appeals of House Hunters

Although House Hunters is similar to other real estate TV shows, it does not neatly fit into the most common formats of real estate and property programs, such as DIY, instruction, makeover, and so on. It is not expressly instructional, though it offers modest information about home buying and home buyers. ² It is not a competition. The “view three-pick one” approach to house buying that the program presents evokes game shows, especially those where contestants are offered prizes hidden behind doors or curtains. But House Hunters is not a game show. Home buyers receive modest compensation for participation; but they otherwise assess properties, select one, and pay for it themselves. The choice has more bearing on viewers, a narrative structure that encourages “playing along” by guessing which house the buyer will choose. This creates a sense of excitement, chance, and surprise—however slight—to engage viewers watching a television show about others engaged in the process of choosing a house. ³

Although the makeover looms large in lifestyle and property TV (Heller 2007; Lancioni 2010; Lewis 2008; Weber 2009), it plays only a minor role here, muted by the program’s prevailing narrative and visual strategies. Home buying is presented as a developmental experience rather than a transformational event. It is the result of personal deliberation, not the product of expert or public scrutiny and judgment, even though the process gets recorded for television. The impetus to house hunt may stem from significant transitions (such as a new job or change in family status), and buying a home may give rise to makeover activities, such as redecoration. But none of this is necessary. Moreover, these changes are not the stories that drive the program.

Even the final scene, showing buyers settled into their new home, is not a “reveal,” but a narrative coda that confirms the success of the home buying process. Buyers invariably talk about how happy they are not just to be in a house, but to be in a particular house, the one they chose. The conclusion includes interior images of the property from before and after the new owner has moved in. These scenes may expose some redecorating or renovations, but just as often show the home to be fundamentally unchanged. The nature and extent of modification varies so much that it is not a necessary part of the program at all, distinguishing it from the dramatic transformations and reveals of makeover TV (which occur on other HGTV programs). It is more important to demonstrate that the house hunters become contented owners.

Perhaps the most prominent departure from other property programs on House Hunters is the lack of a regular, embodied host. Nearly all reality shows, including most home buying shows, feature a recurring host or presenter, often a self-styled property “expert.” These figures are widely considered critical to establishing the distinctive identity, tone, and appeal of the programs in which they appear. On other property and realty programs, hosts interact with program participants, coaching them, and by implication television viewers, in the challenges and opportunities of real estate. Hosts are also seen as the crucial point of contact and connection for viewers, the on-screen personality who directly addresses them, drawing them into the program, voicing explicit educational and ideological agendas, and providing continuity across otherwise transient characters and changing locations. ⁴

House Hunters replaces the on-screen host with a female voice-over narrator who provides background, summary, and transition information in the third person, to tell the stories of the program’s home buyers. This contributes to economies of production in a number of ways. Small production teams can gather material for multiple episodes in different places at the same time, as no host has to be present during the filming process. The narrator can stay in one place, generating the expository material in a studio during the postproduction phase. Beyond industrial considerations, the use of a narrator has considerable implications for the image of American home ownership that the program projects. With her disembodied voice, the narrator addresses the majority audience for HGTV—women (Steinberg 2010)—as a peer who shares common interest in the stories of each home buyer. In the process, House Hunters transfers the work of connection, familiarity, and continuity usually identified with the host from an on-screen personality to the program’s impersonal, repetitive narrative format. This depersonalizes the address to viewers, but yields increased attention to the personal, local experience of each program participant, which changes with every episode. The accumulation of episodes that function in terms of locality, particularity, and individuality contributes to a view of America as a land of equal opportunity home ownership.

The program highlights rich diversity, starting with the program’s home buyers who represent the multicultural breadth of the United States in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, age, gender, sexuality, and family status. The house hunters are singles and couples, married and not, straight and gay; they include interracial, interethnic, and international families. The buyers range from young adults who are still living with their parents and looking for their first home, to current homeowners looking to upgrade their residence, to retirees who are looking to change where they live. There are families with two working adults, with one stay-at-home parent, and single-parent households. When it comes to sociocultural identity, the program proposes that anyone who has enough money and/or qualifies for a mortgage can, and probably should, buy a house. While this obviously excludes the unemployed and underclass population, the program includes people buying property across a wide economic spectrum. As a result, the program has the capacity to instigate fantasies of home ownership for all those who watch, no matter who they are, and whether they already own a home.

The program handles social-cultural diversity with measured equanimity. It does nothing to flaunt its inclusivity, and instead naturalizes diversity as the state of the nation. Consider some of the cases mentioned above. Christie and Amanda’s recent civil union is announced by the narrator in the exact same way that recent heterosexual marriages are, as a routine part of household introductions. Similarly, the only way to ascertain that Jake and Rudi are two men buying a house together, or that Corey and Shoshanna are a heterosexual couple, is to watch the episodes. In the same way, race and ethnicity are rarely explicitly labeled or otherwise marked as “different.” Sometimes, specific ethnic or national heritage is mentioned, but only when it is relevant to a particular story.

The dispersed, diverse changing assemblage of home buyers serves as the focus for the program in explicit contrast to a consistent host personality, and the narrator offers rich detail about these buyers. The voice-over narrator provides information about the nature and size of the household; their profession, often naming the company where they work; the reasons for the move; their target budget; and the key things they are looking for in a home. Viewers see scenes of the buyer’s current living situation and of the area where they are moving. These brief b-roll montage sequences of 6–10 shots vary, while giving a visual sense of the milieu. Depending on the location, they may include iconic images and recognized landmarks (the St. Louis arch, the Washington Monument, or San Francisco street cars) along with shots of the street where each house is sited. For less familiar locations, these sequences give a general feel for the area. Across episodes, in brief summary images, the program builds a visual inventory of the diverse American domestic landscape, one that includes beaches, skyscrapers, mountains, suburban subdivisions, open fields, and urban density.

The neighborhood for each house is identified and characterized in terms that verify it fits some key concerns of the buyer (e.g., it has many restaurants and shops, it is near public transportation, it is close to work, the houses have large yards). The house location is often pinpointed on a schematic city map, emphasizing the local parameters of the house hunt extracted from a larger, national image of the United States. This pulls in two directions at once, suggesting both that the schematic lines could be anywhere and that these houses could only be “here,” in a particular, plotted position. Viewers learn the asking price for every house, and in the conclusion usually find out what the buyers ended up paying. The narrator also raises issues that pose a challenge or dilemma for each house hunter, infusing each story with some sort of narrative pressure or conflict: One buyer has to find a place to live before their lease expires; a married couple has different opinions about what size or style of house they prefer. All of this information is repeated throughout the episode, the narrational glue that makes each house hunt distinctive and endows it with an affective narrative trajectory.

With all of this detail, through the course of accumulated episodes, the program represents the process of buying a home as particular and variable in multiple ways. The participants, locations, and houses change with every episode, and no two buyers want exactly the same thing. Each house hunter has their own budget and priorities for the kind of property they are seeking: condos, townhomes, or single-family residences; urban, suburban, or rural settings; large or small homes; properties in need of renovation or move-in ready; and so on. Each house hunter also has their own sense of style and taste. Many want updated kitchens with a “contemporary” look (which today means stainless steel appliances and granite countertops), but others don’t. Some prefer open floor plans while others want separate eating, cooking, and living spaces. There are different predilections when it comes to all manner of design elements, including lighting fixtures, window treatments, flooring, and wall color. Individually, these are the superficial features of a home, and most of them are changeable, if at a cost. But together they comprise the overall look and feel of the houses under consideration. The buyers all want to find one that looks and feels like home to them, or one they can readily envision adapting to fit.

Of course, not everyone can afford the same kind of property. But the program’s economic scope is quite broad. The house hunter budgets range from less than $100,000 to as high as a few million dollars, with most falling somewhere in between. On rare occasion, the narrator will explain that a buyer is taking advantage of a state or federal program that subsidizes mortgages for lower income households. Moreover, the raw budget alone does not determine what kind of house an individual can afford, which depends on where the house is situated. Across episodes, House Hunters delineates the considerable disparities in the realty-economic market across the United States, where the cost of housing—or what kind of housing is available at what price—varies significantly from region to region, from city to city, and between neighborhoods within and around any city or town. The program even acknowledges the impact of the 2008 housing market and mortgage finance collapse (Hay 2010). Although it hardly highlights the crisis, the evidence is apparent in episodes where realtors show homes in foreclosure or with substantially reduced listing prices. As the economic downturn has persisted, it has become more visible on the program; more houses sit on the market for extended periods, some in foreclosure, others with surprising drops in the asking price. A few episodes feature people who are downsizing their home as a result of job lay-offs. Thus, the program inescapably broaches the risks of home ownership, but also reveals how homes lost by previous owners in the economic downturn afford housing opportunities for others. All of this also contributes to the program’s diversity, including the potential pitfalls of owning a home, when it comes to the realty-economic market that house hunters encounter; there are not only distinctive differences among buyers and homes, but also among locations and real estate markets.

The accumulation of episodes generates such diversity that no one place, buyer, realtor, or host sufficiently represents all buyers, houses, and locations. The program is propelled by logics of multiplicity yielding cumulative and comparative assessment. This is reinforced through the routine scheduling of episodes in clusters, as if no single episode is adequate to convey the program’s meanings. Similarities that emerge—and they do—between properties and house hunters and realtors are in constant tension with the localized particulars of proliferating differences in individual experiences, identities, places, and tastes. This extends to the relationship between viewers and the parade of house hunters and houses they see when they watch the program. The viewers’ connection to the show involves variations and modulations in identification, sympathy, captivation, voyeurism, curiosity, disinterest, disdain, and boredom. Many of the buyers, and many of the houses they see, are not particularly interesting or distinctive. As a result, the show can be frankly tedious. There are as many, if not more, cookie-cutter condos and bland suburban subdivisions as there are dramatic urban lofts or restored Victorian mansions (a formulation that itself belies the biases of one viewer). With its geographical scope spanning the United States, many episodes are set in places in which most viewers are unlikely to have any particular interest. The impact of the show and its significance are grounded in its expansive, inclusive variety of people, houses, places, and attendant ways of looking. The program itself does not assert status or taste hierarchies, or judge the discrimination of participants. Instead, it presents a broad assortment of individuals around the United States with their own needs, constraints, opinions, and style. Each episode, and each instance of home buying, is exemplary, but not typical. House hunting is always the same, and always different.

Engendering Diversity in American Homes

Lifestyle television is often considered a major proponent of normative, even restrictive social identities and values, in both subtle and obvious terms. However, at least one scholar has observed that “inclusiveness” is one of the most striking aspects of British home improvement shows (Holliday 2005).

As these programmes represent “the public,” so they simultaneously construct it. Thus, the households presented as “ordinary British households” include black, Asian, multi-national and mixed “race” families, lesbian and gay families (sometimes, but not always, euphemistically described as “friends”) and single-parent families. (Holliday 2005: 67)

Holliday’s assessment is equally apt for House Hunters, where the terms of inclusivity are compounded by an even broader array of nationalities and ethnicities, and a wider geographical scope.

Gender differences would almost seem to be beside the point in a show whose changing cast of characters so deliberately represents diversity and inclusiveness, and where the contingent interests of individual buyers prevail. Yet, ideas about domestic needs, comforts, and ideals permeate the program. They are the central issues that buyers raise as they consider which property will make the best home. In the process, gender(ed) perspectives surface. Even though no two buyers are looking for exactly the same things, certain ideas get repeated in different contexts, and prevailing tendencies become apparent. This exposes one of the fundamental tensions at the heart of the show: Houses and house buyers are at once particular and general, singular and multiple, idiosyncratic and representative, different and the same, private and public. As house hunters view properties and imagine inhabiting them, the homes are provisionally parsed and territorialized in personal terms that are never confined to, but prominently include, gender.

Even in its most extreme forms, the gender parsing is only intermittent; it is best characterized in terms of tendencies rather than inflexible standards. Yet across episodes, the erratic recurrence of certain gender habits, tropes, and preferences stand out from perspectives that are more idiosyncratic and exceptional. Through repetition, they accrue a kind of cultural credence as guidelines for how to think about houses and domestic space. Ultimately, they function as a form of contingent gender territorialization of American domestic space in all its manifold diversity.

The most notable tendencies of gender difference that emerge on the program are described below. Usually, only a few of these get articulated in any given episode, but they are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed with random regularity.

All of these tropes combine in a gendered image of houses and domestic preoccupations along fairly traditional, even stereotypical, lines. Indeed, together they seem to confirm far more traditional ideas about family, gender, and domestic roles than the diversity and inclusiveness the program itself conveys. One might conclude that a diverse and inclusive range of homeowners is acceptable so long as they all conform to normative gender binaries. However, there are other considerations. For one, diversity and inclusivity include the normative and predictable, even the stereotypical, alongside perturbations, deviations, and innovations. Although this may be obvious, it is important to keep in mind, especially with respect to the kind of mainstream, commercial television that House Hunters represents. Second, even in the program’s environment of diversity and difference, familiar, hegemonic cultural touchstones persist as a common reference point. This is intensified by the very subject of the program, home ownership, which is entangled in social and economic histories of familial privatization and racial discrimination, and, at least since World War II, has largely been the dominion of the traditional nuclear family, replete with stereotypical gender divisions of labor.

Given the conventions of television representation and the socioeconomic conditions of home ownership, it is not really surprising that many of the home buyers on House Hunters are traditional white, heteronormative couples and families. On the contrary, the program’s effort to diversify and complicate that image of American homeowners—in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, age, sexuality, and marital status—is far more noteworthy. ⁵ House Hunters offers a decisive challenge to these traditions and their attendant gender roles, and contributes to a popular cultural redefinition of what constitutes a family and a proper homeowner, even though it also ends up reproducing many traditional ideas about gender and domestic space in the process.

The persistence of cultural touchstones is also encouraged by the ways in which the show is scripted. Participants are not just looking at houses to consider for purchase but are also being filmed for the television program. In this context, they are clearly encouraged—even required—to enumerate what they are looking for and to make clear statements evaluating each property. Without this, there would be no show. It often seems as if participants are supplied with specific terms and questions to help them fulfill their TV roles as home buyers. Across episodes with diverse house hunters, the buyers’ comments about the properties can veer toward a common repertoire. For example, buyers devote conspicuous attention to crown molding; it is often one of the first things they mention when they walk into a house. That such a detail attracts so much attention suggests that these remarks result from some degree of prompting. The shared vocabulary of home appreciation and value works alongside the spatial gendering as a counterpoint to the geographic and participant diversity.

The conventions of the program also bear on the expression of gender difference. The program structure accentuates split opinions and disparate interests. The narrator introduces conflicts and pressures impinging on each house hunt. The house hunters in turn are clearly encouraged to say different things about the properties, rather than just echoing one another. If one person comments on closets, the other focuses on the bathroom; one person likes the wall color, the other dislikes the cabinets. Even when the buyer is single, the hunters are multiple, because single buyers almost always bring a friend or family member to help assess their choices, introducing another voice into the mix. This is all part of documenting the deliberative process of house hunting; but it also promotes recourse to common conventions when speaking and performing for television. It makes standard cultural scripts, including gender difference, more likely, especially when the subject is already so heavily encrusted with cultural meanings, as is the case when it comes to domestic space and American homes.

The narrative contrivance on the program goes even further. The first indication, and none too subtle, is the fact that buyers view only three properties before choosing one. Common sense alone, if not experience, suggests that most people look at more than three houses before making such a significant commitment (although sometimes the program acknowledges that these are not the only three properties the buyer has considered). In fact, the program finds participants who are well into the process of looking for a home, and who often already have a home under contract. Their television realtor then takes them to view three properties, including the house they have already purchased. In short, the house hunt presented on the show is an abridged, retrospective reconstruction of a house hunt that has already concluded. The participants are the actual, ordinary home buyers they claim to be, restaging their house hunt for public presentation. ⁶ In these terms, the program is perhaps best understood as a kind of docudrama, in which the conflict, pressure, uncertainty, and urgency that shape each house hunt are convenient fictions. The production process accounts for the buyers being able to choose a home successfully and decisively shapes the tenor and tone of the program’s version of house hunting. The program’s significant narrative and temporal sleights of hand assure a satisfactory outcome, a happy end for virtually every house hunt. ⁷

This is certainly not how the house hunt is presented on the show, though it confirms that simply looking at houses is not the only point of the show even if it is a convenient point of entry. The appeal lies equally in the idea and ideals of American home ownership that the program envisions, and its dramatic renditions of successful home searches. By proliferating examples of home purchasing in terms of broad-based inclusivity, the program envisions the United States as a land of heterogeneous homeowners. Everyone on the program is submitted to the same house-hunting process, regardless of their budget, class, location, marital status, age, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference. However artificial the program’s formulaic narrative may be, it confirms that all house hunters are equal. The identity equality of real estate buyers extends to embrace the program’s viewers who, by looking, participate in its idealistic vision of a neoliberal capitalist American polity, which remains marked by gender divides. ⁸

The most flagrant expression of gender difference is the “man cave,” a prominently American construct, based on the design and size of U.S. housing stock. ⁹ The man cave presents a potent nexus of nation, gender, and domestic space. It goes beyond the tropes that territorialize different parts of the home in gender terms to suggest that houses in general, and the varied domestic activities and habits they contain, are redolent with femininity. After all, if the man of the house could comfortably play video games and swill beer with his buddies in the common family room, he wouldn’t need a man cave at all. Yet the desire for this dedicated space is expressed as readily as the need for bedrooms or a dining area, in terminology, which marks its primordial function. Thus, it seems that in (some) American households, men rather than women need rooms of their own. Somehow, houses—at least those inhabited by heterosexual couples—are too girly. If the man’s home is no longer his castle, he at least deserves a man cave. As a physical space, a nomenclature, and a concept, the man cave proclaims that houses have a gender, that they are effectively female.

Although the program unleashes this meaning, it also mitigates it in any number of ways. The man cave only emerges as an intermittent concern, though just often enough to give pause. Not all house hunters, not even all heterosexual family men, look for homes that accommodate man caves. Moreover, although the man cave projects an image of heteronormative homes aggressively territorialized by gender—with not only fathers, but also mothers and children all retreating to their relegated space within the house—virtually all episodes conclude with scenes of the owners entertaining guests in their new home, no matter their age, marital status, gender, or sexuality. The program’s diverse homeowners literally open their doors to friends and family as the final confirmation that they have settled in. This even happens when people have moved places where they have no prior friends or family. The consistent, authenticating image of the American home, then, is not a place where individuals and nuclear families shut themselves off from a social context. It is equally not a place where the men, women, and/or children who inhabit it retreat to separate zones. Instead, in the final image, homeowners—whoever they are—commingle with others, as part of a larger community. These images of sociality and hospitality are not incompatible with traditional familial or domestic pleasures. Yet the program ends by emphasizing more public and communal ways of seeing home and being at home, in terms of a diversity that both incorporates and surpasses the old-fashioned nuclear family and its old and new ways of inhabiting gendered domestic territory.