S3, Episode 5: Home Alone

In this episode we’ll be looking at experiences of loneliness at home, and how these have been aggravated during the pandemic. How we might start to think differently about being alone? Ana Baeza Ruiz talks to Anastasia Christou of Middlesex University and Kate Bloor, founder of Lyme Research UK.

What does it mean to experience loneliness at home, and how have these experiences been aggravated by the pandemic? How we might start to think differently about ‘being alone’ as this widespread social malaise?

Loneliness has been diagnosed as one of the greatest public health issues of our age. Recent research has pointed to the higher vulnerability of certain groups to loneliness: people on lower incomes, those living alone and younger groups, especially women. Yet loneliness is something that is rarely talked about, and is often regarded with shame and a sense of individual responsibility.

You can also listen on Apple podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher and Google Podcasts. Search for ‘That Feels Like Home’ to subscribe, follow, favourite, and share!

MoDA objects relevant to this episode

Cassell’s Household Guide, Volume 3

This book, entitled ‘Cassel’s Household Guide’ was published in London around 1870.

Housewife

An illustrated, monthly magazine aimed at an audience of young housewives.

Beautiful Homes

Arding & Hobbs held pride of place in Clapham Junction, with a large department store built in 1885.

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to That Feels Like Home, a podcast by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, reaching you from Middlesex University London. I’m Ana Baeza Ruiz, and I’m hosting this third series to look afresh at what ‘home’ is, and what it means.

We’ve previously looked at home from a wide range of perspectives, including in series 2 some of our shared experiences of home during the pandemic. This season, we’ll be in conversation with academics and activists who have moved beyond traditional ideas of home as a place ‘of safety, privacy, and care’.

Each episode will propose alternative readings of home, from its engagements with histories of empire, the politics of micro-living under neoliberalism, home as a queer space, or the changing meanings of home for people who cross borders.

As always, we draw inspiration from our collections, and the stories missing in them, to rethink the past through the lens of the present.

Ana: In this episode we’ll be looking at experiences of loneliness at home, and how these have been aggravated during the pandemic. How we might start to think differently about ‘being alone’ as this widespread social malaise?

One of the greatest public health issues, loneliness, has been diagnosed as a pressing social crisis during the pandemic, with recent research pointing out the higher vulnerability of certain groups, people on lower incomes, those living alone and younger groups, especially women. Nowadays, Britain is known as the loneliness capital of Europe, according to the Office for National Statistics. Yet loneliness is something that is rarely talked about in the open, and it’s often with shame and a sense of individual responsibility. It might not seem as obvious why we’re talking about loneliness in this podcast, which is, after all, about home and our lives at home. But in actual fact, this goes to the heart of what’s at stake: though feeling lonely is not the same as living alone, people who live alone are more likely to experience loneliness. The shape of our domestic spaces and ways of living profoundly impacts our social interactions with others. And in this episode, what we want to think about is how loneliness and household living intersect and the ways in which we might live differently.

Ana: And I’m so glad to be joined by Dr Anastasia Christou from Middlesex University and Kate Bloor, founder of Lyme Research UK, who have been working together on the subject of loneliness, particularly in relation to the pandemic and its aftereffects. And the work they’re producing is especially powerful for rethinking how we theorise loneliness and to move away from a focus on the individual and redress this as a collective and social issue through intersectional perspectives that will bring different experiences to the meanings of loneliness.

Ana: it’s really great to have you both here, thanks so much.

Anastasia: thank you, it’s great to be here.

Kate: yes, I’m delighted to be here, thank you.

Ana: I’m just going to give an intro, and then we’ll jump in. Dr. Anastasia Christou is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Middlesex University and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She extensively researches, publishes and teaches on a whole range of issues, including identity, emotion, inequality, through an intersectional lens and also decolonial and feminist pedagogies. She has engaged in multi-sited and multi method and comparative ethnographic research across many countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Denmark and many other countries in Europe.

Kate Bloor is a sociologist with academic achievements and interests in the human sciences, sociology of health and illness, science and technology policy, and with an interest in these issues related to chronic ill health and illness. She has volunteered for community projects, empowering local people to undertake academic study, as well as being a community organizer for better understanding of research in people with chronic conditions. And we will put links for both the research and the projects in the show notes of both Anastasia and Kate’s work.

So thanks so much for both of you. Welcome. It’s great to have you here, Anastasia and Kate.

Anastasia: First of all, thank you so very much, Ana, for extending this invite to Kate and myself today. We are very enthusiastic to be part of the MoDA podcast series. And thank you for opening up with the reflection on our project, because it also gives me the opportunity to underscore how incredibly rewarding it has been to work with Kate on this project. We have collaborated previously with Kate within the context of community volunteering for several years. But this particular project is indeed also grounded in personal experience with an auto-ethnographic, feminist and activist lens.

And I highlight the latter three angles because in order for the personal to become political, it inevitably will have to become polemical through introspection and activism. The paper we have produced with Kate, which is entitled “The Liminality of Loneliness,” highlights important insights here in how loneliness is understood. And what does it mean to negotiate feminist ethics and intersectional affect in order to address the social issues of loneliness? Kate. Any reflections on our collaboration?

Kate: I came to this project really, I suppose, because my own identity as a researcher had been rather damaged, perhaps, by the fact that I became chronically ill and my career was affected. And so for me, it was very empowering to be able to participate. But also the topic resonated with experiences that I’ve had and other people I know have had. And also it resonated with my Buddhist practice, I hadn’t thought about that until we started this conversation, but my Buddhist practice is very important to me. And within that, we aim to create a society in which everyone can be happy. And that means awareness on all sorts of different levels. So this kind of whole topic of loneliness and this research kind of resonated with all sorts of personal agendas that I had.

(Re)defining Loneliness

Ana: When I was reading the draft of your article, I was really struck emotionally, actually. And I think it’s because this aspect you can connect to and so it’s really you know, it’s great to hear you talk about that process of writing it and the motivations for doing it, because I think, as you say, there is this interconnecting of the personal with a broader set of questions that affect lots of people. So in that sense, I wanted to maybe go a little bit deeper into thinking about loneliness and the way that loneliness is defined, because you speak about reframing loneliness as a feminist issue and that, seems to be really at the heart of the arguments that you’re making in your work.

Kate: I think I’ll address that, if that’s OK. So if you look at Public Health England, there are various models and understandings and concepts, if you like, around social isolation and loneliness. And it’s very interesting to look at those definitions and models and try and understand where they’ve come from. They didn’t just arise from nowhere. They have a social meaning in their own right: the way in which we construct in research, the way we think about things is embodied in concepts that underpin definitions and so on. So it’s something that really interests me. So in the Public Health England report, it describes social isolation as an absence of social interactions, social support structures and engagement with wider communities or structures. And then it has a note added to that indicating that it can be linked to marginalisation and discrimination. Loneliness is seen as an individual’s personal, subjective sense of ‘lacking connection and contact with social interactions’ to the extent that they are ‘wanted or needed’.

But what’s interesting about this particular conceptualisation is that they actually draw a model of how social isolation and loneliness interact. But they also have a third concept, which is social action, which also overlaps with these two other concepts. And that’s very interesting because what it suggests is that loneliness is about us ‘not taking opportunities forward’, us ‘not choosing to connect’, rather than the fact that loneliness and social isolation can both arise because people don’t have access to opportunities or engagement, because those opportunities are not made available or there are barriers to that.

And it’s very interesting how the concepts of loneliness that are commonly used have these limitations. And it’s partly because there’s a history to the way in which this has been thought about and researched. And there’s always a great struggle around operationalising concepts to embed them in actual research projects, say, for instance, looking at outcomes of initiatives to address loneliness or whatever. And I think there’s a tendency within research to just broaden out this discussion a little bit to approach loneliness as something that can be measured in a way that’s very reductionist.

The research we’re doing moves well away from those kind of more reductionist ways of measuring things and defining things. And we start from another perspective entirely, which is ethnographic and auto-ethnographic. So we’re looking at our deep and complex and changing and sometimes confusing experiences of loneliness in order to challenge what those other understandings of loneliness might be. So it’s a deliberate attempt to, if you like, think about this in a different way.

Anastasia: I wanted to just add to the very comprehensive overview of definitions that Kate just provided – a clarification that, to date, there has not been a comprehensive feminist analysis of the structural conditions that both produce and intensify experiences of loneliness.

So loneliness, in my view, requires a feminist schematic approach of political action by intervening in the ethics and politics of involuntary isolation, because we have to stop as a society becoming spectators of social suffering.

With our article with Kate, we aim to remedy this gap because we seek to address what a feminist and intersectional approach to loneliness studies can contribute to understanding the complexities of this as an emotion and social condition. There are many more angles that need to be addressed in future research when it comes to loneliness, both as an individual and systemic issue. I’m thinking here of angles such as the proliferation of exclusions through patriarchies, white supremacy and racial capitalism, neoliberalism and globalisation, precarity and austerity, and the generative possibilities of the ethics of loneliness. So feminist action and feminist theory can indeed address one of the most significant public health challenges of our time, which is loneliness.

Loneliness and policy

Ana: You’re listening to That Feels Like Home, a podcast from the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. I’m Ana Baeza Ruiz and in this episode we’re addressing the question of loneliness with Anastasia Christou and Kate Bloor, and as we’ve been hearing, loneliness is not quite as straightforward as it might first appear: it is a question for society, not just for the individual. But the question is what might we do about it?

Ana: I think that’s not just a comprehensive but just a completely enlightening set of propositions. And as I think Kate you’ve already hinted at, there, is that sense of the individuation of loneliness with the idea that one is a suffering self that can get themselves out of loneliness through the appropriate support.

And this seems to be reflected on strategies that have called on the UK government to devise a national strategy to combat loneliness like the Jo Cox Loneliness Commission report of 2017, which acknowledged loneliness as a problem, but still continued to perpetuate those ideas of loneliness as an individual thing. And so because you’re working from a research perspective, but then there is this policy dimension, I wonder if you have some thoughts on how to connect those two: on how to tackle this centrality of the individual, which, as you’ve already outlined, is a political problem, and what alternative approaches could look like?

Kate: I’ve been re-reading the Jo Cox Commission report and came across some various other reports from the local government, from various charities and so on and so forth. And, you know, because all this work is utterly fantastic and amazing, it’s raised the profile of the issues to everybody, we’re all talking about loneliness now. It’s recognised as a key problem, less and less stigmatised situation for people and so on and so forth.

And these reports do ask for every organisation at every level to consider these issues and try and reconfigure what they’re doing or to enhance what they’re doing or to extend what they’re doing to address these problems. But actually, if you look at the amounts of money that was actually poured into this, it was minuscule. You know, it was a few million pounds and that was distributed to charities and other groups that were, setting up projects to close these gaps and address loneliness at a local level. And then you start to realise that there are a lot of political issues behind these reports. And I searched this morning using the key word “inequalities” because I was starting to think that somehow this sort of structural and socioeconomic drivers, causes, factors and so on in the experience of loneliness within individuals and groups and communities and so on, weren’t really discussed fully in these reports. So I thought, well, if I have a look, perhaps I can see whether that’s the case. And out of four different reports of this kind, only one of them mentioned inequalities once. And that was really interesting because when I re-read the Jo Cox Report, which, of course is extraordinarily groundbreaking work in its in its own right, I did feel that there was still some degree of an absence around what loneliness was caused by. In fact, they said that early in the report. We don’t really know what factors are causing this in society.

So it seems to me that we need to be looking at that, because we can pour a lot of energy into tackling loneliness through all these different means, local authority work charities, networks, community groups and so on. But if there are deep factors that are exacerbating this that aren’t tackled, then it’s a bit like trying to swim upstream. And you asked about alternative approaches, and I think what we need to do is turn to look at all the discussions that are happening at the moment, particularly in the era of coronavirus, around how we create a society that is good for us, that enhances our wellbeing. And there’s a feminist set of issues within that which are around gender, access to services, access to things like childcare, the support given to carers. What do we want to do about the challenge of coronavirus, how are we going to have to think differently and live differently and especially how are we going to tackle inequalities?

Anastasia: I totally agree with everything that Kate elaborated on, and I just wanted to make a brief reflection. I’m aware of the limitations conceptually of the concept of ‘community’, but I also see the mystique of communities of practice to combat loneliness as an alternative political project. But it has to be conceived and become applicable as a collective responsibility political project, not redirecting the responsibility back to the individual, and obviously, supporting it with the necessary resources.

The history of loneliness

Ana: We’ve been talking about the concept of loneliness, and how it might be usefully thought of as a shared social problem rather than something the individual has to endure. Later on we’ll move on to a discussion of how policy decisions around housing provision might impact on loneliness. But first I wanted to ask Anastasia and Kate a bit more about how loneliness has been understood historically.

Ana: I want to ask you actually more about this concept of community a bit later on, but before that, I actually wanted to think more historically, I guess, because we’re the museum, and that’s always quite interesting to, I think, have that historical reflection of how loneliness is not just something that we can situate politically, but also historically. And so I was looking a bit at this quite popular book by Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness, the history of an emotion that is talking about how this condition didn’t really exist prior to the 19th century, or at least the word loneliness rarely appeared until about eighteen hundred. And so what’s interesting is that there is the sense of a language of loneliness that develops as there’s a rise of privacy and particularly how this is associated to also the rise of a nuclear family.

And as I was looking at that and I did some research on one of the household guides that’s called Cassell’s Household Guide, that’s in the collection that is about household management from the late 19th century, from 1890. Just did a word search to see how many times the word ‘lonely’ came up, and it showed up 23 times and often it was in association to women who feel lonely, who have had a lonely childhood and also there is the figure of the lonely spinster.

So it seemed quite gendered, but also what was coming out really clearly is how this was often linked to the absence of a family life, I guess my point here in thinking about this wider history is how do you think these historical perspectives might be useful for diagnosing the current situation in the sense of understanding that loneliness is something that is situated and isn’t inevitable? Do you have some thoughts on that?

Anastasia: I certainly find enormous utility in every society to have historical documentation, resources and archival material to draw on. But I want to advance limitations I’m compelled to make on relying on historical documentations primarily.

The first critique I’m compelled to make is the sole reliance on historical documentations as explanatory frameworks for contemporary issues is that such insights capture particular spatiotemporal glimpses of those societies and social relations that do not always include the voices and subjectivities of the social subjects they claim to be interpreting.

A second limitation I see is the normative rendition of societies and subjectivities through framings there might be, for instance, heteronormative, Eurocentric, ableist and one dimensional. So from a particular perspective, of what is perceived to be, in inverted commas, the ‘truth’, which often essentialises other invisible experiences.

A third limitation I find useful to mention is the frequent medicalisation of gendered subjectivities, and especially in the proliferation of stigmatisations of women’s behaviours and women’s choices.

Kate: I agree with Anastasia, women’s role in society and how it’s been constructed historically and how that’s impacted on how people think about what’s an appropriate lifestyle for women. And also, there are all sorts of class issues related to that, for instance, you know, working class women were required to go out and work, middle class women, you know, in the earlier part of the 19th century, wealthy women, women from wealthy backgrounds or in wealthy marriages could stay at home. But that didn’t mean that they were necessarily having an easy time.

And actually, the first thing that popped into my mind was Radclyffe Hall, her famous novel of 1928 called The Well of Loneliness. she was a white, wealthy, lesbian who was brave enough, courageous enough to try and explore the actual inner experience of being a lesbian at that time. And, you know, the interesting thing is the title, The Well of Loneliness. So, that’s a kind of completely different take on loneliness. That loneliness in that sense was something created by the fact that this woman was trying to find a place in a world that was very, very problematic for them. And that loneliness was created from lesbian issues being taboo, completely taboo and completely unacceptable. I am actually not heterosexual, so I’m speaking from that position or positionality that, you know, in my personal experience over my lifetime, I’m 65 this month. And so, you know, I’ve seen over the last four decades the way things have changed. And they have changed hugely for many people, not for everyone, of course, because, you know, there are historical trends and issues, of course, that carry on into modern life and experience. But, you know, LGBT communities have fought back against this idea that they are necessarily going to be, you know, lonely for the rest of their life.

And there are many, many lesbians, women that I know who live on their own, who are perfectly happy and enjoying their lives. And they’re creating a community within which they can tackle that. It’s complex because within LGBT communities, some groups of people are even more marginalised than others and so on and so forth. We’re divided by race, class, ethnicity, culture, background, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But, communities do resist and they do have resilience and they do create opportunities for resistance.

Ana: I think you mentioned how we can think of broadening the identity of the home beyond the physical space at the home as you’re articulating through these multiple engagements with different communities.

And that leads to a question that I wanted to ask you around these geographies of loneliness as a result of these reports on loneliness, there has been some probably sort of tentative responses from a policy perspective around future town planning and housing. So how to tackle loneliness by providing communal spaces, parks where people can meet, but also suggestions for co-housing and more intergenerational housing developments. So I wonder, again, are you sort of cautious about these policy developments? Kate you were mentioning before, the way in which funding hasn’t been particularly generous. So I wonder how you see these proposals for housing provision as a strategy for tackling loneliness?

Kate: Well, I think all of those initiatives would contribute if they were easy to set up and also properly funded. And I’m aware of various communal housing funding streams and initiatives. But the problem is they take years and years to get off the ground and they require groups of people to solve their own problems, if you like. They have to do it themselves. They have to set these groups up and they have to buy the houses and they have to do all of that. And that’s incredibly slow. I think what we need is a central government initiative and push to put funding into this so that people can create spaces for themselves that are fulfilling for them emotionally, that meet their work needs, that meet their family needs. And it’s as simple as that. I think it boils right back down to that.

Anastasia: I totally agree with Kate. And I just wanted to add a reflection on the intergenerational housing approach, which is a new idea based on an old model. So people of different ages living together and sharing their skills and time. In the past, this tended to be with an extended family so tightly knit local communities. More recently, this idea has been introduced into some older people’s housing, and the idea is such that participation can be shared amongst unrelated people living independent, modern, professional lives and actually benefiting mutually.

The current situation is housing provision being highly segregated, inflexible and often unsuitable, creating emerging crises. And these particular crises and special needs have to do with elderly care, affordability and indeed loneliness. So all these issues generate huge costs for any society. The intergenerational model seeks to tackle these through a social impact-based approach. And these housing policies and design principles for a new form of housing across all ages that supports and enables participation and the sharing of residential space has many successful examples and models in the United States and Europe, creating these resilient communities which nurture social relations across generations.

And I have observed that in the UK, some local councils are exploring this option currently. So in my view, there would be logistical, economic and psychosocial benefits in expanding intergenerational housing schemes in the UK, but rolling these out as a national plan of housing action, again, going back to the political project and the resource component.

Care work and the saturated self

Ana: I’m speaking to Anastasia Christou and Kate Bloor about loneliness in this next part of our discussion we talked about how loneliness can result not from an absence of social interaction, from when one is saturated by it…

Ana: Social relations that are mutually supportive and nurturing is a form of care work. I’m bringing this up because I think it connects to one passage in the forthcoming article in which you seem to be connecting loneliness with the performance of this kind of care work. I think you put it this way, that loneliness here can emerge not from the absence of social interactions, but when the self is saturated by these. And there’s a quote that I pulled out and I wondered if Kate, if you would like to read that and then comment a little bit about this.

Kate: I’m happy to read it. I think Anastasia might have something to say about this:

“I know deep to my core how loneliness feels at all stages of my life’s course so far, quite draining and often a source of loneliness to know that you are the one, perhaps the only one in your family who is responsible for the lives of all others. Indeed, a burden and not a privilege to show any other human elements of limitations and weakness. This has been most exhausting and actually depleting when loneliness has been most pronounced during major life events, turbulence, loss, grief, illness, change. While there have been exceptions and once in a while on a rare but very special occasion, someone who has cared and has picked up the phone, sent a card, sent an email, offered to help in some way, has made a difference. For the most part, I have felt alone while dealing on my own with serious existential and logistic life matters.”

Anastasia: Thank you, Kate. I wanted to focus on two connecting threads here, the concept of saturation and the saturated self, and especially how this has been impacted by the pandemic currently, but the wider negotiations of domestic space. So the concept of the saturated self was developed by Kenneth Gergen in his volume entitled The Saturated Self, published in 1991. And it refers to the dramatic expansion in the range of relations be those physical, virtual and imagined in which the individual is increasingly immersed.

Currently, during the past pandemic year, many workers have been working from home and actually legally enforced in lockdown periods across many countries to work from home, including academics. So, this is just one sphere of a saturated self in a working from home life mode, with additional layers of caring responsibilities in and out of the home, often with self-care for women being sacrificed in order to meet these shifting new roles and new demands.

As a result, the experiences of domestic space are no longer protected as a sanctuary or escape from the public and professional spheres now orchestrated and managed in the private domestic space. This saturation is a symbolic signifier for unsustainability for many workers, the erosion of boundaries in the work-home balance, where roles are enmeshed in exacerbating the burden of individual responsibility.

Ana: Thanks, Anastasia. I wonder if you had some thoughts on that the impact of digital interactions on the way that domestic space is experienced and how the self might become saturated,

Kate: Yes, thinking about that nearly always start to think about my chronic illness and I consider myself to be disabled. And that’s been going on for a long time, and so the way I use space in my home is massively affected by that because my home has been a clinic, it’s been a restaurant, it’s been a care home for me. It’s been a space of rejuvenation and rehabilitation. It’s been a prison, it’s been all sorts of things over the years, some very positive, it’s been a space for creativity and for relaxation and peace as well. So I have a kind of emotionally quite a complex relationship with my space. But I would like to say that as a person with a disability, I’m in a privileged position. I have an income. I have a home that’s secure and safe. And I really value those things and realize how my experience of my space is very much affected by those things in positive ways.

So in terms of the saturated self and technology, as a person with cognitive problems, I find technology overloads me. I’ve been brought to tears by technical problems that arise by continuous demands on me to download yet another app, create yet another password,

And so I can’t imagine what it’s like for people that are working and having to work through those mechanisms all the time. Bearing in mind that I was one of the first people to use a computer because of my work in the early 1980s. And now I consider it to be a very you know, to be a very how can I put this, almost an infringement in my life to some extent. But it’s also offered us some ways of staying connected during the pandemic, which of course I’m sure we’re grateful for. But it’s not that simple. It’s not that straightforward.

Ana: No, it’s certainly not. And it makes me think also of the anxiety that I was having two days ago when my phone just stopped working I had to order one. It really becomes so apparent that it is through those technological prosthetics, that you can have any connection with anyone else at this point. It also makes me think of the way in which there has been a loss of those other physical spaces that are not virtual spaces, as all of our social interactions have been re-routed in the home and through technology.

So I wanted to hear more about how you see home spaces during this period for you. If they’ve gained new meanings, maybe not necessarily positive meanings. And in that sense, how this period does challenge some of the more normative representations of home as a project for realising the self and as a space of comfort.

Normative representations of home

Anastasia: So thinking about the normative representations of home as a project for self-realisation in a space of comfort, I’ve been deeply reflecting and very conscious that inevitably there will have been cases during this pandemic lockdown that, as I said previously, might have included forced cohabitation, non-options with others, be that a return to a family home or shared lodging, which for particular groups might have been suffocating or even traumatic. And I’m thinking especially about LGBTQIA+ people. And I’m actually concerned that this might be ongoing for those unable to move out of those domestic arrangements and are not comfortable seeking support and help to cope. And I’m also particularly worried that experiences of individuals transitioning or in discovery of their sexuality and gendered self might be totally alone, and even suffering in a home environment that does not accept them for who they are, or who they wish to be.

And another distressing realisation is how different bodies are also perceived and remarked on in a homing context and might be further shamed and stigmatized. So the home can potentially become a space for a project of self-actualisation and certainly for collective awareness and individual awareness, but alarmingly, can also be one of trauma and suffering. And I know I keep coming back to these contentious spaces of homing as un-belonging, but I want to demystify this romanticising idea of homing as a space of comfort and belonging and to actually highlight the real policy issues that we need to address as a society when it comes to the exclusion and marginalisation of people, when it comes to domestic violence and unsafe spaces that are homing spaces for some, and not experiencing the comforts that we associate with home and belonging.

Kate: I identify with a lot of what Anastasia’s just been saying in terms of the conversations I’ve been having with people within my life, whether they be LGBT or not, especially during the era of the pandemic and how that’s affected everyone’s lives. And, you know, one of the things that I’ve personally experienced is this, this loss of identity. And I hadn’t realised how much of my identity was connected with gay places and gay spaces. You know that because I didn’t necessarily socialise that much before the pandemic, I didn’t necessarily think it was a very important thing for me. But it has been a huge loss and a huge loss for many of the people I know, especially those that are living alone who would go to a cafe with a gay friend where they felt safe, where they could share personal stuff. And, you know, it has hit it, had hit everyone very hard the pandemic, of course, it has and has created loneliness as a commonality, as an experience that’s very common and possibly even shared. But at the same time, I think for particular groups of people, that has been particularly difficult in particular ways.

So many LGBT people construct their lives around intense affirmation, through social interaction of various kinds. Sometimes that can be creative as well. You know, working together, playing together, creating together. And a lot of that has disappeared. And technology hasn’t replaced that. And I’ve had quite a few conversations with people living on their own saying that there are some virtual groups that they’ve joined to try and alleviate the loneliness they’re feeling. But it hasn’t really worked. They still feel lonely and empty and disconnected and yeah, it’s been quite traumatic for certain groups of people. So, yeah, I hadn’t realized how much of my identity was tied up with those activities of going out, being with other LGBT people. And I, I do kind of miss that, hugely.

Existential isolation

Ana: I wanted to ask you what you think about a distinction that is sometimes made in in research, which is the distinction between existential isolation and interpersonal isolation, where one interpersonal isolation is defined as a lack of meaningful and enduring social contact, whilst existential isolation is defined as a lack of connection on a subjective and experiential level, a feeling of being alone in one’s experiences in the world. I wonder if you’ve got any thoughts on this, how it speaks to your research and perhaps also your own experiences.

Kate: Yeah, I think it’s a very important distinction, actually, because early on when we were talking about the article together, I basically said, I’m not sure if I’m actually lonely. Do you remember that conversation? And I started thinking, am I lonely? Maybe I’m not, because I was thinking of all the connections I really did have. Like my Buddhist friends were door stepping me early on in the pandemic, literally coming and saying, how are you? You alright? And neighbours were chatting more freely with me and asking how I was in a more genuine way.

And I was thinking, I’m not really lonely. But actually I was on this existentialist level, which was that my identity was somehow bruised, and that that did leave me with a feeling of being different, feeling of being separated, a feeling of being not rejected, per say, because it was because of the pandemic and I couldn’t get to see people. But kind of –yes, I mean, it was an existential experience of loneliness that I didn’t really initially understand or see. And I think slowly over time I’ve, especially chatting with other friends of mine who are LGBT, we exchange, you know, feelings about this and we’re all feeling like that. So, yes, it’s interesting. I think that’s quite an interesting distinction.

Sharing those feelings with other people enabled me to understand that, yes, that I was actually experiencing a type of loneliness,. And I think recognizing that has been important and helpful to understand, because the pandemic’s been causing a kind of internal trauma for us. And, getting to grips with why and how we’re feeling like that, I think is important for us to move on and deal with this. So, yes, it has been a really useful thing to connect with people and have those conversations, albeit all of us sitting in our own homes and not actually physically.

Having said that, I think in some ways I’ve kind of changed how I use my home. For instance, I have a very small garden, but I built a kind of canopy which stops the sun and the rain. And so I began to use my garden as a room, a socialising space in a way that I didn’t use it before. So, yes, I think we have small but significant ways of trying to carry on connecting with people on that very important direct social level in the middle of all this. And those small efforts have been quite significant for me as a way of surviving and trying to cope with it all because I can always remind myself that, you know, in a few months I’ll be able to have people sit in my garden again. And that’s kept me going. And I’m sure it’s the same for other people.

Ana: Anastasia, I don’t know if you have any similar physical extensions of home I think this is quite an interesting point, what Kate was saying about using different parts of the home differently, but also creating new spaces.

Anastasia: I think it’s a fantastic question because the space has a sense of what my colleague Hania Janta and myself conceptualised as affective habitus (Christou and Janta, 2019) and I find myself without realising that I’m negotiating micro spaces of affective habitus within my home space, in which rooms I’m going to use for particular meetings, or if the office per se will be the space of teaching and also how I’m recreating colour in my garden to create a sense of joy and to destabilise perhaps the greyness that I feel in an emotional level with how new forms of life and planting and transplanting life is creating new meaning. So absolutely, totally resonates with the emotional geographies of my everyday life in my home space.

Ana: Thank you both so much for such a you know, truly, truly enriching and critically engaged discussion that I’m going to be thinking about for quite a while. And it’s been a real pleasure and a brilliant opportunity for me to reflect on some of those issues and with complexities that they bring. So thanks. Thanks so much to you both.

Anastasia: Thank you very much for an enormously stimulating and enriching conversation today.

Kate: Yes, I’d like to also say thank you for that opportunity. It’s been really nice to connect over our article and to discuss some of the issues and themes. And, of course, you know, in this conversation, all sorts of new ideas and new questions have come up, which is also very, very stimulating. So thank you for giving us this opportunity.

Ana: Thank you for listening, and a special thanks to my guests for this episode, Anastasia Christou and Kate Bloor, for joining us to talk about loneliness, for sharing both personal reflections and thoughts on why we should see this as a social problem, and for thinking together about how we might organise our lives differently. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also want to listen to the first episode in this series, Queering Home, which overlapped with some of the issues we discussed around LGBTQ+ experiences of home.

In the rest of the series we’ll continue to examine traditional ideas of home and venture into other, more critical readings of this space.

Don’t miss our next episode with Aimi Hamraie and Ellen Clifford which will develop in more detail issues that we discussed around the body, disability, design and home living.

I’m Ana Baeza and this podcast is brought to you by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. We’ll be back again soon, stay tuned

If you enjoyed our podcast ‘That Feels Like Home’ (or even if you didn’t!) please let us know by completing this short survey: http://ow.ly/bzxM50EAwff

Credits

Produced by Ana Baeza Ruiz, with guests Anastasia Christou and Kate Bloor

Editing by Zoë Hendon, Ana Baeza Ruiz and Paul Ford Sound

Transcription by Mia Kordova

Music Credits

Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License

Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.