Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home

While aspects of the home may provide for privacy, sanctuary, security and other aspects of 'ideal' domestic habitation, such provisions are always conditional, contingent, never secure and likely to be challenged by, amongst other things, the onset and development of bodily impairment. However, explorations of the meaning of the home, and housing studies more generally, rarely consider the body and impairment and its interactions with domestic space. This is curious because impairment is a significant, and intrinsic, condition of human existence and can affect anyone at any time. The paper develops the argument that a person's feelings about, and experiences of, the home cannot be dissociated from their corporeality or the organic matter and material of the body. Thus, the quality of domestic life, and housing quality more generally, has to be understood, in part, with reference to the body and conceptions of corporeality.