Reading of the thesis “Opening the doors of the house: Experiences and resistance of young LGBT+ people from Bages in the domestic space” by Júlia Pascual Bordas

On 19 June, Júlia Pascual Bordas successfully defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Opening the doors of the house: Experiences and resistance of young LGBT+ people from Bages in the domestic space”, from the Interuniversity Doctoral Programme in Gender Studies: Cultures, Societies and Politics, directed by Mireia Baylina (UAB) and Maria Rodó-Zárate (UPF).

The thesis addresses the home as a space that, traditionally perceived as safe, is problematised from feminist and LGBTIA+ perspectives. These perspectives have highlighted that the home can be an arena of conflict, struggle and negotiation, generating tensions between feelings of belonging and isolation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear for women and LGBTIA+ people. While social science has often focused on public space, this research focuses on private space to analyse the power dynamics at play that are central to understanding social inequalities.

The main objective of this research is to focus on the home as a central space to explore how young LGBTIA+ people experience discrimination and generate transformative resistance in their daily lives. Using a qualitative methodology, we analysed the experiences, experiences and emotions of thirty-seven young LGBT+ people in various spaces of the family home and their own home in the Bages region. This location outside the metropolitan area of Barcelona makes it possible to respond to the lack of studies in small, medium-sized cities and rural areas, thus expanding knowledge about LGBT+ realities in different contexts.

The research uses the intersection of three categories (age, gender and sexual orientation) to examine how these combine and result in power dynamics and coping strategies in different spaces of the household. The results reveal how adultism and cisheteronorma operate in everyday spaces, shaping the experiences of LGBT+ young people. In the face of this cisheteronormative context, young people with non-normative sexual and gender identities develop strategies of resistance and transformation.

The thesis underlines the importance of focusing on the home in order to understand how social norms operate, offering a complex view of private space as a space of negotiation, (in)comforts, power and contradictory emotions. This allows for a deeper understanding of how social norms manifest themselves in domestic spaces.

Congratulations to Júlia Pascual Bordas for this valuable contribution to the study of power dynamics and resistances of LGBT+ youth in domestic space!