Home decoration as popular culture
Constructing homes, genders and classes in Norway
Marianne Gullestad
Main goals:
1. to uncover the subtleties, complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of gender in different
contexts
2. to make sameness and similarities between genders explicit
3. to examine gender constructs relationally
4. to study gender constructs (cultural categories, symbolic expressions and activity systems)
5. to analyse gender in interaction with other kinds of differentiation (such as class, age, race,
ethnicity, religion etc)
The house as an object of study
Houses have a practical, economic, social, aesthetic, cosmological and symbolic aspects
Researchers look at
 physical structures of the house and the environment
 the objects found in the house
 how the objects are grouped and arranged
 use of these objects
Various theoretical perspectives stress
 household functions
 symbolic and cosmological aspects
 cognitive categories
Uses of looking at houses
 to discover associated practices
 to discover cultural and moral categories
 a medium to discover how persons and society are created (through process of
objectification)
key symbols (core symbols, dominant symbols)
symbol: vehicle for cultural meaning
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House as a key symbol in Norway
serves to
create and express specific identity and intimacy
(gender, social class and background)
House as a key symbol in Norway
complex set of
 cultural categories
 values
 relations
Social-historical context:
 rural
 division of labour according to gender
 religious pietism
 recent urban migration (mid-19th century)
 relatively little economic differentiation
 small landed aristocracy
 arrival of welfare state
 ideology of equality as sameness
 ideology of equality as sameness in gender relationships (in the households)
 single family house
 mobility in the cities (discontinuity of houses from generation to generation)
Home (hjem)
 hierarchically ordered
 warmth, security, cosiness (boredom +)
 inside-outside (home vs. outside world)
 inside-outside  (private-public) time-dependent
 nature (human functions) vs. culture (socializing)
 division of rooms according to generations
Ordinary people in Bergen
 working-class families
 men-women  little education
 men: salary earners
 women: marginal jobs
 three-room apartments, home making is important, new furniture (class
background), order and cleanliness, symmetry, wholeness and style, living room 
display, kitchen (multipurpose)
2


home is a female universe (controls, decides)
garage, cellar and the car are male domains (man is not at home, vulnerable)
Reasons for the preoccupation with homes in Norway:
 cold climate
 secularized religious pietism
 creativity and expression (popular culture-consumption)
 identity
 work patterns
 egalitarian ideologies (sharing and unity of men and women)
 resistance against commercialization
 status
Home decoration
 inside (personal, expressive)
vs.
outside (impersonal, mute)




self-sufficient & independent
personal & unique  (social class)
diligence, simplicity, realistic outlook
supposedly not ostentatious/extravagant
practicality  modesty  creativity
Home is an expressive statement
personal identity, family identity, social class
(love, sharing, closeness, integration, unity, safety, security, self-sufficiency, control, order,
comfort, world view)
Home is a source of resistance (wholeness and closeness)
 whole vs. fragmentation (post-modernity?)
 order vs. chaos (sanity vs. anomie)
 control vs. no control
 power vs. disempowerment
 personal vs. impersonal
 informal vs. formal bureaucracy and market
 healing vs. sickness
 sacred in a way secularized way
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Constructing genders
 female hand (aesthetic, clean, caring/close, comforting, creating)
 handy man (potent, able)
 sharing and togetherness (rural ≠ city)
reflected in the organization of space
division of tasks has to be negotiated (symbolic value of tasks is gender-specific)
sameness ideal  home decoration  love

"handy man" dependent on the "female hand"
Constructing classes
middle class vs. working class (mutually constructed)
 different objects, similar order
 same categories, different styles
working class: passive & traditional - women
middle class: active & progressive - men
working class: passive & traditional - women
middle class: active & progressive - men
working class to middle class
as women to men
working-class marriage – dependency (explicit)
middle-class marriage – dependency (implicit)
love = dependency (sharing)
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