This thesis explores domestic spaces and the aesthetics of home. Since geography remains embedded in colonial binaries that reify a self-referential and biocentric system of knowledge (Wynter), the aim is to expand-overlap-converge-confront (McKittrick 2021) the current understandings of the domestic, related with questions of gender, the everyday, and ways of being. In doing so, it seeks to undo the dichotomies that not only fail to explain the processes of domestic everydayness but also contribute to the consolidation and normalisation of the gendered construction of space. Given that domestic spaces and homes are profoundly intimate, and that ethnography and interviews are research forms that intrude on lives; the thesis relies on literary texts as its primary material for expressing and analysing domesticity. By engaging poetic texts as primary data, the thesis aims to open up new potentialities for understanding home as relational, plural and aesthetic.
At the same time, it proposes a form of mapping for analysing such textual data. Because cartography is historically and originally embedded in colonial, imperial, and patriarchal systems of knowledge, the aim is to rethink mapping as a practice that questions its onto-epistemologies and actively refuses reproducing such hegemonic structures of knowledge production. To this end, a mapping manifesto is proposed, one that conceives mapping as a practice-praxis-process that do not delimitate or define but instead attempts to acknowledge the opacities inherent in representational practices. This manifesto does not claim novelty; rather, it situates itself within a relational and interdisciplinary dialogue with both past and contemporary thinkers. Mapping is thus understood as an analytical tool that opens up, rather than imposes, ways of relating within domestic spaces.
Hence, the thesis contributes theoretically by re-conceptualising domestic space as complex, emotional, and fluid, and methodologically by proposing a mapping practice that treats the process itself as a field of inquiry, through creative making and critical reflection. It positions domestic space as central to contemporary spatialities and advances mapping practices that reflect its complexity, human depth, and collective potential to imagine liberatory futures and practice liberatory presents.