THE (IM)MATERIALITIES OF HOME: NEGOTIATING HOME IDENTITIES IN A CONVENT IN SPAIN

Abstract

Despite the salience of homespaces as intense sites of affective encounter, literature on immaterial dimensions of the home has largely focused on the geopolitical and transmigrational, overlooking the role of religious discourses in shaping understandings of the home, particularly its transcendental dimensions. This thesis employs Sutherland’s (2016) concept of theography to examine how religious subjects negotiate between potentially (in)congruous discursive and affective framings of home, and how these conceptions of home affect their processes of identity formation. Its study is based on a group of Catholic Sisters living in a convent in Santander, Spain, whose lifestyles are profoundly exposed to and intertwined with religious discourse on the home. It combines mental mapping with semi-structured interviews and participant observation to examine their lived experiences of home, as shaped by their everyday geographies and affective spiritual encounters. Through discourse analysis, it also investigates how Catholic teachings about the home - namely, home as Heaven and manifested through a family bonded by spiritual relations - are contextualised and assimilated in the Sisters’ institution. Tracing the Sisters’ spiritual journeys, as they undergo transformational processes of conversion and purification, teases out the increasing significance of religious, immaterial dimensions over ‘earthly’ physical comfort and social relationships in their conceptions of home. While this evidences a growing alignment with the institutional discourses they are exposed to, it also foregrounds the Sisters’ agentic role in choosing to (continually) conform to particular institutionalised framings of the home. Critically, the recursive nature of theographic negotiation advances nuanced understandings of the relationship between discourse and affect as a complex dialectic rather than a one-way binary whereby discourse is privileged over affect. Overall, this thesis argues for the need to pay greater attention to religious discursive understandings of home in order to examine their impacts on identity formation and wider social implications.