If you read last month’s essay on viewing Home as a “care studio,” consider today our first class together in the series, where we explore the design, labor, and emotion embedded in the domestic spaces that shape us. Here is Module 1: Home as a Site of Power & Resistance.
I. What do we inherit in our homes?
After renting small apartments for most of my adult life, we recently became homeowners of a 112 year old Edwardian—a complicated privilege and responsibility. In the Bay Area, old homes are part of a complex history of wealth-seeking and climate-battling. Edwardian architecture, which emerged in the early 1900s, marked a quieter, more practical response to the ornate Victorian style that preceded it. While Victorian homes—especially in San Francisco—are known for their decorative trim, turrets, and more segmented interiors, Edwardians featured simpler facades and more open layouts. Larger living and dining rooms signaled a shift toward day-to-day livability, appealing to a growing middle class navigating modern domestic life. Still, San Francisco in 1912 was a place where white homeownership was subsidized through government policy, Black families were redlined out of these neighborhoods for decades and Asian families continued to face displacement and racism. After a city-destroying 1906 earthquake, what got rebuilt and for whom was not politically neutral.
When we moved in, I couldn’t help but wonder: What was this house originally designed for? What have these walls witnessed? And what kind of home am I building inside it now, in an era of wild economic volatility, climate change and rapid technological acceleration?
Making a home, which includes basic domestic chores but also tremendous cultural choices—raising a child, hosting guests, managing space—is to make a thousand small decisions that signal who belongs, what’s safe, and how much power I’m willing to share.
II. Homeplace (A Site of Resistance) - bell hooks
I decided to pull from a few different disciplines to try to understand how home can be a site of power. At the end of this essay is a list of readings. But if you only read one, let it be bell hooks’ incredible essay, Homeplace (A Site of Resistance) from 1990.
In it, she explains, in the simultaneously nuanced and direct way only bell hooks can, how Black women carved out spaces of love, dignity, and resistance within their homes, even under the most dehumanizing conditions.
She writes:
This task of making homeplace was not simply a matter of black women providing service; it was about the construction of a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. We could not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that “homeplace” most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits. This task of making a homeplace, of making home a community of resistance, has been shared by black women globally, especially black women in white supremacist societies.
My favorite part of the essay is a section in which she takes to task Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative, specifically a section in which he tells the story of his birth and how he never got to see his mother, an enslaved black woman who had to work 12 miles away from home during the day. Because she was a field hand and had to be at work by sunrise, she would only be able to see him at night, when she would walk all the way home to put him to bed and then leave before he woke up in the morning.
hooks’ critique:
After sharing this information, Douglass later says that he never enjoyed a mother’s “soothing presence, her tender and watchful care” so that he received the “tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” Douglass surely intended to impress upon the consciousness of white readers that the cruelty of that system of racial domination which separated black families, black mothers from their children. Yet he does so by devaluing black womanhood, by not even registering the quality of the care that made his black mother travel those twelve miles to hold him in her arms. In the midst of a brutal racist system, which did not value black life she values the life of her child enough to resist that system, to come to him in the night, just to hold him.
The whole section made me cry, but especially:
Holding him in her arms, Douglass’s mother provided, if only for a short time, a space where this black child was not the subject of dehumanizing scorn and devaluation but was the recipient of a quality of care that should have enabled the adult Douglass to look back and reflect on the political choices of this black mother who resisted slave codes, risking her life, to care for her son. I want to suggest that devaluation of the role his mother played in his life is a dangerous oversight. Though Douglass is only one example, we are currently in a danger of forgetting the powerful role black women have played in constructing for us homeplaces that are the site for resistance.
This opened up everything for me. Of course we can’t compare the circumstances of slavery to the environments in which most of us get to mother today, but we can consider that any environment in which one mothers is a site for political choices. The way we approach the most mundane acts—making a bed, cleaning a kitchen, holding a child—can be politically and emotionally charged. Even the way an Indian-American woman like me, from a traditionally patriarchal society, chooses to raise a son, becomes a political act. And these acts are shaped by the systems we may be resisting… and the ones we unconsciously reproduce.
So, if homeplace is where care becomes resistance, how do we begin to see the shape of power in our own homes today?
III. A Noticing Prompt: Can you trace the flow of power?
Let’s do a small noticing practice to see if we can see power in the home.
When I was in journalism school, a reporting professor encouraged us to always look for the flow of power in a room, which can often be done by noticing: Which direction does information flow in a community? Who holds the power in the flow?
I think this can be applied to noticing power in any environment, built or natural or, like home, somewhere in between. For instance: We exert power when we decide who we feel comfortable hosting—and who we don’t. We exert power when we choose which rooms are for kids, which are for adults, and which stay closed. We exert it when we keep certain community or family members at a distance, not out of cruelty, but as a form of emotional self-protection. It might seem minor, but we even exert power when we install baby gates, not just for safety, but as a way to manage overwhelm and reinforce structure. I’m doing it now, juggling a toddler and a puppy who like to fight over toys without language. I exert power by managing space and setting boundaries—trying to keep everyone safe.
So here is a prompt for you →
How does power move in your home? Can you see it?[Note: The point here is just to notice. Not judge or evaluate.]
If “power” feels abstract, start small. Every home has a structure—emotional, architectural, cultural. And that structure teaches us something. What, exactly, is it teaching?
Here is a small list to get you started:
- Who cooks, and who chooses what’s cooked?
- Who has keys to the house?
- What kinds of locks are on which doors?
- Who is expected to clean up after whom?
- What’s the most private space in your home? Who gets to use it?
- What kind of power do objects hold? (e.g., baby monitors, smart locks, family photos)
- Who decides what stays on the fridge?
- Who dictates the schedule?
- The money?
- The privacy rules?
- Which rooms feel emotionally charged?
- Who is invited in—and who is kept out?
Some of these details are common across homes because they simply mirror the safety and survival requirements of being human. But others might actually be more arbitrary—or loaded—than we realize.
What I’m realizing—both as a child of parents and a parent to a child—is that they shape how children understand the world, how emotional labor flows, and how power is granted, exercised, or withheld.
It may not mean we have to do anything different immediately, but perhaps we can at least name what we are doing as we are doing it. Noticing is how patterns emerge. As I try in my own home, I’ve been noticing how many of these choices I make without thinking. But they add up to the building blocks of my entire posture toward other people. And I know my kid is watching.
IV. The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard
The architect of our inner world, Gaston Bachelard, opens The Poetics of Space with a claim that has haunted me:
“If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
To Bachelard, the home is not just a physical structure, but a space that animates our imagination. We do not merely dwell in homes; they dwell in us—shaping how we remember, how we imagine, how we feel safe enough to think.
He writes about the attic, the cellar, the nooks and thresholds of a home as metaphors for our psychological life. What we call storage or structure may in fact be containers for memory, for reverie, for fear, for longing.
Design, in this way, becomes a conduit of emotional life—and a subtle form of power. Because who gets access to which rooms, which emotional landscapes, which corners of thought, is never purely logistical. It’s cultural.
This invites a question:
What parts of your home invite your imagination? And whose imagination is being invited?
V. The Architecture of Control - Beatriz Colomina
Where Bachelard explores the interior life of homes, Beatriz Colomina examines the public performance embedded in private design.
In Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, she writes:
“Modern architecture does not so much accommodate the subject as produce it.”
She argues that domestic spaces have always been designed with visibility in mind—especially visibility that maps onto gender. Open kitchens, floor-to-ceiling windows, even the concept of open floor plans—they aren’t just aesthetic shifts. They signal a transformation in how we expect people to live, to be watched, to be available.
Where Victorian homes divided labor across many small rooms, the modern open floor plan collapses distinctions between domains. A woman cooking in an open kitchen is also hosting, also parenting, also performing. The walls didn’t just come down—they took with them a form of private power.
Consider how modern homes now include baby monitors, smart locks, nanny cams—objects designed to watch and be watched. When is surveillance an act of safety, and when does it become a form of control? These design choices reflect not only fear or care, but our deepest beliefs about trust, privacy, and authority—especially when we parent.
This reconfigures our question:
What kind of labor is made visible in your home? What kind is made invisible? And how does your home’s architecture reinforce that?
VI. Ruth Asawa and the Art of Domestic Casting
One of the most moving studies I came across this month wasn’t a text, but an exhibit: The Faces of Ruth Asawa at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center.
Asawa—best known for her intricate wire sculptures—also spent decades casting the faces of guests who entered her home, asking them to lie still while she made a mold of their features. The project was intimate, quiet, and radically egalitarian: everyone from neighborhood children to famous artists was invited, and treated the same. It was a domestic ritual of recognition.
This gesture—of turning a private home into a site of creative archive, of seeing all sorts of guests as worthy of documentation—transformed her space into a living, breathing memory vessel. Later, she requested that her ashes be fired into ceramic vessels by her son, which are also on display in the exhibit.
I couldn’t help but think: What kind of agency does it take to make that request—and what kind of home life fosters it?
References
- bell hooks, Homeplace: A Site of Resistance, from Yearning (1990)
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Chapter 1: “The House, From Cellar to Garret” (1958)
- Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, selections from Introduction + Chapter 3 (1996)
- Exhibit: Ruth Asawa, The Faces of Ruth Asawa, Cantor Arts Center