Savvy Investors and Domestic Goddesses? New Challenges for Feminist Housing Research

The arrival of savvy female investors and domestic goddesses in mainstream media poses considerable challenges for a feminist housing research agenda that was once aimed squarely at accommodating gender equality within the housing market and the urban landscape. In this paper, I outline some of the ways that feminist scholarship is being reformulated in response to theoretical critiques from within the social sciences, namely the destabilization of a unified female identity and the unpacking of master concepts such as patriarchy. Here I chart the rise of feminist standpoint theory, which provides some intermediary solutions to these critiques, as well as the limits of this position. I then suggest some strategies for reinvigorating feminist housing scholarship which has lost some momentum since the publication of Sophie Watson's groundbreaking work on gender and housing in the 1980s. This reformulation I contend is important in analysing and interpreting recent shifts in women's housing careers and domestic lives, as well as broadening the gender-agenda to include consideration of the negotiation of masculinity and femininity within contemporary housing markets and homes.