To Build Home and to Live in (U)Hygge

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, Danish society has established a standard of normality through building bourgeois homes. To write about Danish homes is to write an ethnography of hygge, a nationalized, domestic aesthetic encapsulated in the sense of comfort, togetherness, and well-being. Meanwhile, in mainstream media and scholarship, minorities’ homes have been largely represented as "ghettos," distinct urban territories characterized by social dysfunction and unemployment.

This thesis looks at the home as the site where citizenship is produced and performed through household objects, furniture, and architecture. With an archive built on lived experiences collected from minorities living in Denmark, this research examines precarious bodies and non-normative modes of living and loving to articulate uhygge—the strange, foreign, othered, and unhomely—as queerness in the heteronormative discourses of a nation, a spatial form of being together that maintains the histories of diverse struggles.

To Build Home and to Live in (U)Hygge produces a three-act play that reconstitutes the cultural meanings of uhygge through acts of passing, turning, and arriving. The play unfolds narratives of home and belonging on the scales of homeland, house, and body. “Act I: To Pass, or Nobody Passes” positions migrants and queers of color as intersecting vectors of uhygge who haunt an essentialist Danish identity in order to re-evaluate failures in assimilating social norms. “Act II: The Politics of Turning” reflects on both the struggles of turning away from majoritarian projects, such as hygge, and the different coalitional publics that this “turning” enables. Finally, “Act III: A Home on Uranus” constructs a hybrid orientation between assimilation and marginalization to imagine a refuge built with jouissance, the delight in pain and danger.