Alva Gotby‘s Feeling at Home explores the complex interplay of practical and emotional concerns that a home involves, which are often flattened in debates around housing justice. Showing how domestic labour, privacy, safety, precarity and health are all bound up in housing, Gotby’s radical, feminist approach calls for a reimagining of home beyond normative individualist structures, writes Isobel Araujo.

Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing. Alva Gotby. Verso. 2025.

Do romantic ideas of home limit our radical imagination? What if social housing isn’t the way to fix housing injustice? How might we envision a totally new way to live, responsive to contemporary conditions of intersectional and gendered housing precarity?  

In her 2025 book Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing, scholar and feminist housing organiser Alva Gotby explores these and other critical, relevant questions relating to how our domestic lives present opportunities for developing critical consciousness around housing systems and public policy. Gotby builds on a long tradition of feminist and leftist critique, while provoking new questions relevant to contemporary housing conditions, injustices and struggles.

Debunking myths about the home

Though many of the concepts and policies discussed in the book are relevant to housing struggles everywhere, Gotby’s analysis is firmly focused on the UK. By tracing this history of social housing policy alongside the emergence of an ideal bourgeoisie domesticity, Gotby shows how certain ideas about family, individualism, and criminality produced the “myth that the home is a haven, separated from public space and the economic world of work and commerce” (31). These myths have material consequences, including housing design that promotes and naturalises surveillance and seclusion, as well as spatial arrangements that only accommodate very specific, gendered roles of care. Students, researchers, and public policy professionals (myself included) who, too often, fall back on social housing as the remedy for housing precarity and injustice, should take note. 

Gotby is a housing organiser and feminist scholar, and her work reflects a deep familiarity with traditional Marxist and leftist discourse on housing, as well as feminist critique of social housing policy and design. She draws upon her experience as an organiser to share sharp insights on contemporary conditions of housing struggle, and the ways in which we might begin to make space for radical re-imagining of home as a more flexible, collective, sustainable, and liberatory space.  

Feeling at Home is in keeping with a trend in the past five years of intellectual productivity around themes of care and capitalism. This crop of titles includes The Care Manifesto (2020) by The Care Collective, Cannibal Capitalism (2022) by Nancy Fraser, Premilla Nadasen’s Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023), and Gotby’s own They Call It Love:The Politics of Emotional Life (2023). Moving beyond broad analyses of emotional and domestic labour, Feeling at Home makes the case for centring home and housing policy in our analyses of class formation and feminist struggle.

Gender-based violence is an important and often overlooked component of housing precarity

The book opens with a call for leftists to reconsider the totalising rhetoric of housing financialisation. Gotby points out that the rental market in the UK is dominated by small-scale landlords, and that small landlordism persists as an aspiration for working-class people. Gotby also challenges the idea that recent financialisation is to blame for housing precarity, stating that housing conditions pre-financialisation were already unbearable for marginalised groups. As Gotby asserts, there can be “no return to normal” for those who have always “been excluded from the white, bourgeois version of domesticity, and for those who have been exploited and abused within it” (29). By centring the needs of people who are most vulnerable to eviction and housing precarity, Gotby in turn makes a compelling case that housing is a feminist, political issue.  

Centring the most precariously housed

Housing is a feminist concern- not only because eviction, homelessness and burdens of domestic labour disproportionately impact women, but because the very nature of the way in which public and private spaces are falsely dichotomised serves to obscure and normalise violence, thereby upholding patriarchy. Gender-based violence is an important and often overlooked component of housing precarity, not only because women often face the impossible choice of staying in an abusive situation or becoming homeless, but because, as Gotby points out, “the design of private homes becomes shelter for harmful behavior. The very thing that is supposed to protect people from violence – the private domestic space – becomes a source of violence and a condition for its continuation” (38). This also complicates narratives of “stranger-danger” that encourage seclusion, surveillance, and a false sense of security through the feeling of individual ownership, even for renters who will never be able to own their homes. When housing is considered through a radical feminist lens, the myth of the house as a “safe haven” begins to unravel, and we can begin to critically reimagine living spaces that promote stability, healing, autonomy, and collectivity.  

Building on this radical feminist perspective, Gotby argues that it is necessary to consider the ways in which poor housing conditions also produce “slow death” for entire swaths of populations relegated to disinvested and racialised neighbourhoods (68). Gotby articulates this concern, stating, “over the past decades, this association of race and poor housing conditions has intensified through a moralising discourse on “sink estates” which states that the moral conduct of residents is simultaneously the cause and the consequence of the decline of housing stock” (66). In other words, policy that prioritises new and marginally improved housing stock without considering the root causes of deterioration runs the risk of uneven implementation at best, and the reproduction of community stigma, segregation, and racism at worst. 

Urgent research is needed to better understand the potentials and pitfalls of housing cooperatives and commons.

To counter romanticised narratives around ownership, “safe spaces”, and domesticity, Gotby also draws upon family abolitionist literature. One of her most salient points is that, just because homeownership is more unaffordable for more people, that doesn’t necessarily mean that fewer people are becoming homeowners. It could mean that more people are simply relying on inheritance for homeownership. In this way, the bourgeoisie family form becomes the only apparatus through which stable shelter can be found, and radical imaginations of housing become limited by normative expectations around familial bonds, inheritance, and caregiving.

A vision for collective, flexible housing

To engage in transformative housing struggle then, Gotby cautions that a family-based, state-led strategy will never be enough, explaining that “the tendency in the housing movement to posit a bad market against a good state means that there is often a failure to theorise the state as a capitalist state, which is tasked with reproducing capitalism” (126). We must learn from past policy regimes and their counter-movements to propose a new vision of collective, flexible housing, without the family as the basic unit of housing design.   

But what might such a housing arrangement really look like? Gotby makes it clear that urgent research is needed to better understand the potentials and pitfalls of housing cooperatives and commons. Among other things, this research could examine if and how housing commons are addressing gendered and intersectional disparities in practical and political ways. To eventually move beyond theory and begin mobilising for the collective, liberatory vision of home that Gotby calls for in her closing chapter, this text might work best when paired with other texts that employ an intersectional, contextually grounded, ethnographic perspective on home, such as Homeplace (A Site of Resistance (1990) by bell hooks, or How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America (2020), edited by Sara Sinclair. 

As organisers, advocates, students, researchers, and working-class people continue to build critical consciousness around housing struggle and gendered housing precarity, this book delivers a critical provocation. While home is a personal feeling, feminist wisdom reminds us that the personal is political. It is only through re-organising our feelings around home that we might be able to radically transform the politics of housing.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: Sincerely Media on Unsplash.

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