Home and beyond: Housework as aesthetic engagement with everyday environment

In social sciences, including sociology, gender studies and economics, housework is routinely understood as gendered reproductive labour, which unequally hinders women’s options in life. Based on qualitative interviews with Finnish emigrants, this article shows that we may need a more nuanced understanding of how people experience household chores. Housework sits, inconspicuously yet interestingly, at the intersection of many topical discussions, including migration, transcultural life, self-identity, sense of agency and technological advancement. Yet societal narratives of reproductive labour as something negative or nugatory tend to dismiss and devalue in particular women’s home-related skills, interests and traditions. This article makes a start in exploring how housework in its mundane ubiquity can hold more meaning and existential value than previously recognised: as aesthetic practices that anchor us to the familiar but also allow development of skill, taste and style, supporting self-expression and (re)making of one’s environment.