Governing the Domestic Space of the Traveller in the UK: ‘Family’, ‘Home’ and the Struggle over Dale Farm

This article contends that domesticity and processes of domestication maintain a central role in the (re)production of British citizenship. Domesticity provides a template for living that shapes the raced, classed, gendered and sexed boundaries of Britishness. Drawing upon William Walters’ concept of ‘domopolitics’, the article specifically explores how norms of familial domesticity are used in the marginalisation and regulation of Traveller groups in the UK. Focussing on the eviction of Irish Travellers from the Dale Farm site in Essex, 2011, the article argues that the eviction relied upon the historical mobilisation of Travellers as ‘failing’ norms of domesticity. However, whilst the destruction of ‘home’ (domicide) at Dale Farm represented a form of domestication that is enacted in the name of the ‘true’ domos or the home of the citizen, this did not go unchallenged. The struggle and resistance to the state-led eviction at Dale Farm unsettled the boundaries of contemporary domopolitics by providing alternative claims to belonging and ‘home’. By examining the politics of domesticity in the production of marginality, we see how family and home not only act as means of stratifying and governing subjects but also emerge as sites of contestation.