Through this thesis, we seek to investigate displacement as an intrinsic part of the queer experience and how homemaking for displaced queer bodies can be a conscious act of resistance and resilience. We understand “queerness” as not solely referring to sexuality or serving as a blanket term for LGBTQIA+ communities, but as a critique and rejection of social norms and unequal power structures, a political commitment to alternative imaginaries and possibilities. Building on Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology, displacement is not seen as a “one-off” or exceptional event but as a constant ongoing process (moving out of place) and condition (being out of place). For those queer bodies that are displaced because of their resistance to normative expectations, how can architecture support a sense of respite and inhabitation? What does the making of home look like for them? How do they enact resistance and resilience through the process of homemaking?

Starting from our own personal stories and trajectories, we aim to build a theoretical reflection that stems from our Chinese and Italian backgrounds and de-centers Anglo-American queer theory. We expanded onto home studies through methods of drawing and oral histories that allowed us to encounter the intangible layers of home space, thus incorporating emotions, memories, hopes, and the unspoken that are at the base of day-to-day practices of homemaking.

From a broad series of home studies varying from historical and contemporary queer communes to individuals living in the diaspora, we outlined several “practices of resistance”: labor, opacity/visibility, messiness, elements of orientation, house of difference, and power of fiction. We appropriated a soon-to-be-sold ETH villa at Voltastrasse 18 as the testing ground for these strategies and transformed the institutional setting into a domestic one by queering the use of space and office furniture. Weaving together the dreams and imaginaries from our research with the experiences of hosting the queer space working group (QSWG) and others, we saw the homemaking at the villa as an ongoing collective living experiment. This first iteration of the “house of differences” was documented in various formats, including the fiction book “The queer beings and their friends” and a film produced in collaboration with filmmaker Filémon Brault-Archambeault.