Abstract

During the lockdowns enforced to meet the COVID-19 pandemic, homes were tasked with sustaining life in a time of emergency, taking on multiple new functions and inviting reflection on modes of their inhabitation. Asking ‘what have our homes become?’, the article explores the metaphorical life of ‘home’ as the locus of a set of powerfully normalizing and normative functions as well as potentials for transformation. The article weighs the meanings to be found in the exceptional time we were ‘at home’ during lockdowns, in company with Bruno Latour’s sense of the metamorphosis lockdowns brought, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of this as a time of emergency, heightening executive powers, and Bonnie Honig’s counter-story of emergency politics as requiring democratic attention to the time and terms of emergence from a period of difficult choices and narrowed capacities.

How to Cite:

Jenkins, F., (2022) “What have our homes become? Metaphor and metamorphosis in the pandemic lockdown”, Law Text Culture 26(1), 188-214.