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kgbrown's picture

Thinking about home

On Thursday in class, when we were discussing the concept of home, someone posed a question about whether or not you had to have a home. Emily responded by saying, "If we didn't have ahome, where would we come from?" I guess that this question really stuck with me because it seemed to conflict with the ideas that I have been having about being able to choose your home. I believe that home is not necessarily the place that you are born in or the place where you grow up. For some people, the place that they come from is not their home. Instead, they find a home later in life or they have to make one for themselves. Some one is class said that "home is the place that you know you are going to be accepted." I really liked this definition of home because I think that it really fits with my idea of home having less to do with the actual place than with the people that come from that place.

So then, how do my ideas about home fit with Martin and Mohanty's ideas about the stability of the home ebing built on "stable notions of self and identity [that] are based on exclusion and secured by terror" (197). When they discussed Pratt's examination of her own home town and the exclusion that it had been built upon, I think that the most important idea was about the people that had been left out of her concept of home even though they had existed and, in fact, been vital to its existance. I feel that it is important that your own "acceptance," as I discussed in the previous paragraph, is not sustained by other people's exclusion. The question that I am lead to: Is this really possible? Or is the concept of "home" naturally exclusive? Is there a possibility for an all inclusive concept of home? Can it really exist and, if so, what would it look like?

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