CARNAL KNOWLEDGE: IN PRAISE OF ROOMMATES The Precious Quality of Solitary Togetherness by Clio Chang ℅ SSENSE
Key Takeaways
On markets making homeownership desirable and exclusive:
“As the people I live with can attest, I’m the roommate who’s most often in a terrible mood. I stomp around barefoot and shut myself in my room when I’m home. But when I come out, I always feel more settled knowing others will be there. In the end, I’m a roommate proselytizer. For decades, we’ve been taught that roommates are a proxy for failure; a lack of financial and romantic success. Market forces relentlessly encouraging homeownership have made living alone, or with your nuclear family, the pinnacle of adult achievement. Yet those same forces are the ones behind rising rents and lower incomes, making what we’re taught to want increasingly out of reach.”
On covid-19 as a case study for needing self-sustaining communities:
“As the virus ruthlessly separates many of us from our families, we’ve found ourselves relying on the people we live with and the people we live beside: neighbors, strangers, everyone in between. If someone in our community gets sick, we get sick. It's impossible to protect our families unless we protect everyone else.”
On capitalism encouraging the pursuit of homeownership and nuclear families:
“In her 1979 essay about the family, Ellen Willis argued that for people living under a hostile system of precarity, families were the only sense of security. The ethos of family and capitalism were inextricable—if people started looking beyond their families for aid, they might start demanding broad government programs and just working conditions, too. As Willis wrote,‘Capitalists have an obvious stake in encouraging dependence on the family and upholding its mythology.’ (A pro-roommates mantra if I've ever heard one!)”
On finding the security we seek in homeownership by organizing with strangers:
“We don’t require strangers right now because our system is failing us; our system is failing us because we haven’t reached out and helped each other as strangers. This is a moment to try to broaden our organizing in every way possible, starting with marshalling our own desires. Reorienting ourselves against the homeownership ideology is where that understanding starts, not where it stops.”