Feminist Media Studies

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“Stay the fuck at home!”: feminism, family and the

private home in a time of coronavirus

Jilly Boyce Kay

To cite this article: Jilly Boyce Kay (2020) “Stay the fuck at home!”: feminism, family and
the private home in a time of coronavirus, Feminist Media Studies, 20:6, 883-888, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2020.1765293

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Published online: 18 May 2020.

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FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
2020, VOL. 20, NO. 6, 883–888
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1765293

“Stay the fuck at home!”: feminism, family and the private

home in a time of coronavirus
Jilly Boyce Kay
School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This short essay considers how, in conditions of widespread lock- Home; Feminism; Family
down during the coronavirus pandemic, domestic space has abolitionism; Coronavirus;
become hyper-visible. It argues that, in the mediated aesthetics of Capitalism
the crisis, we have seen a resurgence of mystificatory images of the
heteronormative private household through celebrity culture. It
considers how the injunction to ‘stay the fuck at home’ may work
to conceal pervasive forms of gendered violence within domestic
space, as well as re-affirming the private, capitalist home as a place
of safety and stability. Drawing on the work of family abolitionist
feminism, the essay argues that we might turn the hyper-visibility of
the private heteronormative home against itself, by exposing its
inbuilt dangers, inequalities, and cruelties - and by imagining how
much better home could be.

Since the global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic transformations have taken
place on a mind-bending scale, forcefully exposing the Thatcherite notion that “there is no
alternative” as a fallacy. Calls for a major redistribution of wealth are gathering force; the
United Nations (2020) has stated that the recovery “must lead to a different economy,”
centring sustainability, inclusivity and equality. I want to reflect in this short essay on the fact
that, while the official economy might be understood as unprecedentedly “up for grabs,”
our collective sense of how the social reproduction of the future might be differently
organised does not yet seem to be on the conceptual table in quite the same way.
New battle lines are being drawn over economic democracy; calls for more dignified
and humane conditions for waged labour are being voiced. The incipient campaigns for
better pay and protections for nurses, supermarket workers and other recognised “key”
workers may build into broader popular demands for other undervalued waged workers.
But what about the future of social reproduction and the gender order? If we are daring to
imagine new ways of organising economic life in the sphere of production and waged
labour, then how might we re-imagine domesticity, kinship, and care, and ways of
cohabiting and being beyond the private family? If utopian futures are newly possible,
then the risk might be that, left unquestioned, current heteropatriarchal power relations
will remain stubbornly intact, even as other solidities melt into air.
In the mediated aesthetics of the crisis, we are seeing a resurgence of mystificatory
images of the heteronormative private household. I want to explore here how the

CONTACT Jilly Boyce Kay jilly.kay@leicester.ac.uk University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
884 J. B. KAY

widespread injunction to “stay the fuck at home,” and its dissemination through celeb-
rified images of domesticity on social media, can cue us in to some of the dangers of
failing to interrogate the politics of the “private” sphere in a time of crisis. If the unrolling
of a conjuncture is also an opening to new possibilities, then what are the feminist ideas
that we have at our disposal which we should mobilise and amplify so that they too might
become politically possible? This is what I think we are tasked with, and in this short essay
I want to point to some of the feminist work that I think is most valuable in this regard.

Staying the fuck in your millionaire home: the class politics of lockdown
aesthetics
In this crisis context, we are being instructed to ‘stay at home’ or even to “stay the fuck at
home.” Across the world, official government instructions have been issued for citizens to
remain at home. In the UK, the slogan currently in government use is “Stay at home; protect
the NHS; save lives.”1 The “stay at home” message is amplified endlessly by celebrities who
exhort us to self-isolate in our houses. Unlike the official government messaging which is
disseminated through depersonalised, grave modalities—the UK chief medical officer Chris
Whitty sombrely outlining the threat of the virus, for example—the celebrity exhortations
come to us from their own domestic scenes of apparent bliss and plenitude, and via playful
and hyper-personalised performances of the self. The government warns us of the threats of
going outside; celebrity culture shows us the untold pleasures of remaining indoors. Under
conditions of lockdown, the private home has become hyper-visible; there has been
a proliferation of carefully curated images of domesticity, and performances of being-at-
home posted on social media by the wide spectrum of celebrities, micro-celebrities and
ordinary folk well-versed in self-branding techniques.
Elite celebrity culture in this time of coronavirus seems to promise a new form of social
solidarity, collectivity and belonging: we’re all in this together; we’re all equal now. This
taps into a widespread longing for social connection and common culture at the same
time as it obscures the hierarchical social arrangements that fatally undermine this very
possibility. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “stay-at-home” video despatch on Twitter came
from his large kitchen in California, where he was seen feeding carrots to his miniature
pony and donkey: “we will get through this together,” he captioned the tweet. Madonna
has tweeted quarantine communiqués from her luxury bathroom, musing whilst
immersed in her rose-petal-strewn milky bathwater how the coronavirus pandemic is
“the great equaliser”: “It doesn’t care about how rich you are, how famous you are, how
funny you are, how smart you are, where you live, how old you are.” On TikTok, celebrity
dance challenges have proliferated in the time of coronavirus, offering tantalising
glimpses into the enormous yet minimalist homes of the super-rich. Celebrities are also
pictured embracing the new pleasures of staying at home, rediscovering what “really
matters,” and feeling grateful in their domestic confinement. Gwyneth Paltrow, for
example, posted an image of herself in the novel position of having to carry shopping
bags, and reflected that now is the

time for nesting, reading, cleaning out closets, doing something you’ve always wanted to do
(write a book, learn an instrument or a language or learn to code online, draw or paint) going
through photos, cooking, and reconnecting on a deeper level with the people you love.
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 885

These celebrity-issued injunctions seem to function both as public service announce-

ments and collective morale-boosters. Celebrity culture has become the soft arm of
lockdown enforcement, instructing us to stay at home while simultaneously displaying
the pleasures and inducements to do so: who wouldn’t want to hang out with their
miniature ponies, or frolic in the sunshine and cool blue water of their Californian
swimming pool? The love of being in one’s home is being reframed as civic virtue: or,
to put it another way, the class privilege of home-love is being reframed as civic virtue.
Meanwhile, the Londoners who dare to sit down in public parks are labelled as “selfish,”
even in a context where, as Siobhan McGuirk 2020 points out, “they are one of millions of
British city-dwellers living in cramped conditions with limited or no access to a private
garden.” And at the same time, large tracts of green city space in the form of private golf
courses and fee-paying school fields remain inaccessible to the public. However, this
private enclosure and jealous hoarding of common space does not feature in journalistic
discourses of “selfish” use of outdoor space. Access to public space is an intersectional
feminist issue.

Home is where the heart(break) is

Capitalism is often understood as an “a-emotional” system that destroys social bonds and
affective attachments, but feminist theorists have pointed to the ways that it actually
generates, naturalises and institutionalises particular kinds of intense emotional attach-
ments, within social constructs such as marriage and the family (see, for example, Eva
Illouz 2007). These attachments are forged at the expense of other kinds of affective and
solidaristic possibilities. It is precisely because capitalism is understood as heartless, and
the family as full of feeling, that it is all too easy to slip into understanding the family as
offering a set of values that exist outside of, or in opposition to, capitalism’s dog-eat-dog
imperatives and atomising effects. The pervasive idea that the home is a “haven in
a heartless world” neatly expresses and perpetuates this notion.
Much left-wing thought also construes the family as a vital bastion of social protection
against the forces of marketization. However, through feminist theory, we know that the
family does not necessarily function in antagonistic relation to capitalism, or as a resistant
force against it; rather, as Nancy Fraser 2016 puts it, the family provides “the social-
reproductive conditions for capitalist production” (104). Capitalism cannot survive with-
out free care labour—mostly that of women performed within the family unit—which
sustains and reproduces the workforce. The labour of social reproduction involves “birth-
ing and socializing the young [. . .] caring for the old, maintaining households, building
communities” (101), and these constitute the background conditions of possibility for the
functioning of the official economy. Families really matter to capitalism, which is invested
in their future for its own survival, even as it undermines their capacities for care. For
Fraser, then, meaningful justice must involve “deep structural transformation,” which will
require “reinventing the production–reproduction distinction and reimagining the gen-
der order” (117). A key point we can take from this is that the family in its current historical
manifestation is not a “retreat” or a “haven” from the vagaries of the market economy, but
rather a model of privatised care that functions as a resource for capitalism, at the same
time as it insidiously constrains the possibilities for more expansive and collective models
of love, care, and kinship.
886 J. B. KAY

Given all this, what might we make of the widespread injunction to “stay at home,” or
even the more forceful “stay the fuck at home”? The most famous enjoinder to stay the
fuck at home came from Samuel L. Jackson’s re-rendering of his reading of the children’s
book Go the Fuck to Sleep. On the Jimmy Kimmel show, he read out the re-worked poem:

If you want things to get back to normal, don’t panic.

Just use your dome.
Wash your hands, stop touching your face, and stay the fuck at home

Even before this broadcast, the message to #staythefuckathome was widely circulating
on social media. On the one hand, to self-isolate and remain in one’s residence is
a necessary act to contain the spread of the virus, and as such is an act of social solidarity
and care for others. But perhaps there is a risk, in the uncritical adoption of the “Stay at
home” exhortation, that the ideological mystifications of home-as-haven will be further
and more powerfully entrenched. Do we really want things to go “back to normal”?
What might it mean to understand and promote the private home as “safe”? For whom
is it so—and for whom is it not? How can we adhere to physical distancing policies whilst
refusing to protect the status quo, which privatises care, alienates us from one another,
and renders invisible endemic forms of domestic abuse? In California, the state-wide
policy of physical distancing is referred to as “Safer at home.” In terms of contracting or
spreading COVID-19 we are undoubtedly safer for a policy of lockdown. But what kinds of
gendered violence might this conceal? At the time of writing in April 2020, the UK charity
Refuge, which provides specialist support for women and children experiencing domestic
violence, reported a 50% rise in calls to their National Abuse Helpline since the lockdown.
India’s National Commission for Women (NCW) reported a surge in domestic violence via
its WhatsApp reporting system (as only one third of women in India have access to the
internet, this surely conceals a much graver situation) (S. Rukmini 2020). While we adhere
to physical distancing rules in order to contain the pandemic, perhaps we might also turn
the slogan “Safer at home” against itself, showing how the private patriarchal household
has its own in-built dangers and oppressions.

Shelters from the storm/storms within the shelter

Sophie Lewis's (2019) work on family abolition, and her call for “queer care” and “surro-
gacy solidarity” to replace marriage and the family, is especially valuable in this crisis
context. Discussing the private nuclear household, Lewis (2020) identifies “the impossi-
bility, the unjustness, and the structural scarcity (for all concerned) baked into the heart of
this template for social reproduction.” As she compellingly writes:

How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being
so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal
parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health? Such standard homes are
where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down (Sophie
Lewis 2020a)

Lewis points out that other models of care and “kinning” are already in practice, with
many people on this earth “cultivating non-oedipal kinship and sharing reciprocal
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 887

mothering labors between many individuals and generations”; indeed, we would do well
to centre the ways that “trans, black, sex-working, migrant and queer communities have
historically survived thanks to their skills in this sphere” (Lewis 2019, loc, 2794). Abolishing
the family, then, would not involve the snatching away of the only social mechanisms for
care and love that are available to us, but would entail a proliferation and more radical
sharing of these resources.
Writing specifically about the coronavirus crisis, Lewis (2020a) points to one such
example of the sharing of mothering labours: she discusses the ways in which homeless
and housing-insecure mothers in the US are now organising to reclaim vacant properties. As
one of the mothers put it: “They say it’s a crime to come and occupy these houses. But this is
not a crime. This is justice.” (Liam Dillon and Laura Nelson 2020) Such instances of “feminist
kinning,” and Lewis’s work more broadly, show that the capitalist housing market makes
“home” in its current historical form unequal and unsafe by definition. In this sense, the
injunction to “stay the fuck at home” as the singular and undifferentiated response to the
crisis works to obscure the permanent crisis that constitutes patriarchy, racism and capital-
ism. To further re-inscribe the private home as a place of safety is to allow these oppressions
to more intensively flourish and entrench.
While we are seeing the resurgence of ideological mystifications of the happy house-
hold, this is also being met with the uncontainable evidence of their fallaciousness. In
India, when lockdown was declared, the vicious inequalities of “home” were starkly
revealed: there was a mass retreat of the middle-class into their gated communities,
while poor migrant workers were effectively expelled from their homes in the cities and
towns, driven out by employers and landlords, and forced to walk back to the villages
from which they had migrated; many died on the way (Arundhati Roy 2020). “Going
home” is dominantly associated with safety, security and love, but for millions of people,
“home” instead represents precarity, violence and terror, either because the lack of
a materially stable home, or because of the violence contained within it, or both.
While the official economy has been radically exposed as contingent and transformable,
the sphere of social reproduction that undergirds it is being implicitly construed as beyond
the purview of politics; as a timeless and apolitical space to which we can all retreat; a space
of protection that itself must be protected. But perhaps the intensive focus and hyper-
visibility of the home might yet render it susceptible to utopian impulses for change. How,
then, might we make the injunction to stay at home, to remain within the private household,
less amenable to the insidious logics of heteropatriarchal capitalism? As the force of the new
conjuncture splits open the status quo and provides once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for
radical change, the heightened media focus on “home” might allow us to reimagine and
rebuild this zone, if we can marshal the boldest intellectual and imaginative resources
offered to us by feminist theory. The task is to expose the constitutive inequalities and
deadly forms of violence of the private home; to render it conceptually open, and therefore
transformable. So while we are staying the fuck at home, we should also be imagining how
much fucking better home could be, and fighting to make it so.

Note
1. The National Health Service is the UK’s publicly funded healthcare system whose socia-
lised model is always under ideological threat from Conservative governments. As some
888 J. B. KAY

have noted, Tory voters would do well to protect the NHS by ‘staying at home’ on
election days.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Jilly Boyce Kay is a lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. She is author
of the forthcoming monograph Gender, Media and Voice (Palgrave). She is editor of Cultural
Commons, a new short-form section in the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

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angeles-caltrans-coronavirus-pandemic
Fraser, Nancy. 2016. “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” New Left Review 100 (July/August): 99–117.
Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Lewis, Sophie. 2019. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. London: Verso.
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