Entering the living room : sex, space and power in a cross-cultural and non-heteronormative context

In March 2009 I had just about settled into what was to be my fieldwork home and research base in Fiji for the next year. My main topic of interest was the social construction of masculinity in the context of Fiji’s modern, multicultural market economy, and I had set up an interview with an acquaintance whom, for the purpose of this chapter, we may call Ronny. After some negotiation we had agreed that Ronny would visit my house a few kilometres outside town in order to share his story and views on my overall topic. In an inversion of the classic anthropological ‘arriving-on-the scene’ opening of ethnographic narratives, my text thus starts when a local interlocutor enters my living space and it is this key moment that forms the nucleus of my analysis. The interview itself did not turn out the way I had envisaged it and is best understood, in research terms, as a ‘false start’. My failure to handle the interview in the way I considered appropriate, and my interlocutor’s surprising response to my questions, was the catalyst for this reflexive chapter. In the context of the present collection on ‘queering the interior’, this chapter works in three ways. First, it is an opening, an invitation into the home and its queer interiors; second, it provides a small counterbalance to the largely UK/US-focused content of the chapters; and third, it cautions us about universalizing expectations or ideals that might be associated with Western queer domestic lives and practices.