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This chapter demonstrates how cultural accounts of men in the home inculcated feelings that produced, reinforced, and disseminated notions of masculinity. It shows that while manly men were considered integral to its success they were nevertheless envisioned outside the home, fighting for it, defending it, or providing for it. As such, this chapter addresses men’s absence from home through the popular motifs of men leaving and returning, dreaming of home, and their ‘absent presence’; that is objects which acted as reminders of men who were away from home for long periods. When print and visual culture imagined men within the home, it was as catalysts for a ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ home, predominantly fashioned through their performance of key emotions. Men could produce ‘happy’ homes through their provision, frugality, kindness, love, and affection. Or their disruptive unmanly behaviours resulted in ‘unhappy’ homes, sites of domestic violence. The chapter focuses on representations of working-class men because middle-class imaginations often scrutinised their emotional and sexual performances in the home, since it was deemed central to a successful society and nation. As such, they also functioned to remind middle-class men what they should aspire to and avoid being. (194 words)

The chapter investigates the imaginings of home projected by Indonesian domestic workers while they are working in Hong Kong. Their imaginaries of future home provide important information for understanding their desires and sexuality in relation to the local ideology of migration and marriage as well as the political economy of family, that is, the gender division of labor and earnings contributed by women. The chapter also enriches the notion of Asian queer subjectivity by addressing how Indonesian women insinuated their homoerotic desires into the heteronormative logic of home. Addressing the Islamic context, the chapter also attends to the unmarried women who would not continue a same-sex relationship after returning to their natal family.

This chapter demonstrates how cultural accounts of men in the home inculcated feelings that produced, reinforced, and disseminated notions of masculinity. It shows that while manly men were considered integral to its success they were nevertheless envisioned outside the home, fighting for it, defending it, or providing for it. As such, this chapter addresses men’s absence from home through the popular motifs of men leaving and returning, dreaming of home, and their ‘absent presence’ that is objects which acted as reminders of men who were away from home for long periods. When print and visual culture imagined men within the home, it was as catalysts for a ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ home, predominantly fashioned through their performance of key emotions. Men could produce ‘happy’ homes through their provision, frugality, kindness, love, and affection. Or their disruptive unmanly behaviours resulted in ‘unhappy’ homes, sites of domestic violence. The chapter focuses on representations of working-class men because middle-class imaginations often scrutinised their emotional and sexual performances in the home, since it was deemed central to a successful society and nation. As such, they also functioned to remind middle-class men what they should aspire to and avoid being. (194 words)