A tiny home of one's own

Abstract

The home occupies a prominent place in our popular and material imagination. The ideal home is a powerful image because it is understood to be a haven from the ills of the world and a material expression of our true selves. This article considers how home, as a tiny home, is framed through two YouTube channels, Living Big in Tiny Homes and Kirstin Dirksen. Extending Sara Ahmed's work on affect, we present this framing as twofold: first, through a sense of ‘with-ness’ where YouTube facilitates an intimate storytelling with materiality; and second, a sense of ‘against-ness’ where both channels facilitate the notion of the materiality of home as separate and bounded. The study draws on detailed analysis of 42 video episodes and accompanying written comments to consider how materialities, affects, and experiences of tiny homes are intersected with the constraints of the ideal of a stand-alone home.

Introduction

Home is a powerful ideal because it is understood to be a haven from the ills of the world, and a material expression and representation of our true selves (Miller, 2008). Home is an aspiration, a future orientation, the good life and a status symbol. Home is metaphorical but equally present, material and felt (Heynen, 2005). However, home, in the words of Mary Douglas (1991: 289), is ‘always a localizable idea … [and] home starts by bringing some space under control’. In this sense, home is a political ally, demarcating who belongs, who is authentic and who should stay. Home does not operate just at the boundary between ourselves and others, it also serves as the grounds for the historical root of nationality, citizenship, belonging, and the naturalisations of these terms (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Duyvendak, 2011: 117; Morley, 2000). Bourdieu argues that the naturalness of the home means that we tend to ‘[take] it for granted, precisely because [we are] caught up in it, bound up with it; [we inhabit] it like a garment or a familiar habitat’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 142–143). The home, for Bourdieu, however, is not natural at all, but is culturally created. This article takes a closer look at precisely what is unnoticed and undervalued because it is so visible and so close to us; the place where home and happiness are treated as merely givens and a home's materiality takes on the mantle of the mute and the prosaic.

While desiring to obtain an ideal home, current potential owners are faced with housing precarity, which has resulted in people seeking other ways to obtain the dream of home ownership. Tiny homes are offered as a solution for those seeking financial freedom (Anson, 2014; Blunt and Sheringham, 2019; Ford and Gomez, 2017), a way into the housing market (Priesnitz, 2014), and a way to live cheaply when faced with economic and financial failure (Wilkinson, 2011). Tiny homes are also proposed as a sustainable alternative to other forms of housing and resource depletion (Anson, 2014; Colombini, 2019: 450) to reduce a home's footprint (Priesnitz, 2014). Further, tiny homes are envisaged as housing for guests (Ford and Gomez-Lanier, 2017), a way to house large populations within limited space (Ford and Gomez-Lanier, 2017), and as the means of a fun escape in the guise as a grey nomad (Leonard and Onyx, 2009). Tiny homes represent an ideology of a simpler life, by having less: less space, less stuff and less responsibility. Tiny homes, in this respect, mediate between various factors impacting on homeownership – while still preserving a stand-alone home.

To gain insight into tiny homes as a site of production of home, affectively, materially and symbolically, we analyse two YouTube channels (Ahmed et al., 2020): Living Big in Tiny Homes (Living Big) and Kerstin Dirksen (Dirksen). The article is structured as follows. After introducing the two channels we outline the methodology used for the study. We then present the theoretical framework of Sara Ahmed's writing on affect, materiality, orientation, and in particular, on the notion of ‘with-ness’ and ‘against-ness’ (2012). Then we elaborate on Ahmed's evocation of ‘with-ness’ and ‘against-ness’ in two ways: first, we examine the notion of ‘with-ness’ within homes literally, which YouTube enables with its more intimate storytelling through materiality. Such intimate ways of communication eschew traditional understandings of home as emplaced through fine-grained movements with architecture, but still speaks to notions of homeyness; and second, we discuss how both channels present gestures of ‘against-ness’ where the shows still facilitate the notion of home as separate and bounded to the governing norms of privacy, propriety and property. Subsequently, such distancing ties identity to spatial and material separation through the absence of difference, where home is defined in terms of a white middle-class couple, and made and remade as the ground and conditions of sameness. The article concludes with discussing tiny homes, as a lens that enables us to expand on ‘with-ness’/‘against-ness’ towards material cultures.

Two YouTube channels

YouTube, launched in 2005, is one of the most visited websites on the internet with 22.8 billion visits a month, surpassed only by Google (Ceci, 2022). The video-sharing site allows people to produce videos, watch, indicate likes (dislikes are no longer publicly visible) and comment on videos. Jenkins (2006) describes YouTube as a convergence culture merging traditional and new media formats, non-profit and for-profit ventures, professional and amateur videos, and the production and consumption of media. YouTube's potential for creativity has also been celebrated for (Jenkins, 2006: 69); participation (Van Dijk, 2009) and a sense of authenticity and intimacy (Bond and Miller, 2021), affording people to meet, dialog, learn, and share. The ability to engage through the comment section not only sets it apart from television, but also denotes it as a site of fierce ideological struggle, fraught with antisocial behaviour (Jenkins and Carpentier, 2013: 8–9; Strangelove, 2020); but equally, it can be engaging, informative, self-reflective and affirming (Levinson et al., 2020).

Dirksen is focused on tiny homes and extends to simple living, backyard gardens (and livestock), alternative transport, DIY, craftsmanship, and philosophies of life. The host, Kerstin Dirksen, combines her TV journalist background and self-proclaimed minimalist stance (‘both personally and for the planet’) to create intimate home conversations and performances. Dirksen forges authenticity and intimacy through the manner of revelation, where the videography appears to be choreographed through happenstance (Genz, 2015; Jerslev and Mortensen, 2016). The homeowner leads us through their home with their own rhythm. Dirksen, at times, will prompt the owner, and sometimes her assistant behind a second camera – to describe or talk to specific aspects of their home. Dirksen and the other camera operator will even capture each other in their shots, sometimes with a coffee. This is casual. The videography gives an impression we are watching their real lives, inviting a sense of familiarity and intimacy (Bonsu et al., 2010). Supporting this view, professionals, such as architects, speak about the home at times, but the interaction is low key; they do not rely on architectural tropes, genres, or named figures. The whole scene reassures the viewer that they are invited without it feeling inappropriate; we are welcome guests (Hill and Paris, 2014).

Living Big is a scripted channel hosted by Bryce Langston, an actor who, like a host on a television series, acts as a conduit of knowledge and ‘leads the viewer around buildings, narrating their attributes and their value’ (Stead and Richards, 2014: 101). In Living Big, Langston asks the owner about everything, from the form of the home through to the kitchen cupboards, from the budget through to how the toilet operates. The videos operate through a repeated pattern of description, which is then weaved together with the images of the owner performing the actions of living – this is a staged home biography. Unlike Dirksen's channel, architects, builders, or other experts are absent. In this respect, building a tiny home is portrayed as a singular self-sufficient activity – even as a heroic and individualistic act (Anson, 2014). However, in contrast to Dirksen, Living Big is premised on a positive emotional economy – even the choice of a toilet, no matter what the choice, is a good choice. Living Big orientates us towards this promise of happiness through the values tightly woven into the ideal of home. Viewers also connect with the series through the comment section where Langston responds to comments conferring a sense of community through his engagement. Both channels leverage off a performance of intimacy and authenticity – in purposeful ways. We now briefly present our approach to the selection and analysis of the video episodes.

Data and methodology

Living Big is structured much like a walking interview, where the interviewer prompts the meanings and connections to the surrounding materialities and environments, where the owner(s) provide responses while also being located to the multi-sensory simulation of their home (Evans and Jones, 2011). We suggest, similarly, that Dirksen resonates with a ‘go along’, where she shadows the owner and the owner is free to discuss their own perceptions, spatial practices, and social and spatial architectures (Evans and Jones, 2011; Hitchings and Jones, 2004). The movement on these channels, however, is not first hand, but mediated through videos (Pink, 2007) – the aural, spatial and temporal nature of the videos, allow us insight into how the owners walk and engage with the materiality of their homes, as they communicate to the viewers how their whole-body movements create a sense of home (Lee and Ingold, 2006: 80; Witmore, 2006), evoking sensations and affects, soliciting a sensory or kinaesthetic empathy (Paterson, 2012). The videos provide a sense of material presence. While staged beyond the control of our own research design, these videos offer us insight into materiality, affective charge, and normative constraints of the home.

We gathered the data for this study through a purposeful selection of 42 videos out of just over a thousand videos (1316). We focused on the period from 2017 to 2021. We chose an equal number of videos from the respective channels. The first videos we selected were listed as the most popular, and then more recent videos were watched; and, understood in conjunction with the one hundred top comments for each video. We also reviewed some of the least popular videos, most of which were recent releases. We viewed each video multiple times to understand their structure on each channel and how different actors – including the home ‒ interacted. The emerging themes were coded inductively, premised on relevant architectural literature. Given the large number of videos that were studied, aspects of creating or describing the home were omitted. While this may present as a limitation, our analysis was strengthened by two researchers examining the videos and comparing notes.

Theoretical framework

In this article, we set up our approach in light of Ahmed's writing on affect, orientation, and gestures of ‘with-ness’ and ‘against-ness’, to look at how tiny homes are both regulated and charged with affect. As Ahmed (2010: 35) writes, ‘objects are sticky because they are already attributed as being good or bad, as being the cause of happiness or unhappiness’. Ahmed uses the word ‘sticky’ to describe the strength of the connection ‘between ideas, values, and objects’ (2012: 29), such as taste. With ‘sticky’, she challenges the concept of affect as autonomous and instead argues for the importance of emotion involved in forms of ‘intensity, bodily orientation, and direction that are not simply about “subjective content”’ (Ahmed, 2010: 230), an orientation which is grounded in the repetition of past association and accumulated affective value (Ahmed, 2012). Critically, stickiness circulates as a ‘form of relationality, or a “with-ness,” in which the elements that are “with” get bound together’ (Ahmed, 2012: 91). ‘With-ness’ shapes materiality, our bodies, our gestures, our turns of phrase: we pick up bits and pieces of each other as the effect of nearness or proximity (Ahmed, 2004: 160). As such, our orientation or our position has ‘with-ness’ or ‘against-ness’, how we lean into and away from these norms, values, and the materiality of objects (Ahmed, 2004: 139).

While Ahmed considers how one can stick by a friend or be stuck in traffic, we are interested in how this stickiness holds together ideals of home – the good life, family, and the stand-alone home. We also pick up on Ahmed's material orientation to include the touch of the door handle, cleaning, and collapsing onto the chair and floor – as a relational, collaborative, and co-extensive relationship with human and non-human others to create a ‘with-ness’ (Ahmed, 2004: 160). An affective charge of ‘with-ness’ that goes beyond the screen, forging a connection with the viewer.

This more-than-human view allows us to attend ‘to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and bodily affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility’ (Springgay and Truman, 2017: 27). Rather than understanding ourselves as rational, autonomous and self-consistent envelopes distinct from time and space, gestures of ‘with-ness’ and ‘against-ness’ orientate us to consider how we are necessarily enmeshed with others, including the audience. The homes-on-screen have the potential to trigger affects of desire, proximity, toward-ness, but equally leanings of away-ness – where the viewer performs their bodies differently as part of the interaction with the media. Our attention now shifts to the analysis of specific episodes and written comments of Living Big and Dirksen where the presented homes act to transfer a sense of ‘with-ness’ through performances of nearness and intimacy.

With-ness: Performance of nearness and intimacy

Architecture's history is built around distance and objectivity. Historically, for Colomina (1992) and Godber (1998), the representation of architecture is ‘cleansed’ to exclude some elements in order to guarantee that architectural representation is understood as an object – in contrast to the liveness of the body. Thus, the sanctioned image of architecture does more than identify and explain buildings – these images work to reinforce a particular understanding of architecture, as a ‘solid stable and reassuring’ object (Hill, 2006: 54). Rather than focusing on architecture as an object, a monumental and iconic image, Living Big and Dirksen operate through nearness; a sense of ‘with-ness’ communicated and performed through the body's encounter with the non-human world.

Both channels enable a closer look at how people perform in their homes with non-human others. Dirksen's episode titled ‘Tokyo's impermanent skinny house made to age well with owners’ (2017) focuses on such exchange. This episode differs from others on the channel in that the architect leads us on tour. The architect pauses at the first step and calls us to see how each thing touches every other. He highlights micro-interactions with materiality, how our feet brush the foliage to step into the house and how ‘it is a rich experience to touch’. The architect's body leans in and leads us through the lingerings, tones, emotions, and movements between human and non-human others. The architect describes this nearness of architecture as ‘peach skin architecture’, where our eye is able to understand the tactility of the surface materiality. As he remarks, ‘The fine-grain in materials is like the tiny hairs on a peach’. In this home, smallness is reinterpreted as nearness with materiality, a with-ness of positive affective resonance.

Similarly in an episode of a ‘Shotgun shack redux, a mortgage-free house set in 320 square feet in Arkansas’, we are let into the life of a family who had it all, the American dream with the large four-bedroom property for a family of three: but beyond their means. Their new home is described through an experience of intimacy with materiality, a physical bodily ‘with-ness’, as the owner describes:

… the house is a little less than ten feet across just getting from one end of the house you really can’t get about without touching someone, there is something about the close physical contact when you are walking through each room you actually brush each other … and you are constantly in each other's faces so it forces you to interact and even be more pleasant: we say ‘thank you’, ‘excuse me’, or ‘could you scoot over, please’.

Positive emotions are born through compressed spaces, where physical nearness is at times forced, in familiar and sometimes unfamiliar ways, and the material world is not separate and distinct from the non-human other. Through movements and affects, there is a stickiness between bodies and their surfaces, a connection through brushing and touching each other, where the self is formed in relation to others. Dirksen's channel allows a heightened sense of intimacy, a ‘with-ness’ in and through materiality, that has an affective charge (Ahmed, 2012). These episodes celebrate how materiality facilitates a sense of connectedness and belonging, which are often elusive to capture.

However, what both series negotiate is how a sense of homeyness and belonging intersects with tiny homes and with the idea of home-as-familiarity. Homeyness binds the materiality of home, to what ‘can be thought of as a feeling of belonging, comfort and security; the ability to feel “at home” within a space, be that a dwelling or a nation’ (Cox, 2016: 64). Through a compressed scale this ‘with-ness’ with the materiality of tiny homes has the potential to undermine the notion of feeling ‘at home’ by not being able to take up space. Flow and movement through the home have the potential to rupture a sense of homeyness in tiny homes – through a lack of physical space to enable one to feel comfort, since the material cultural context of these channels is a belief that larger detached homes offer more comfort and homeyness (Cox, 2016). Both channels bring us near, through their intimate lens to the norms of home, which create happiness (Ahmed, 2010: 22).

Living Big more directly addresses how scaling down does not impact on what homeyness means, aside from making the viewer aware that one can still flow through space through discussion (Dowling and Power, 2011). In Living Big, Langston amplifies sticky affects, a sense of homey ‘with-ness’ where homeyness is rooted to a particular place, to feelings and materialities. Langston iteratively comments through the channel: ‘Completely cosy, completely warm and completely independent, that is what makes this truly a home’ (‘Tiny House Designed to Be Elderly/Disability/Mobility Friendly’). And similarly, ‘Lauren has really created an incredibly special place to call home. It is warm, compact and cosy and a welcoming place to come home to. It is a place of solace after a long hard day’ (‘Young Doctor's Idyllic Tiny House In Vineyard’). Tiny homes offer a sanctuary and place of escape – as Langston further comments:

In today's hectic, modern world, it’s more important than ever to have a sanctuary space to retreat to, a home where the troubles of the world can be left behind and where you are free to dream and pursue a life of your choosing. (‘Stunning Modern Tiny House Sanctuary’)

Dirksen addresses a homey ‘withness’ by the presence of visualising other ways of living and engaging with the materiality of home. In Dirksen, while the host may not orientate the conversation to the same degree as the owners and the commenters, we can still pick up this thread on with-ness, or an orientation towards a particular understanding of homeyness. For example, as an owner outlines in the episode on the Shotgun House, Arkansas: ‘They have such a homey feel to them’. In the comment section, one also reads: ‘… wow you have made this little home so homey and cute’.

Tied into this sense of homeyness, what is clear across both channels is that the material objects appear as the self-same, as a givenness which holds (Ahmed, 2010b). There is a familiarity, a sameness of architectural identity and homeyness, across the channels – signalled through the material choices and aesthetics. The interiors are warm toned, wood interiors, soft furnishings, and craft-inspired décor. The material construction on the interiors is complimented by exteriors that borrow from traditional architectural styles such as Colonial Revival, Victorian and American Craftsman – pitched roofs, picture windows and wooden walls. This is a settler chic rooted in an individualistic ‘bootstraps’ aesthetic, which operates to make homey and familiar homes, through material choices. Both channels’ repetition of homeyness orientates us to an aesthetic grounded in the authentic and natural materials, but still within the ideals of a stand-alone home.

Here, within this warm-toned cocoon, happiness and the promise of happiness are found through a sense of belonging in the private sphere of the home. Its interior becomes our stable, centred, grounded site, protected and safe from the outside world – a space of ‘belonging’ and of ‘feeling at home’ (Duyvendak, 2011). But critically, and more explicitly in Living Big, we come to understand that these are lives orientated materially, through the familiar, in the right way – to create happiness (Ahmed, 2012). However, missing from the conversations are discussions about how tiny homes can cause motion sickness, disturbing smells, and even issues of finding a parking spot – the potential aspects of ‘with-ness’ with materiality that could foster a sense of ‘against-ness’ are omitted and put to one side.

Against-ness/with-ness: Performance of distance and spacing

The notion of the stand-alone home remains a dominant aspiration in market-led economies, a path to the good life and happiness; the stand-alone home has a stickiness to it, an ideal we lean into. However, tied to this ideal of the home is also an ‘against-ness’ to the community, to sharing, and the practical and ecological value of shared accommodation and space (Jarvis, 2013). As Jarvis points out, the tyrannies of the stand-alone home receive limited attention ‘in contemporary debates on social justice and sustainability’ and simultaneously, through limited attention on spaces which are shared (2013: 940). We see through the home performances in Living Big and Dirksen how such gestures of ‘against-ness’ is represented through separation and distance: homes distanced from other homes. Moreover, this ‘settler image’ is not singular but rather iterative, where the notion of home as isolated and leaning away from gestures of ‘with-ness’ has accumulated affective value grounded in repetition (Ahmed, 2012: 185). But it is the complexity of the material relations of home which disturbs the constructed ‘with-ness’ and ‘against-ness’ of a sustained orientation.

One example of ‘against-ness’ reified through materiality is an episode on Living Big, ‘Tiny House Concept Adapted Into Amazing Modern Home’ in which a tiny home on a normal-sized plot was permitted in Wanaka, an expensive site in New Zealand. We start our journey with Will and Jen on the deck that wraps around part of the home. We are given a bird's eye view to understand the house contextualised within the site – and the spacing they have from the boundary. The house itself is 29 m². The couple's motivation to downsize was born of a trip overseas, where rather than converting to tiny homes, they were converted to a philosophy of minimalism. Will tells stories about people who tour on bicycles who cut down their tooth brushes to shed weight. The anecdote elucidates their philosophy of cutting back, and freeing oneself from the excess of materiality – a traditional status symbol of home. What is noted in the comment section is the support for the home and for the presenter: ‘Wow! This is lovely!’ Even the critique is tempered: ‘… that's the tallest tiny house I've seen. LOL RICH people are funny. THAT land space’.

With the walls of the home pulled back from the edges, we can look at how a dwelling's walls are mediating devices that perform culturally specific separating and connecting procedures. The home, rather than offering new ways of living, sheds light on how strong the desire for the domestic interior as a ‘closed transcendence’ emanating from the ‘caesura’ between inside and outside that ultimately accentuates the couple-form (Baudrillard, 1996: 14). A stand-alone home for a couple or family, separated and distanced, becomes a ‘naturalised’ effect through repetition and re-iteration premised on an exclusionary ethic, where materiality supports an individual self-understanding ‘across time and space in relation to social norms and values’ (Christensen, 2019: 241). But also, reading strategically through the lens of performances means we understand how architecture is constituted and is charged with affect positively and negatively. A sense of positive ‘with-ness’, where the ‘relative proximity to those norms and ideals creates happiness’ (Ahmed, 2010: 22)., but equally this ‘with-ness’ to the ideal of home, covers over other ways of understanding home, such as multigenerational, or co-housing, which fall out of the remit of a visualised citizenship (Ahmed, 2010). Together with a charge of negative ‘against-ness’ towards the proximity of other homes, we are oriented towards an understanding of home that is grounded and separated.

This also raises questions about how tiny homes come together, in terms of material infrastructure. In one Dirksen episode titled ‘aVOID: if a Swiss Army knife were a tiny home’, a tiny home departs from the traditional aesthetic through its flat roof, smooth surfaces, rather than being clad in ‘homey’ wood, pitched roof and picture windows. The interior continues the same minimal aesthetic with the furniture hidden within the walls where the surfaces of the tiny home are flipped, rotated and extended to draw the furniture out of the walls. The tiny home swings into life when it is lived in, but it is a seamless white interior at rest. This aesthetic speaks to architectural journals rather than how a home normally performs on these channels. In the comment section, people ask if this is even a home. The home is seen as cold, sterile, and lacking the necessary material qualities that reflect people's perception or sense of homeyness.

In the final scene of the Swiss-Army home episode, the home is exhibited alongside other tiny homes at the Bauhaus. Visually, it is an ad-hoc community. The homes do not relate. They do not engage with each other aside from spatial proximity. What the homes reinforce, or repeats, is the idea of self-formation. This is determined through its interiority, by means of a private internal life, which the owner expresses through the materiality of their home. The problematic relationship between infrastructure and design guidelines is aesthetically palpable. While Dirksen explores moments when tiny homes come together, or tiny living within the city, on Living Big, homes are separate, often in vast lots in the countryside – embodying a philosophy of separation and farness, rather than proximity and sustainability. Denser cities rather than separate homes are more sustainable (Glaeser, 2011); furthermore, within the building industry or approaches to building, there is more interest and awareness of sustainable use of material resources, which includes re-using existing building stock, and using principles of circular economy (Nadazdi et al., 2022).

Infrastructure, urban density and urban sustainability are infrequently discussed on both channels. What is communicated is a degree of satisfaction with one's own living arrangement, that is coupled with a high degree of indifference towards the community, socially and materially, in particular on Living Big. Tiny homes, as a thought experiment, question what our ethical obligations are to established or developing communities, but also how does community and ownership play out within a public space (Butler, 2012). Tiny homes, whose potential mobility ushers them into public space, operate for the most part within the confines of spatial fixity, and place-based meanings (Tuan, 1974). The argument that we are developing here is how an ideology of separation, fixity and home, still underscores tiny homes, but also, how this is tied to particular identities, where the happy emotions of home ‘can attach us to the very conditions of our subordination’ (Ahmed, 2004: 12).

Vision and positionality

The settling into familiar patterns of spatial fixity and identity is made evident on both channels in terms of whose lives are made visible, and who is able to take up space and be happy in the home. What is made explicit is how home and a sense of ‘against-ness’ resonates with ideas of home and identity. On Living Big, class is evident through the language choices, which connote luxury, reflective practices, and future orientation, specifically through the dissociation with mobile homes. Mobile homes ‘are associated with negative social, economic and health-related outcomes’ as well as limited educational achievement and access to public services (Brooks and Mueller, 2020: 1; MacTavish and Salamon, 2001). In addition, contextually, research on tiny homes suggests that in the USA, there are approximately 10,000 tiny homes (Colombini, 2019). Yet, at the same time, with 17 million people listed as living in mobile homes (Kusenbach, 2009), there is a dissociation of tiny homes from their poorer cousins. However, this brief discussion of mobile homes is to highlight the ideological motivations of a ‘tiny house’ movement tied to ‘being middle class’, where the tiny house movement sustains itself as it ‘subtly but substantially differentiates itself based on class associations’ from mobile homes (Anson, 2014: 294).

The issue of who is represented as living in tiny homes is not just limited to class but is an example of social-spatial segregation embedded in the process of othering, articulated through the home and what the materiality of the home represents. In both series, women are not depicted to any greater extent than men on the inside of the home. Historically in architecture, in contrast, women are ‘often objectified, isolated, and sexualised’ within the interior of the home (Havenband, 2002: 12; references removed for review). The relationship between gender and space in the programme is less emplaced, yet traditional norms in relation to space still play out. The trigger for these social and spatial norms is usually activated by the kitchen, especially in Living Big, where the homeowners re-enact home mobilities through using the kitchen, such as Ilse chopping up vegetables (‘40 ft Shipping Containers Transformed into Amazing off-Grid Family Home’). But differentiation also occurs in the comment section. In ‘Woman's Dream tiny House Even Has A Walk-In Wardrobe’ on Living Big, Dolly, the homeowner, defines her home:

It's white and feminine but that's me. But it evolved based on what is me … yeah like I told you before this tiny house is an extension of myself so its sweet and cute and childlike I designed it how I feel.

The comment section is full of support for her cute, happy, homely home, and for her demeanour. Dolly is supported. However, the comments are divisive when women take up space and talk more compared to men. Women who talk ‘too much’ are critiqued in the comment section for not allowing their partners to speak, as evident in two Living Big episodes ‘This Ultra Modern Tiny House Will Blow Your Mind’ and ‘Amazing Modern Single level tiny House Gives Couple Ultimate Freedom’. In comparison, in the episode ‘Tiny House Concept Adapted Into Amazing Modern Home’, the male interlocutor who took up space at the expense of his female partner, was supported in the comment section for his pride in his home: ‘So friendly and just beaming with pride over his house, which he should!’ If we consider these scenes through the lens of spatial performativity, gender, as a class, is constituted through and named in space-acts, which in effect mark the subject position within spatial relations. In these examples, the female is distanced, set against from the knowing subject, and being able to take up this position. We also get to see moments ‘in which emotions align some bodies with others, as well as stick different figures together, by the way they move us’ (Ahmed, 2012: 195), shaping what is possible or expected for some bodies to do materially.

What we are sketching out here briefly across both channels is the absence of diversity. As a final example, the House Trailblazers website is more direct and asks, ‘Where are all the black people? The author of the article asks pointedly, why “[t]he people in the tiny house movement don’t look like me”’ (Pearson, 2016: n.p). Diversity is missing. Home on both channels is predominantly white and middle-class. The power of the home, thus as a space from which the speaking subject draws nourishment is supported through a spatial performance or spatial acts, which play off a rhetoric of spacing, and materially, where identity difference plays through visibility/invisibility, foreground/background. This operates to enact different thresholds, gestures of ‘against-ness’, boundaries and privacies that are coextensive with an identity that is not limited to questions of class, gender and race; and how identities intersect with the stand-alone home, even if it is small and on wheels. YouTube's ability to get close and near rather than structured and distanced through a lens of objectivity masks how the ‘face of happiness looks rather like the face of privilege’ (Ahmed, 2010: 22). The home-performances here operate as material sameness, to stabilize the notion of home as a process of repetition where the materiality of the home becomes one of the conditions that constitutes who are an external ‘they’ and who a ‘we’ are.

This argument is complicated, however, when we consider Dirksen's channel. On Dirksen, there is more diversity in economic backgrounds. Dirksen, unlike Living Big, attends to how one can use tiny homes for transitional populations; to address issues of poverty and homelessness the channel uses the word ‘mobile homes’. YouTube, via Dirksen, becomes a platform that allows access to stories of home that are outside of the remit of scripted and shelter programmes through this nearness and ‘with-ness’ to materiality and openness to how we might live otherwise as a community. Dirksen offers a more inclusive understanding of home, with a more diverse group of people, economically, being able to define home, in a more varied and complicated way.

Discussion: Between home-performance of ‘with-ness’ and ‘against-ness’

YouTube transgresses the private/public divide by making the intimate, the private, and the interior, public. Both channels make evident the porosity of the material boundary between private and public, dwelling and mobility, and how the home stretches in different ways, through affective performances of ‘with-ness’ where the domestic flows into public space, and where public space flows into the home (Gorman-Murray, 2006: 56). The tiny homes are also celebrated as walled and contained, a cocoon for the self. This intimacy plays out through the haptic nearness to the materiality of home, as well as the ideal norms of home, or gestures of ‘with-ness’, where tiny homes perform as part of a community of spaces, leaning into attachment or spatial adjacency. Such ‘with-ness’ plays out in tension where tiny homes enact a performance of ‘against-ness’, where the homes remain distanced and separated.

‘With-ness’ and the tension with ‘against-ness’ at different scales are amplified when discussions cross to the toilet. Toilet waste and toilets themselves are not part of standard shelter programmes. On Dirksen there are videos that talk to urban composting. A home-owner, Allen, in the episode ‘Urban composting toliet: poo from loo to garden in 1 year’ describes the humanure's end stage as similar to dirt, in her words, ‘it is something new’. Allen invites Dirksen to smell the humanure, to see that it is like dirt, Dirksen responds with giggles and her support person instead comes forward with, ‘like you say it is like dirt’. There is not necessarily an ease in the interview, but what Allen indicates is getting used to the sense of time with composting, rather than a simple flush. While some videos can have 44,000 comments, this video on composting toilet had only 32 comments. Dirksen responds to comments about how a composting toilet can be problematic, and the legal constraints around it, and adds links to other videos about how to deal with ventilation. There is a performative ‘against-ness’, where the political and cultural overlaps with the everyday performance of waste material.

Living Big always discusses the toilets, but in less detail than on Dirksen. Instead, the discussions around the toilets deal with potential concerns for the viewer, around smells. Langston frames toilets within a positive emotional economy, as one couple describes their toilet choices in ‘School Bus Converted to Increadible Off-Grid Home’:

… not quite a bucket with sawdust that one has got a ventilation system … it is lot easier to use than what we thought and a lot less smelly than what we thought it was going to be …we would not go back.

The host further comments: ‘… composting toilets are really popular in tiny house and it’s a brilliant solution especially if you’re static but what's it actually like having a composting toilet and using it on the road?’ In response, homeowner Rachel responds: ‘… its actually probably one of the better decisions we made because we knew we didn’t want a black tank, we were not at first sold on the composting toilet … and its definitely easy to live with’. Here, we are given insight into the forces of smells – an affective orientation of ‘against-ness’ – that leans against ‘us’ as human bodies. And yet, the owners find a way to ‘live with’ it. The intimacy of YouTube allows discussions of how we co-habit with non-material and material others, conversations normally other to mainstream television and conventions of propriety to become part of an important dialogue about home.

Conclusion

In this article, we have illustrated how YouTube channels Living Big and Dirksen through their material storytelling give access to the ‘right here and the right now of the sensual world’ (Ahmed, 2012; Berlant, 2011: 224‒225). They offer us a world, which is more intimate as we watch how people enact a ‘with-ness’ with their homes. These are processes of ‘materialisation’ (2004: 121) where affect is amplified and shapes the ‘surfaces of individual and collective bodies’ (Ahmed, 2012: 1), including the screen, host and clients, the home itself, and us, as viewers. Here, the surfacing of affect as sticky is ‘about what objects [and bodies] do to other objects … it is a relation of “doing”’ (Ahmed, 2012: 91). The episodes on Living Big and Dirksen discussed in this article consider an ethical responsiveness to interdependence, how we co-habit space together and are within a ‘sticky web of connections’ (Bennett, 2004: 365), to take a stance of ‘with-ness’ always in play with gestures of ‘against-ness’. We are reminded how the home performances in Living Big and Dirksen involve gestures of physical and material distancing, where affect inflects ‘historical trajectories, enabling, excluding and particularising’ (Ngai, 2005: 6). The episodes make apparent, even within the nearness and intimacy of YouTube, how the idea of a stand-alone home as separated from others remains present, where different social groups and individuals are placed in distinct ways in relation to materiality and happiness. Even when the ideal of the stand-alone home is unsustainable in terms of the environment and community; it is an ideal that stays and gets stuck. The materiality of home operates in a space of tension and of flow between ‘with-ness’ and ‘against-ness’, where materiality and ideology of home reinforce each other.

The close focus on the home also allows us to expand on ‘with-ness’/‘against-ness’ towards material cultures, or relationality, which demonstrates the complexity, overlapping, and symbiotic character of ‘with-ness’/‘against-ness’. But, equally that, ‘with-ness’/‘against-ness’ constitutes and are constituted by social norms around the home that govern behaviour. We conclude that when considering material culture, ‘with-ness’/‘against-ness’ compose and recompose relations, where one might experience ‘with-ness’, but one may still experience and feel ‘against-ness’, dependent on the context, scale and other relationships.