QUEER WOMEN AT HOME: SPATIAL ORIENTATIONS IN THE PRICE OF SALT AND CAROL

Abstract

This article examines how queer women’s orientations toward objects, routes, and others transform a range of interiors, such as home, car, restaurant, shop, and hotel room, into safe spaces, in other words, homes. It uses literary and cinematic spaces as primary evidence for the emotional and embodied dimensions of interior experience. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer phenomenology and orientation, it argues that home is not a limited site of residence but an experience that emerges as queer women orient in the interiors. Objects, from a letter opener to a map, function as active points of orientation, sustaining queer intimacy or becoming conduits of heteronormative surveillance. These transformation processes are always open to disruption. Heteronormative straightening devices –such as surveillance, spatial intrusion, and demands for legitimacy– can cut across queer lines, turning the same interior from a safe haven into an exposure and oppression space; reorientation, in turn, reopens the possibility of refuge. These dynamics are explored through a structured close reading and media analysis of The Price of Salt (1952) by Patricia Highsmith and its film adaptation Carol (2015), directed by Todd Haynes. The analysis shows that, in both works, straightening devices operate through heterosexual authority, pointing to a heteronormative spatial governance form that shapes how queer women experience interior space.