Architectures of resistance: women's tiny houses as spaces of agency

This thesis examines the experience of women who build and live in tiny houses. Whilst a growing scholarly literature on tiny houses exists, the specific motivations and experiences of women has not yet been adequately explored. Consequently, this thesis set out to answer three research questions: How are women using tiny houses to reconfigure their relationship with and experience of capitalism and patriarchy? What do women say about how their experience of designing and building their own homes impacted them? Finally, (How) are women’s lives different before versus after living in a tiny home?

Using qualitative data collected via Zoom and email with 33 different women, this thesis uses the tripartite theoretical framework of heterotopia, dweller control, and the slender body to provide a novel analysis of women's experiences building and living in their tiny houses.

The findings show that women gain a unique and powerful sense of agency through the process of controlling the design and build of their tiny houses. Women also describe an enhanced sense of agency over their consumption habits. This thesis argues that tiny house living modulates the power of work under capitalist patriarchy, including an attenuation of the negative impacts of both paid and unpaid labour in these women’s lives. Taken together, the thesis shows that tiny house living enhances women’s ability to choose under an otherwise constricting structure of capitalism and patriarchy.

This thesis shows that tiny houses are understood by these women as a living critique of mortgage encumbrance, and as a way to provide an alternative to the pervasive intersection of debt and power.

The significance of this thesis is foregrounded in how it enhances our understanding of how women seek to reclaim agency and different ways of doing gender through the use of self-build tiny houses.