Cellars as heterotopias: domestic storage and the discursive-material politics of value

This paper examines cellars as heterotopic sites for studying domestic waste management and the discursive production of value. Orienting to scholarship on materiality, space and affect, we conceptualize storage as a situated practice that endows space with social meaning and through which people enact particular identities and social values. Drawing on discourse-ethnographic data from cellar tours in four Swiss households, we present a mediated discourse analysis organized around four rhetorical tactics: erasure and deferral, relationalities, minimalism/excess and memory. These multimodal tactics help domestic actors negotiate competing value regimes and perform ‘good citizenship’ by managing clutter out of sight. We show how cellars conceal overflow to maintain curated domestic order and thereby, complicate social norms around tidiness and excess. We argue that cellars as heterotopias bend time–space relations and expose a discursive-material politics of value where storage practices index responsible citizenship and uphold social order. This renders the cellar simultaneously an ordinary infrastructure of domestic waste management and a micro-political site where negotiations around what – and who – holds value in society demand attention to waste as a matter of care.