The Full House and the Empty House. Spectral Masculinities and Styles of Domesticity in a Low-income Neighbourhood of Urban Chile

This ethnographic study focuses on a matrifocal family in a low-income neighbourhood of Santiago. In a context where people build their own houses and vacant spaces are quickly reoccupied, we found an atypical scenario. On the same plot, an overcrowded house coexists with an empty one that the women refuse to occupy. We explore this counterintuitive situation through the women’s accounts of ghostly presences haunting these dwellings. Drawing on hauntology, we propose that their everyday life is underpinned by two persistent spectral figures: the father who never becomes a husband, and the dead son who never ceases to be. These spectral masculinities, reinforced by the ambiguous absence of the daughter who has left, are rooted in these women’s history of ‘practical kinship’, inseparable from house building. These dynamics shape styles of domesticity in tension, through which spectrality operates in the laborious work of making their existence meaningful and valuable.