Hoarding as Insurgent Domestic Agency: Mattering Bodies

Domesticity under siege stands as a direct counterpoint to the concept of home as a haven—a stable, nostalgic ideal. Approaching from a spatial practice, I see an alternative to viewing the hoarded home solely through a pathological
lens; instead, I perceive it as a practice that disrupts and presents an alternative spatial logic, defying normative understandings of both the body and its use of space. Rather than a passive backdrop, the hoard functions as a spatial
and corporeal assemblage, where bodies and objects co-produce an insurgent form of inhabitation.

The hypotheses put forward here examine the besiegement of the home through hoarding, juxtaposing its definition provided by Cognitive Behavioural Theory of Hoarding as a disorder of excessive attachment and an inability of using space as intended, against new materialist and poststructuralist theories of agency and spatial practice. The hoarder’s home is frequently perceived as an assault on the normative domestic order, yet this perspective overlooks the interwoven dynamics of memory, identity, and materiality that shape the hoarded environment. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory, the hoard is not a static collection but a non-linear, affective terrain, where objects, bodies, and space dynamically interact.

I propose that hoarders challenge dominant spatial norms through their bodily relationship with space. Unlike the discrete, autonomous body that maintains fixed boundaries, the hoarder’s body is porous, dissolving the separation
between inside and outside, self and object. This aligns with Barad’s intra-action, where subject and object emerge in relation, and Anzieu’s Ego-Skin, in which the hoard acts as an externalised bodily extension, retaining affective traces of
the self. Memory, too, is reconfigured—the hoard forms an embodied, material memory-scape, aligning with Bergson’s and Deleuze’s sense of memory as a continuous and dynamic process of becoming rather than a fixed repository of
discrete, retrievable moments.

Shifting the focus from pathology to agency, this paper reframes hoarding as a radical spatial practice. The hoarded home is not inert but an insurgent domain, where domesticity is redefined through non-linear spatiality, memory, and
matter. This challenges existing architectural framings of bodies, proposing that hoarding constitutes an alternative spatial negotiation and a site of resistance.