Uncanny and In-Between: The Garage in Rural and Suburban Belgian Flanders

Starting in the 1950s, postwar Belgian Flanders was a site of emerging and complex relationships among the car, garage, house, street and users. This article explores the shifting meanings of the garage in connection with the concepts of “domestication” and “domesticity.” We question how the garage, as a newly configured spatial entity separated from or integrated within the home, is indicative of the gradual domestication of the automobile, and how its gendered use and meaning are co-productive with ongoing investments in domesticity. Studying the garage as a means to domesticate the automobile sheds light on many social and cultural aspects of recent history: the shift from rural to suburban lifestyles; upward social mobility; the transformation from the car and the garage as typically masculine areas to their appropriation by other family members; and the complicated ways in which the car itself modified house design.