In the past hundred years, rural Jordan has seen tremendous changes in the nature of its primary modes of dwelling. The past is commonly associated with the goat hair tent, a form of women’s wealth and a token of nomadic, Bedouin identity and a certain kind of masculinity: the kind of man whose home has no door. In contrast to this heritage—alternately viewed as romantic or backwards—the present and future seemingly belong to the concrete house, built with migrant labor, industrial commodities and, in many cases, bank loans. In place of a simple gendered bifurcation of the tent into masculine and feminine aspects, such homes seemingly provide a separate time and place for everything. Yet I argue that these ostensible changes to the material infrastructure of Jordanian modes of dwelling are mitigated by the fixity of the ‘spoken home,’ which continues to reproduce the household (and by extension the family it contains) as a corporate body. It supports a resilient mode of ‘house politics,’ which has survived this transition intact, constituting and legitimating particular modes of publicity and domesticity. Ironically, the house-as-body constitutes such a powerful chronotopic frame that many Jordanians see continuity where none exists, back-projecting certain rigid notions of gender onto a more diverse and variegated past. This raises the question: how much more transformation of the local political economy would be required to upset this discursive framing of the home and the regime of gender relations it entails?