The queerness of home : gender, sexuality, and the politics of domesticity after World War II

Author(s)

    • Vider, Stephen

Bibliographic Information

The queerness of home : gender, sexuality, and the politics of domesticity after World War II

Stephen Vider

University of Chicago Press, 2021

  • : paper

Other Title

The queerness of home : gender, sexuality & the politics of domesticity after World War II

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Summary: "Stephen Vider considers how the meanings of domesticity shifted for gay men and lesbians from the late 1960s to early 1980s, from a site of supposed isolation or deviance, to a source of identity, community, and pleasure. His manuscript reveals the multiple uses, appeals, and limits of domesticity for LGBTQ people in the post-World War II period, in their efforts to make social and sexual connections, and to appeal for expanded rights and freedoms. For example, the 1970s witnessed an efflorescence of gay communal households that proved to be seedbeds for alternative modes of domesticity, using the privacy of domestic space to achieve broader social and political changes. Vider brings a novel perspective to gay identity and culture, examining domesticity as a meeting point between practices and discourse, the local and national, the private and the public"--Provided by publisher

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home, Stephen Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life. Beginning in the 1940s, LGBTQ activists looked increasingly to the home as a site of connection, care, and cultural inclusion. They struggled against the conventions of marriage, challenged the gendered codes of everyday labor, reimagined domestic architecture, and contested the racial and class boundaries of kinship and belonging. Retelling LGBTQ history from the inside out, Vider reveals the surprising ways that the home became, and remains, a charged space in battles for social and economic justice, making it clear that LGBTQ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves-they remade the possibilities of home life for everyone.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Politics and Performance of Home Part One. Integrations Chapter One. "Something of a Merit Badge": Lesbian and Gay Marriage and Romantic Adjustment Chapter Two. "Oh Hell, May, Why Don't You People Have a Cookbook?": Camp Humor and Gay Domesticity Part Two. Revolutions Chapter Three. "The Ultimate Extension of Gay Community": Communal Living, Gay Liberation, and the Reinvention of the Household Chapter Four. "Fantasy Is the Beginning of Creation": Imagining Lesbian Feminist Architecture Part Three. Reforms Chapter Five. "Some Hearts Go Hungering": Homelessness and the First Wave of LGBTQ Shelter Activism Chapter Six. "Picture a Coalition": Community Caregiving and the Politics of HIV/AIDS at Home Epilogue: The Futures of the Queer Home Acknowledgments Notes Index

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