The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II

by Stephen Vider

0 ratings • 0 reviews • 0 shelved
Book cover for The Queerness of Home

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

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.
  • ISBN10 022680819X
  • ISBN13 9780226808192
  • Publish Date 10 December 2021
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint University of Chicago Press
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 304
  • Language English