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The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II
Current price:
$29.00
Publication Date: January 21st, 2022
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
ISBN:
9780226808369
Pages:
304
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.
Praise for The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II
"Stephen Vider’s crisply written, gorgeously illustrated book on queer domesticity traces the transformation of the private sphere over the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. Home-life for LGBTQ people, he argues, evolved from a haven from state-sanctioned homophobia, to a revolutionary alternative to the heteronormative household, before ultimately becoming a homonormative domain entitled to legal protection. Each chapter is fascinating and fresh in its own way, and add up to something more than the sum of its parts: this is an important corrective to a queer historiography that has focused almost entirely on the public sphere."
— Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution
“The Queerness of Home is a consequential achievement. Like any historian worth their salt, Vider knows how to tell a tale: this book’s prose is witty and clear as a mountain stream. More than that, it makes an irrefutable case that twentieth-century domestic environments have been momentous for LGBTQ individuals in the modern United States.”
— Scott Herring, author of The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture
“This strikingly original book recovers the unexpected significance of queer forms of home life to LGBTQ people and politics since the mid-twentieth century. Ranging from the gay marriages and camp cookbooks of the 1950s and 1960s to the communes, queer homeless youth shelters, and lesbian feminist experiments in domestic redesign of the post-Stonewall years, Vider provides new insights into the intimate lives and broadest political claims of queer folk—and the meaning of domesticity itself. Creatively researched, beautifully written, and unfailingly smart, this is a first-rate work of revisionist history.”
— George Chauncey, author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
“An important history of how LGBTQ peoples make and sustain the homes of their choice and fight back against norms that oppress them. Vider reveals the lives, labors, and imaginations of LGBTQ home-makers, whose experiments with queer domesticities unfurl in vivid storytelling and amazing archival photographs.”
— Nayan Shah, author of Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West
"Vider’s examination of the recent history of activist domesticity in the United States draws upon an extensive breadth of personal, public, and material sources. In its decade-by-decade chronicle the book discusses efforts to fit into the conformist households of the early Cold War, and examines later struggles to build alternative forms of domesticity, through communal living and rethinking architecture. . . . As well, despite its setting in a time of repression and epidemic, this is not a dark book. LGBTQ agency is at its core, and the narrative is a chronicle of contestation, adaptation, imagination, and, above all, creating community. In the face of hegemonic exclusion and repression, the activists in Vider’s study responded with art and humor and radical caregiving."
— Journal of History
"Stephen Vider’s innovative new book, The Queerness of Home, offers a sweeping account of the centrality of the home and homemaking in challenging and renegotiating concepts of gender, sexuality, belonging, citizenship, and family, among many others, in the United States since the mid-twentieth century . . . Vider’s book is a most welcome contribution to many fields."
— The Public Historian
