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. Rather than viewing the home as a site of conformity, monotony, and tradition, Vider highlights the myriad ways that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have historically adapted homelife and homemaking to reflect, experiment, and express their diverse gender and sexual politics since World War II. With a strong theoretical foundation, Vider views domesticity and the practice of homemaking as a performance that requires interpretation and articulation by its individual actors. In this way, the very practice of homemaking has the potential to be radical in its ability to subvert, mediate, or destabilize gender and sexual norms, privacy, nationalism, and cultural citizenship.
Vider’s...
University of California Press