Queering the Interior

Description

Queering the Interior problematizes the familiar space of 'home'. It deploys a queer lens to view domestic interiors and conventions and uncovers some of the complexities of homemaking for queer people.Each of the book's six sections focuses on a different room or space inside the home. The journey starts with entryways, and continues through kitchens, living spaces, bedrooms, bathrooms, and finally, closets and studies. In each case up to three specialists bring their disciplinary expertise and queer perspectives to bear. The result is a fascinating collection of essays by scholars from literary studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, history and art history. The contributors use historical and sociological case studies; spatial, art and literary analyses; interviews; and experimental visual approaches to deliver fresh, detailed and grounded perspectives on the home and its queer dimensions. A highly creative approach to the analysis of domestic spaces, Queering the Interior makes an important contribution to the fields of gender studies, social and cultural history, cultural studies, design, architecture, anthropology, sociology, and cultural geography. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction SECTION ONE Openings 1 'Thrown-togetherness': Queering the Interior in Visual Perspectives 2 Entering the Living Room: Sex, Space and Power in a Cross-Cultural and Non-Heteronormative Context 3 Stepping into the Entrance Hallway: Glimpses of Public, Private and Personal Notions of Self SECTION TWO Kitchens 4 The Kitchen: Lesbian Pulp Fiction's Radical Conventionalism 5 Kitchens: Queering the 'Man's' Kitchen 6 Beyond Kitchen Walls: Queering Domestic Place through Memory and Storytelling SECTION THREE Living Spaces 7 Designs for Living Rooms 8 The Bedsit 9 Safe Space, Silo Storage, Outhouse with a View: Lesbian Garden History SECTION FOUR Bedrooms 10 Law and the Bedroom: 'Living Together as Husband and Wife'? 11 The Nursery SECTION FIVE Bathrooms 12 The Writing is on the (Lavatory) Wall: Haptic Presence, Modern Design and the Traces of Community 13 Toilet Training: The Gender and Sexual Body Politics of the Bathroom SECTION SIX Closets and Studies 14 The Closet 15 Entering the Eighteenth-Century Closet and Coming Out Today 16 A Queer Study Index