This edited collection of essays and personal writing takes up domesticity as an object of queer inquiry. The authors respond to and interrogate queer theory’s vexed relationship to “home” and “domesticity” as bad objects—things queers aren’t supposed to want. Queer domesticities (plural) proliferate in these essays in recognition that domestic spaces and practices (homemaking, cooking, care work, and parenting, among others) support the making of queer worlds as well as a range of ordinary, non-normative ways of being and relating. Domesticity and the home emerge as key sites for queer knowledge production as well as queer critique. By taking up queer domesticity, the contributors shed new light on the stakes of doing queer work today. Their essays pose and begin to answer questions like: What is at stake in critics’ reluctance to engage with normal queer life? How can the field account for the experiences of sexual and gender minorities without an attention to their domestic lives and orientations to home? How can the field expect to produce “knowledge central to living” if it declines to engage with the spaces (and the practices) queers call home? Where in the field’s history do we find sustained attention to the domestic?

Jess Shollenberger is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, USA. They are the author of Reading Ordinary Queerness: Modernism without the Closet (forthcoming). Their scholarly writing has appeared in College Literature, Jacket2, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus among other places. 

Mary Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Communication at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA, where she teaches courses on 19th- and 20th-century British fiction and critical theory. She is the author of The Labors of Modernism: Domesticity, Servants, and Authorship in Modernist Fiction (2013) and co-editor of Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (2013), and has also published articles on Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Nella Larsen’s Passing. She is the editor of a forthcoming special issue of The Virginia Woolf Miscellany on the topic “Woolf and Failure.”