Letting The Domestic Fail: Notes on Race, Class, and Transvestites

The home looms large in queer and trans studies, albeit paradoxically. It invites the charge of depoliticized retreat from the public sphere, but it also signifies as a marker of authenticity—the domicile of the self. The trans domestic, specifically, is a condition of possibility for thinking queer sexuality and gender writ large. The cover of Michael Warner's foundational book Publics and Counterpublics (2002) is a slightly grainy 1962 photograph of five transvestites in someone's home, all holding cameras. Three figures on the front cover, perfect portraits of midcentury white femininity, point their shutters at Lili, a Japanese woman in a turquoise mod dress, who returns their gaze with her own camera. A fifth white woman points her camera directly at the photographer, locking one eye with the viewer. The picture comes from a scrapbook of photos taken at Casa Susanna, a transvestite resort in upstate New York that hosted regular...