How to Queer the Domestic

In the widely admired third episode of the HBO series The Last of Us, two men, Bill and Frank, find love in a hopeless place. While the world falls victim to a zombie-borne virus, Bill's beautifully preserved Colonial home (and survivalist bunker) becomes the setting for a new queer domesticity. But that queer domesticity is shadowed by another queer pair at the heart of the series: the orphaned and miraculously immune youth Ellie and a before-times contractor named Joel. Both have lost their biological ties, and the show's emotional center is watching the two essentially adopt each other. Their queer kinship is rooted not in a defined home space but in dislocation, as they strike out on the road to bring Ellie to doctors who hope to derive a cure for the zombie virus from her blood. Each episode follows Ellie and Joel to a new city or community, where survivors struggle to build a new sense of social order and safety. Bill and Frank's home is the most idyllic of the options (albeit with an electric fence), but it too cannot last. Between Bill and Frank and Ellie and Joel, The Last of Us effectively weds home stories and road stories—both a domestic tale and a picaresque. In doing so, the show suggests how queer kinship has variously troubled conventional ideas of what constitutes the home in the first place: Who gets to belong at home? Where might home be found? What does home provide? And how does it fail us?

This interplay between the lure of the home as a bounded and protected space and the need to make home where you are is a key tension of this journal issue. The essays here address both the potentialities and the impossibilities of queer domestic space, dwelling in both utopian and itinerant imaginaries. Home is idealized as stable and safe, yet as Craig Willse (2015: 2) writes, “housing”—the biopolitical systems that make house and home available to some and not to others—is a monster, “a technology for the organization and distribution of life, health, illness, and death.” To have a home or to be “homeless” is simply to find oneself on different sides of the beast, to be sheltered or made vulnerable. Still, the underlying secret is that no home or house is ever perfectly secure, as a single conversation with an insurance agent will lay bare. To live in a home is to live in a state of denial about the potential disasters looming outside and the mess hidden within. The discursive divide between “shelter” and “home” enacts this denial, with some spaces of rest, kinship, and care imagined as more real and more lasting than others.

That fantasy—idealizing, valuing, and enabling some forms of home and family over others—rests at the core of Western conceptions of “domesticity”: the historically generated ideology that roots family and privacy to the material borders of the home. Domesticity (at once marshaling and exceeding domestic spaces and practices) is a product of Western modernity and a tool of European and American imperialism. Isabella Beeton, the English Martha Stewart of the nineteenth century, for example, wrote in her Book of Household Management ([1861] 2006: 1) that the “mistress of the house” is a prudent and chaste “commander of an army” waging a “campaign” for happiness in the home as a refuge of comfort and security for husband and children. Such a domestic space is imagined as a shelter, far from the wild hordes of presumably immoral, uncivilized, sex-crazed people in the public realm. Scholars Amy Kaplan (1998) and Rosemary George (1998), too, note how the split between the private domestic sphere and the public mirrors imperial geographies of what constitutes the “domestic” and the outside world ready to be colonized. Domesticity is not a placid location or condition. Rather, it is the result of unequal socialities and political structures and an ongoing process of struggle, wars, and messy encounters. Domesticity is a fictional product of the modern West's understanding of itself enforcing violent regimes of hygienic social order in the world.

To queer the domestic, then, is to attempt to dislodge and disrupt these Western binaries and hierarchies to expose the entangled mess inherent in power relations. Queer studies since the 1990s has often positioned itself against traditional models of domesticity, espousing the potential of public space over the confinements of privacy, most directly in critiques of same-sex marriage.¹ At the same time, Black feminist studies, queer ethnography, queer diasporic studies, queer area studies, and queer of color critique all have troubled the modern bifurcation of the domestic and the public, revealing the home to be a site of labor, irregular shelter and care, leisure, consumption, and carceral surveillance.² To queer the home is not necessarily to purposefully or self-consciously reinvent the home in practice but to make legible the already queer practices of homemaking that are often and otherwise disregarded—to recognize the home for its own queerness, revealing, in Sedgwick's (1993: 8) words, “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning” the home materializes.³ The essays in this collection attempt to map out these entanglements to find alternative forms of togetherness, spatiality, and temporality that might enable minoritized subjects to live, survive, and flourish.

Today, record numbers of individuals and families across the globe confront new forms of displacement and forced migration as a result of genocide, persecution, climate change, and the ongoing impacts of US imperialism. Neoliberal economic and social policies have reprivatized forms of caregiving once managed by the state. At the same time care work has emerged as a global industry, with service-industry migrants and guest workers moving from one nation to another. Gentrification in major cities has widened the disparity between those with stable housing and those without, while global inflation and rising rental and mortgage costs have put housing stability even further out of reach for people around the world. Amid these shifts, home is still promised as a space of sanctuary, even as neoliberal privatization hollows it out from within and makes it more difficult to achieve in the first place.

The issue begins with Rasel Ahmed and Efadul Huq's essay demonstrating both the possibilities of queer domesticity and its limits. Drawing on ethnographic research and their own personal experiences, Ahmed and Huq analyze an apartment known as Nanur Basha (“Grandmother's House”), the home of a Bangladeshi queer activist and community leader, in the 2010s. Looking closely at Nanur Basha, they argue, reveals “quotidian practices of queer worlding” in the postcolonial global South. The apartment housed queer dance parties and performances, hookups, and community organizing events. The site also provided a foundation for the launch of Roopbaan, a groundbreaking LGBTQ+ magazine. But as much as the space served as a sanctuary for queer Bangladeshis, it also enabled surveillance by neighbors and attacks by queerphobic nationalists.

Ariel M. Dela Cruz also finds political potential in queer remakings of home in Hong Kong. Dela Cruz explores the carework performed by Filipino tomboy Leo Selomenio, a domestic worker and organizer of migrant laborers’ beauty pageants as shown in the 2016 documentary Sunday Beauty Queen. Selomenio—exceptional among Filipino domestic workers in his ability to live on his own, outside of his employer's residence—carves out what Dela Cruz terms a “tomboy domesticity.” By turning his apartment into a community gathering space and site of unremunerated caretaking for other migrant laborers, Selomenio resists the structures of race, class, and gender inequality that define transnational domestic care work and affirms the value of Filipino domestic workers’ lives on their own terms.

Holly Jackson suggests that queer kinship formations can only transform the home so far. Focusing on “the archive of polyamory's emergence” in the late nineteenth century, Jackson argues that political radicals conceived of sexual “varietism” or “free love” as a means of building a more just and egalitarian society, rather than as an end in and of itself. These early theorists of polyamory insisted that without a broader social revolution overturning capitalism, women's subordination, and the privatization of domestic work, polyamory would—for all but the wealthy—merely increase the financial stresses and labor demands of married life. This warning, which Jackson finds in Edith Wharton's 1911 novel Ethan Frome, among other sources, carries particular salience given polyamory's recent rise, and many polyamorists’ demands for access to rather than disruption of legal marriage.

Several of the writers here draw our attention to the queerness of housing precarity and homelessness. They do so both in terms of how gender- and sexual-nonconforming people are at greater risk of losing housing and how being deprived of or unable to access a home, in the conventional sense, is in itself a queer experience. Maggie Schreiner focuses on the former. Schreiner's essay examines the 1985 case of Michael Brown, a gay New Yorker who was evicted from his apartment in Chelsea after his lover died of complications from AIDS. Tenants’ rights advocates and gay and lesbian activists in Chelsea rallied behind Brown and fought for him to be able to remain in his home. They were ultimately unsuccessful, but Schreiner argues that their campaign shows how queer activists in the early AIDS era contributed to and were deeply influenced by New York City's long-standing housing movement.

While many authors included in this special issue examine how queer people make or find home beyond the nuclear family and the private dwelling place, Miguel A. Avalos considers the meaning of “queer domesticity” in a theoretical sense, distinct from gender and sexual nonconformity. In particular, Avalos analyzes the daily routines of transborder commuters, that is, people who cross the US-Mexico border in the San Diego-Tijuana region on a daily or near-daily basis for work or education. Avalos argues that due to the time-intensive nature of going through border security (an undertaking of several hours), transborder commuters “queer” the domestic by creating ephemeral, transnational homes where and when they can: they eat, dress, and study in their cars; they crash on friends’ couches and shower in public places. In doing so, Avalos's subjects carve out a new form of domesticity defined by physical movement rather than structural stasis and stability.

If most of the queer figures discussed thus far find or create homes of some sort, Cody C. St. Clair focuses on those defined by their houselessess: homeless people during the Great Depression. St. Clair's essay highlights Depression-era poetry, music, and fiction that depicts homelessness as a profoundly “disgendering” experience, one defined by exclusion from both the heteropatriarchal family and the gender binary. This disgendering, St. Clair contends, works to justify the violent, dehumanizing treatment homeless people have faced under racial capitalism, both in the 1930s and today. At the same time, St. Clair finds hope in homeless individuals’ queer kinship bonds as depicted in other writing of this period. For St. Clair, networks of care and support among chosen kin as depicted in Depression-era literature function as a counterpoint to experiences of disgendering and provide models of kinship beyond the nuclear family.

Many other queer figures discussed in this issue find ways to claim “home” in public or semipublic spaces, challenging white, middle-class, Eurocentric notions of the domestic sphere as confined to a single structure or private space. René Esparza, for example, looks to the fictional characters of John Leguizamo's Mambo Mouth (1991) and the more recent Tangerine (2015) for representations of how queer and trans people of color have responded to gentrification by using urban, public spaces for resistant acts of caretaking typically thought of as “private.” In the hands of Leguizamo's character Manny the Fanny and Tangerine's protagonist Sin-Dee Rella—both trans sex workers—the street, the laundromat, the coffee shop, and the bathroom become domestic; that is, they become places of collective sustenance and support, which Esparza terms “communal intimacy.”

Similarly, the queer, trans, and nonbinary youth depicted in Laila Annmarie Stevens's evocative series of documentary photographs “A House Is Not a Home” feel more at home in New York City parks, streets, and shops, and in the arms of friends and lovers, than they do in the houses where they reside with parents or other family members. Having stable housing, Stevens's project demonstrates, is not the same as being at home, as feeling safe, loved, and accepted. As art historian Virginia Thomas writes, Stevens's photographs suggest “an intergenerational history of queer and trans home-building in the city that extends beyond private property.” Yet Stevens's work does not portray New York City as a straightforward alternative to unwelcoming family homes; rather, Stevens's photographs capture the persistent tension between young people's identities, communities, and domestic spaces.

Finally, in the forum feature, scholars Shoniqua Roach, Jules Gill-Peterson, Jina B. Kim, Gayatri Gopinath, and Sara Matthiesen each touch briefly on the meaning of the domestic in their work on Black homemaking, trans history, disability justice, queer diasporic communities, and reproductive politics, respectively. Their short essays, and their scholarly work more broadly, open up even more avenues for thinking about what it means (or doesn't) to queer the domestic.

The essays here remind us that home is not inherently a space of violent normativity but also a space of racialized and gendered work and a capacious realm of contingent relations, scripts, structures, and aspirations. Home is not always a space of negation, death, and no future but rather a place of survival, longing, persistence, and even joy. It is not necessarily the mess we escape from; it can also be the mess we live with and through. LGBTQ+ people in particular have historically been excluded from state-sanctioned visions of home and family, yet they have also consistently adapted domestic spaces and practices to interrogate gender and sexual norms and to develop new models of kinship and connection. “Queering the Domestic” seeks to investigate these messy relations: the many ways in which the spaces and practices of home both structure and challenge norms of intimate and collective belonging as they play out in everyday life, historically and in the present.

We are grateful to the many people who worked with us to realize this special issue. Thank you to Lillian Nagengast, who served as editorial assistant on the issue; to managing editors Liz Beasley and Karen Dutoi for guiding us through the editorial process; to GLQ editors Chandan Reddy and C. Riley Snorton for their encouragement and feedback in conceptualizing the issue; to Greta LaFleur for sharing insights and advice; to Holly Jackson for many thoughtful suggestions and questions on the introduction; and to our own domestic entanglements for many other forms of care and support during the time we spent working on this issue. Thank you finally to the many scholars who reviewed article submissions and provided vital feedback on these essays.

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