Symposium: The Queerness of Home: Intimacy, Normativity, Domesticity

Marlon Bailey, Indiana University

Deborah Cohen, Northwestern University

Lauren Gutterman, University of Michigan

Queer critiques of the same-sex marriage movement have called new attention to the normative effects of domesticity–its power as a site of cultural assimilation and intimate control. But investigations into past and present domestic practices also reveal the home’s startling potential for reinvention. Please join us as we investigate the meanings and contradictions of home:  How do domestic spaces, practices, and discourses perpetuate cultural norms and boundaries? How do outsiders retake and remake the home to foster alternative modes of identity and intimacy?