The Queerness of Home with Stephen Vider

While histories of queer and trans politics often focus on public activism, the struggle in the domestic realm has been equally crucial in postwar LGBTQ+ life according to Stephen Vider, assistant professor of history. In a live, hybrid Chats in the Stacks book talk, Vider will discuss his recently published work The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (The University of Chicago Press, 2021), where he explores the complex histories of LGBTQ+ challenges to conventions of marriage, gendered codes of everyday labor, domestic architecture, and racial and class boundaries of kinship, belonging, care, and cultural inclusion. Vider argues that LGBTQ+ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves, but that in so doing they also redefined the possibilities of homelife for everyone.