Public History Colloquium Event–”The Queerness of Home: Public History and the Domestic Archive”

Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, May 7 at noon for a Zoom talk by Stephen Vider (History, Cornell University).

Histories of queer and trans politics and culture have centered almost exclusively on public activism and spaces. Stephen Vider will discuss how his forthcoming book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (University of Chicago Press, October 2021) retells LGBT history from the inside out, revealing how LGBT people mobilized home spaces as crucial sites of intimate connection, care, and cultural inclusion. He’ll focus particularly on the challenges and possibilities of uncovering queer domestic life both in The Queerness of Home and in his 2017 exhibition, AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism (Museum of the City of New York)—and how a focus on the domestic archive can reshape methods in public history.

Register for this event at http://bit.ly/queerness-home

Recommended links:

A Place in the City: Three Stories about AIDS at Home, dir. Nate Lavey and Stephen Vider (2017), documentary film which originally appeared in AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism https://vimeo.com/303736782

Stephen Vider, “”Oh Hell, May, Why Don’t You People Have a Cookbook?”: Camp Humor and Gay Domesticity,” American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2013): 877-904. [Open-access through JSTOR Daily: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43822994?mag=in-the-gay-cookbook-domestic-bliss-was-queer]