Stephen Vider's book, "The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II", has been awarded the honorable mention for the 2022 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best book in American Studies published during 2021.
Stephen Vider’s The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II flips the lens through which historians have viewed the transformation of the private sphere over the second half of the twentieth century in the United States and the post-World War II domesticity and gender, to make an original argument about significance of queer forms of home life to LGBTQ people and politics since the mid-twentieth century. With previous queer historiography focusing largely on the public sphere, Vider examines gay marriages and camp cookbooks of the 1950s and 1960s, queer homeless youth shelters, communes, and post-Stonewall lesbian feminist experiments in domestic redesign. Beautifully written, witty, and inventive in its construction of an unexpected and visually rich archive, The Queerness of Home not only makes the case that twentieth-century domestic environments are fundamental to an understanding of LGBTQ individuals in the modern United States, it opens new ways of imaging and pursuing intersectional American Studies scholarship.
Congratulations, Professor Vider!
