Undoing Home: Queer Space and Black Women's Writing 1865-1953.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes, through the trope of home, queer characters' location in black communities and black women's representations of queer space. Embracing the anti-domestic narratives in black fiction and histories, Undoing Home formulates a literary history of black sexuality. This history challenges queer studies' accounts of black women that begin with the 1970s, and black studies' idealizations of home as the bastion of community and guarantor of heterosexuality. Undoing Home is about the social and material construction of homes that serve as symbols of both respect for and restriction on black sexuality. By bringing a queer lens attuned to the historical locations of black women's writing, I show how home becomes a central literary site for struggles over the meaning of heterosexuality. through readings of Harriet Jacobs's work with contraband camps and housing for freedmen; Pauline Hopkins's representations of homosocial intimacy in John Brown's militia; Glenn Carrington's trips abroad to meet other gay men; Zora Neale Hurston's white female heroine who can only quell her racial anxiety by sailing off into the Atlantic; and Ann Petry's violent portrayal of interracial heterosexuality, I trace how represent home often undoes racial and sexual boundaries.