David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow
About
“She Feels Like Home: Black Women and Queer Domesticity, 1859-1970”
“She Feels Like Home” offers an interdisciplinary account of Black women-loving-women couples and the domestic spaces they built in search and enactment of queer intimacy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Departing from the roots of queer history in urban space, this project sees women’s private spheres as a critical site for queer intimacy. “She Feels Like Home” examines epistolary, tax, architectural, and probate records to consider how Black women positioned their physical, emotional, and economic selves in relationship to other Black women. Charting these women’s material lives reveals that Black women’s queer homes were, at times, safe havens of privacy and protection but could also be fleeting horizons just out of reach.
Mix Mann is a PhD candidate in History.
