What does it mean to rethink queer history through the lens of the home? As a David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, Mix Mann’s scholarship changes our understanding of Black queer history by centering the domestic sphere. Most specifically, the intimate and everyday lives of Black women-loving-women in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their work reveals the home not only as a space of labor, but also as a space of love, politics, and possibility.
Traditional queer histories often highlight public urban spaces, such as bars or clubs, as hubs for culture and activism. Mix Mann takes a different approach, arguing that focusing on domestic space in Black queer women’s histories offers “a different history of the relationship between Black women and home spaces after Reconstruction.” Mann’s work asks what happens in Black women’s own homes, especially for women in same-sex relationships. “Thinking about same-sex relationships and the relationship to home space is helpful because you get to see it from two different people's perspectives,” Mann notes. Citing the example of Addie Brown, a free Black woman in the 1850s whose greatest dream was to have a home with another free Black woman, Rebecca Primus, Mann shows how labor and love come together in personal domestic spaces.
The challenge of reconstructing the lives of women-loving-women, especially Black women, comes from the many gaps in the archives and what historians call a “culture of dissemblance.” As Mann explains, “Black women were protecting their inner lives from their oppressors,” which means personal material can be especially hard to find. Mann’s approach is to accept and focus on what's on the page. They choose to focus on the archives that do exist: letters between Addie and Rebecca, correspondence between Alice Dunbar Nelson and Edina Cruz, and oral histories like those of Ruth Ellis in Detroit. They point out the limitations, also noting that surviving sources often center on middle and upper middle class women, and that working class experiences are much harder to historically recover.
For instances where the records are sparse, Mann employs Black feminist historical methods to analyze moments of “intentional silence.” For example, Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first Dean of Women at Howard University, left no written record of her domestic partnership. That leads Mann to read legal documents, like Slowe’s will, as sources that reveal the nature of her relationship with Mary Burrill, by noting how they structured joint tenancy and other legal ties. Mann sees these gaps as part of their history rather than historical absences. They question, “How is her intentional silence around her relationship with Burrill actually an opening to understanding just how much they meant to each other?”
Mann’s research also highlights how racism, sexism, and homophobia shaped, but did not define, the limits and possibilities for Black queer women. Focusing on home space, Mann identifies how Black queer women’s relationships often flourished because they centered their lives around the home. They describe "matrilocal homes” in which women like Alice Dunbar Nelson, who lived with her mother, sister, and nieces, built domestic networks that, from the outside, appeared typical. Another example from Mann’s research highlights how sources show women living together in arrangements that were understood as conventional.“The home space kind of provides a space of protection,” Mann says, “because it was assumed that women belong in the home, so two women being in a home doesn’t really throw up that many red flags… It’s not like they were living out of wedlock with a man.”
Mann’s methods draw from a wide range of sources such as letters, wills, tax records, and more. Some are rich with emotion, like Addie Brown’s letters, while others dwell on “the minutia of sewing dresses for the kids and the house that she works for.” By looking at moments of loss, change, or longing in people’s histories and considering their economic and social context, Mann finds emotional resonance in both the mundane and dramatic. “I don’t necessarily try to project my emotions onto them … The goal is to think about the economic and social and emotional circumstances they were facing and put it in context.”
Mann also connects the domestic strategies of Black women-loving-women in history to current queer communities. In their words, “I often make the joke that my dissertation is the history of u-hauling,” referring to the stereotype of lesbians quickly moving in together; a dynamic Mann sees stretching back to the early 20th century. They view their research as a prehistory of modern lesbian identity and emotional independence, a development that involved not just queer relationships but also American culture. Mann emphasizes this “longer history of lesbian identity formation” as a continuum of community building and an emotional awakening.
Defining the Humanities
Mann defines the humanities field as the “critical interrogation of the circumstances of the human and all the things that the human touches and creates.” This extends beyond society and culture to the earth, nonhuman animals, and technologies. For Mann, examining nonhuman things is a part of acknowledging and understanding our own humanity. Mix Mann’s work at the Institute for the Humanities carves out space for the complex archives of Black queer domestic life. Through the everyday and the extraordinary, the material and the emotional, their scholarship draws attention to the resilience and creativity of historical lived experiences.
Mix Mann is a 2025–26 David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and a PhD candidate in History.
Zoë Tracey is a 2025–26 Public Humanities Intern at the Institute for the Humanities in her fourth year, majoring in Global Health & Environment.
