I’m thrilled to be sharing some material from my upcoming monograph at the BSECS 2021 Annual Conference on a panel on ‘Commemorating Queer Identities in the Eighteenth Century Home’. If you’re registered, you can catch up with the panel on the BSECS Youtube channel. I’ve included my abstract below:
Dr Freya Gowrley
Following Elizabeth Freeman, this paper explores how a ‘commitment to overcloseness’ engendered by a microhistorical approach creates a more encompassing history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space, revealing the overlooked narratives and lost histories uncovered when attention is paid to places and objects that lie outside of traditional areas of (art) historical enquiry. The paper focuses on houses that have previously been sidelined from canonical histories of home in favour of country estates and grand London town houses, or which have been treated as exceptional curiosities to be read against broader aesthetic trends, something that Matthew M. Reeve has called the ‘shared historical trajectory’ of sexuality and aesthetics.The paper is accordingly concerned with the productive interstices of these overlapping othernesses: whether gendered, sexual, canonical, or aesthetic; attention to which creates space for deep attention to objects, homes, and lives previously neglected. Exploring lost evidence, histories, spaces and objects, the paper argues that such an approach makes room to explore the potential ‘queernesses’ of the home at this time. It explores several case studies including Strawberry Hill, Plas Newydd, and A la Ronde, whose relationship with loss allow for an unravelling of the queer domesticities of the eighteenth-century home.