Laura Tscherry '17 MA on Queer Domesticities in Modernism/modernity Print Plus

Laura Tscherry, a current PhD student at Indiana University and 2017 graduate from the Villanova English MA program, was recently published in the Print Plus edition of Modernism/modernity. Laura wrote on "Queer Domestic Architectures: Theorizing Kinship and Communal Modernism," focusing on the way that various intimate living situations exist in literature (and in life!) beyond the heteronormative family unit. In their words, "I propose a theory of communal domestic spaces that asks what it means to share one's private life with strangers and what happens to relationality and space when those strangers become kin without the normative trappings of romance and children." 

To pursue this theme, Laura writes on "more liminal or atypical domestic arrangements such as convents, tenement buildings, boarding schools, and old age homes," which "collapse, or complicate, neat boundaries of public and private." Laura goes on to note that "Communal domesticity is queer domesticity: intimacy, and especially domestic intimacy, is not the sole domain of heterosexual intimate (romantic) affiliation and of nuclear families."

Laura analyzes these ideas in reference to various works of modern literature, including The Corner that Held Them, The Lonely Londoners, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, and others.

Laura concludes their piece with a series of their own photographs. In their words, "In the process of writing this piece, I found myself recalling my own lives in shared domestic spaces and set out to 'queer' my own method and to deepen my readings and theoretical engagements —in the spirit of Amy Elkins’s inspiring call to push modernist experiment into praxis and the cluster on 'Modernist Setting'—with a series of photographic triptychs that restage moments and memories of bodies in shared spaces." We have included one of these photos below.

You can read the whole piece at Modernism/modernity. Congratulations, Laura!

Photograph by Laura Tscherry