Going on an outing: the historic house and queer public history

Abstract

Using the metaphor of ghosting, this article examines the ways in which lesbian, gay, queer (and other) visitors have looked for sexual dissidence in historic houses and their former inhabitants by exploring the complicated processes through which visitors both identify with those queer past lives, and experience a sense of otherness or historical distance from them. It focuses in particular on two sites: Plas Newydd, home of the Ladies of Llangollen; and Sissinghurst, the garden created by writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson. The article questions the distinction (and often implicit hierarchy) made by academic historians between identification and queering, between similarity and otherness, in public history. Identifying historical figures as having had same-sex relationships is important in constructing a sense of selfhood for many queer women and men. Visiting a significant historic site can therefore be seen as an act of pilgrimage. Yet ghostly hints of the otherness (or alterity) of the past are inherent in the complexity of the historic house. This dissonance is provoked by contrary interpretations of the household's past found in biographies or published diaries of former residents, guidebooks and exhibition displays about their lives, and the interpretation strategies of curators. The materiality and spatial qualities of the old building create further narrative complexity, inevitably reflecting both distinct layers of time, and domestic layouts which support or challenge an assumed story of interior family life. These complex possible readings overlap to disrupt heteronormative presumptions about the historic house and instead reveal elements of queer domesticity.

Queer Monuments: Visibility, (Counter)actions, Legacy

“…The term is amorphous and delightfully multipurpose, because it has been redefined through an act of willful repossession and a rejection of its previous denotation and connotations. One can even use the term queer post hoc, to apply to say "fairy" cultures of the 1920s (see Capó, 2017), or "romantic friendships" of the late 19 th century, for example (see Oram, 2011). This can be done in a way that I believe is more accurate than applying the medically-derived term "homosexual" from the late 1880s or the mid-20 th -century political word "gay" (see Jagose, 1996).…”

Gay monuments in queer times: Amsterdam’s Homomonument and the politics of inclusive social practice

“…Our analysis of inclusive LGBTQ spaces that several key informants have challenged is precisely at the heart of wider academic debates on ‘queering’ normative geographies (e.g. Browne and Nash, 2010; Oram, 2011; Zebracki 2020). As Oswin (2008: 91) put it, such debates challenge ‘equations of queer space with gay and lesbian (and much less frequently bisexual, transsexual and transgendered) space and the maintenance of a heterosexual/homosexual binary upon which such problematic notions of queer space rely’.…”

“…We advocate intersectionality (after Crenshaw, 1991) as an epistemological method for ‘queering’ monuments and identifying similarities and ‘otherness’ across social difference, including gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity, specifically within contexts of evolving LGBTQ politics (e.g. Oram, 2011) and queer memory and monumentality (e.g. Dunn, 2017; Zebracki and Leitner, 2021).…”