Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye

Abstract

In dialogue with Gaston Bachelard on "felicitous space," Rita Felski on the everyday, and feminist scholarship both celebrating and reviling the domestic, this essay theorizes a mode I call "shelter writing." Shelter writing—going back to Robinson Crusoe and primarily but not exclusively novelistic—lingers over the shaping and keeping of a domestic space. It details the labor of securing and supplying a home, the pleasure of taking a room from mess to thoughtful arrangement, the daily routines of neatening and freshening. But this is no simple romance of the domestic. I am interested in step-by-step descriptions of homemaking made urgent and precious in the wake of traumatic dislocation. Like Crusoe, my "housekeepers" are the survivors of a wrecked domesticity—whether as the result of migration, divorce, poverty, or a stigmatized sexuality. The essay closes by reading an exemplary passage from Stone Butch Blues (1993), in which Leslie Feinberg's butch protagonist, brutalized and exiled from an early age, finds beauty, safety, and sanity in the mundane acts of sanding floors and buying towels.