Growing Up Queer: 1790-1918

Through the lens of the 'home', my project seeks to explore how queer individuals across the long nineteenth century conceptualised and experienced the domestic environments of their childhoods and what impact these spaces had on their ideas of self and behaviours and their own adult understandings of the home, family and domesticity.

Across the period, ideas of childhood, sexuality and the home became inherently intertwined: pathologizing public discussions of children's sexual and gendered deviance circulating in newspapers, scientific publications and government legislation as well as in art, literature and culture. No longer just a stage to be passed through, childhood became the key to understanding the adult form. As a result, anxieties over the influence of the home environment on the formation of normative gender and sexual identities mounted.

Yet whilst historians such as Sally Shuttleworth, James Kincaid, Sue Morgan, and I.D. Crozier have examined the development of these discourses, such works have largely been intellectual histories. The actual percolation of these debates and more specifically, their lived impact on families and 'queer' children, has been entirely overlooked. This is a significant gap that this project seeks to rectify.

Taking a micro historical approach, I will locate 'queer' individuals' actual experiences of growing up. Likely informed by proliferating discourses but not limited to, I will seek to explore if and how queer children were regarded as problematic presences in the home and how this was dealt with, if indeed, it actually was. I will illuminate how queer expression was curtailed in the home but also how it was potentially explored to cultivate non-normative behaviours and ideas of self. Indeed, as much as the domestic sphere was increasingly seen as the key arena in the reproduction of heteronormativity, I will suggest that the home could also function as a safe space for exploring queer sensibilities: the potential privacy allowing a child to orientate a divergent 'queer' sense of self behind closed doors. Indeed, it this lived tension between the domestic as a place of both freedom and restriction that I particularly want to explore. As Juhani Pallasmaa has argued, the home 'frames, articulates, structures, gives significance, relates, separates and unites, facilitates and prohibits' individuals' behaviours and emotions. This would have happened in unpredictable ways and my project will thus trace the complex ways that the domestic sphere became wrapped up in both who 'queer' children were and would go on to eventually become.

To do so, I will interweave juvenilia- diaries, letters, manuscript magazines- with material produced by adults reflecting on their childhoods such as diaries, memoirs, oral testimonies as well as novels, art, and other such cultural material. Additionally, I will also examine these experiences through the actual materiality of the home: the arrangement and decoration of the domestic sphere telling us much about the self, society, agency and oppression. Materiality will also allow us to expand our view of the 'home' in this period taking into view children who lived in institutional domestic spaces such boarding schools, borstals, orphanages and lodging houses.

In summary, my project illuminates queer individual's lived experiences of growing up in the long nineteenth century. The period saw the coalescing of ideas linking gender and sexuality, childhood and the domestic sphere yet the actual lived experiences of these pathologizing discourses has yet to be studied. Challenging the dominant historical concept that childhood should be viewed as exclusively heterosexual, I will illuminate how far and in what ways heteronormative discourses permeated the home and, critically, how individuals themselves then actually experienced such ideas.