The research project QUEERDOM will investigate how women and men with same-sex desires – about whom we use the term ‘queer’ – lived and organized their everyday lives across a complex domestic terrain in ways that unsettles customary understandings of private life and family organization in modern Norway (1842–1972). These ‘queer domesticities’ will be investigated through the intersecting lenses of time, space, class, and gender.
One of our central hypothesis is that it was not until after WWII that Norway became truly immersed in the increasingly universal modern discourse on ‘sexuality’.
QUEERDOM shifts the focus of queer historical research firmly from the global metropolises to rural regions of Europe, from the cities to the rural districts, from the courtrooms and asylums to the mundane and everyday, and from activism to domesticity and intimacy. The project will highlight the changing dynamics of societal norms and expectations, change and stability, processes of exclusion as well as of inclusion through the period 1842–1972.