ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the queerness of the study in terms of the use that was made of it, and how far the disrupted heteronormative models of home life. A room might be queered simply through its use or design by a person with same-sex desires. It could be queer on account of its dissimilarity from convention, its challenge to assumed boundaries. Queerness might be evoked by inverting contemporary norms of gender and the domestic interior, or through excess; perhaps the ‘campy exaggeration’ of the decorative. A heterotopia is a place, often on the fringes of a society, which simultaneously reflects the conventions of that external world, while at the same time inverting and reconfiguring it, perhaps queerly. The queer prism of the cut glass cast a fascinating play of light into the Ladies’ study-cum-library, reflecting both the opacity and openness of their relationship in its queer design.
