ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to trace some of the major intersections of domesticity and sexuality in United States history, exploring home as a site of both sexual control and autonomy. Historical and literary scholarship dating back to the 1960s has particularly demonstrated how conceptions and practices of domesticity have structured understandings of gender, race, and class, in connection to marriage, reproduction, and family as well as labor, political participation, social reform, and citizenship. The chapter shows how domesticity has structured sexual ideals and norms and controlled sexual practices, and, at the same time, how domestic spaces have provided room for transgression of those norms and ideals, to create alternative or queer domesticities. Marital domesticity took on heightened significance for African American reformers. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, public emphasis on marital domesticity empowered social reformers and local, state, and federal government agencies to peer into the homes of people believed to deviate from social and sexual norms.
