UC Davis

“Extra-Domestic Ecologies” assembles an unexpected, trans-inclusive archive of women writers from the long nineteenth century whose texts articulate ecological dynamics and queer kinships that were once a pronounced—and now largely forgotten—element of American discourse on family and home. Described as the nineteenth-century’s ‘cult of domesticity,’ this discourse of the home comprised one of early America’s most pervasive and enthusiastic cultural traditions. My reconstruction of the queer and environmental strands within this tradition shows that while domesticity was and remains a major vehicle for racialization, heteronormativity, and the acceleration of capitalism, it was also an important lever for queering the gendered labor of housekeeping, refuting heteronormative representations of biological reproduction, and multiplying the mutual dependencies that constitute both human and nonhuman environments. The canonical and forgotten texts I study—from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The White Rose Road”—articulate non-expansionist forms of growth and unproductive modes of transformation and renewal. I approach these texts through the critical lenses of gender performance, sexual orientation, and ecology to develop a method of reading that privileges inaction rather than progress. Finally, “Extra-Domestic Ecologies” resituates these key domestic writers within the canon of American environmental thought as vital resources for imagining what it might look like to disavow the individualism, growth, and activity at the root of today’s environmental crises.