Schematic Bodies: Housing, Status Property, and Sexuality in U.S. Literature

Abstract

“Schematic Bodies” examines literary representations of home in the context of housing policy and its transformative effects on sexual order in the United States. I develop a theory of status property that accounts for role of the family home in the naturalization of the “normal” as a racial and sexual category over time. I demonstrate how texts register concealed functions of economy in their depictions of home and the family by using representational strategies like spatial disorientation, narrative fragmentation, debt and value metaphor, and irony. Literary texts render what I call “spectral” processes in language. By reading literature alongside economic flashpoints of US housing policy such as the development of the Federal Housing Administration and mortgage-backed securities, “Schematic Bodies” develops an account of residential real estate’s influence on literary form and sexual categories over the course of the long twentieth century. Moreover, it explains how literature can function as a site for imagining kinship without property.