Out of the Closet and Into the Home: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and the Affordances of the Domestic Interior

Abstract

The domestic sphere was of great importance to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Indeed, their home in Paris was a social epicenter of expatriate modernism. This article reads Stein’s experimental literature of 1908 to 1920 to understand the identificatory and relational processes that the affordances of the domestic space make possible. It situates the queer in Stein as a domestic phenomenon, arguing that queer bonding and identity formation happen, for her, most meaningfully in the home.