Reimagining the American Landscape: Queer Topographics in Nina Berman'sHomeland

Abstract

This article explores Nina Berman's pictorial monograph Homeland (2008), as a rearticulation of the domestic landscape of the United States following 9/11. The book works to excavate and shape the function of cultural memory by examining how parts of the country responded to the events of 9/11. Considering how the photo-text captures what I call a queer topographics of US culture, I suggest that the spaces of the everyday (church, school, and leisure) are mediated by Berman's framing and use of "narrative" essays, disrupting the heteronormativity of a populist rhetoric that seeks to exclude difference within the nation's borders. As such, Berman not only offers a depiction of how the US has been reimagined since 9/11, it offers viewers the opportunity to further redefine its landscape through more inclusive representations.