Reimagining the American Landscape: Queer Topographics in Nina Berman's Homeland

Abstract

This article argues that Nina Berman's Homeland (2008) is a rearticulation of the US domestic landscape following 9/11. The book excavates and shapes cultural memory through image and text by examining how parts of the country responded to the 2001 events. Considering how Homeland captures what I call queer topographics of US culture, I suggest that the spaces of the everyday are mediated by Berman's framing and use of “narrative” essays, disrupting the heteronormativity of a populist rhetoric that seeks to exclude difference. Homeland ultimately offers viewers the opportunity to further redefine the US landscape through queerness.