Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies

by Mary L. Gray (Editor), Colin R. Johnson (Editor), Brian J. Gilley (Editor)

Overview

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016

Rural queer experience is often hidden or ignored, and presumed to be alienating, lacking, and incomplete without connections to a gay culture that exists in an urban elsewhere. Queering the Countryside offers the first comprehensive look at queer desires found in rural America from a genuinely multi-disciplinary perspective. This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning.





By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book’s focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. Queering the Countryside highlights the need to rethink notions of “the closet” and “coming out” and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as “isolated” and in need of “outreach.” Contributors focus on a range of topics—some obvious, some delightfully unexpected—from the legacy of Matthew Shepard, to how heterosexuality is reproduced at the 4-H Club, to a look at sexual encounters at a truck stop, to a queer reading of TheWizard of Oz.





A journey into an unexplored slice of life in rural America, Queering the Countryside offers a unique perspective on queer experience in the modern United States and Canada.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479880584
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Series:	Intersections , #11
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mary L. Gray is Associate Professor in The Media School, Affiliate Faculty of Gender Studies, and an Adjunct in American Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University. She is also a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She is the author of In Your Face:Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth and Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America.

Colin R. Johnson is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies, History and Human Biology at Indiana University. He is the author of Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America.

Brian J. Gilley is Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. He is the author of A Longhouse Fragmented: Ohio Iroquis Autonomy in the Nineteenth Century, Becoming Two-Spirit, and the co-editor, with S. Morgenson, Q. Driscoll and C. Finley of Queer Indigenous Studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction Colin R. Johnson Brian J. Gilley Mary L. Gray 1

Part I New Archives, New Epistemologies

1 Out Back Home: An Exploration of LGBT Identities and Community in Rural Nova Scotia, Canada Kelly Baker 25

2 Horatio Alger's Queer Frontier Geoffrey W. Bateman 49

3 Sherwood Anderson's "Shadowy Figure": Rural Masculinity in the Modernizing Midwest Andy Oler 69

4 A Classroom in the Barnyard: Reproducing Heterosexuality in Inter war American 4-H Gabriel N. Rosenberg 88

Part II The Rural Turn: Considering Cartographies of Race and Class

5 The Waiting Arms of Gold Street: Manuel Muñoz's Faith Healer of Olive Avenue and the Problem of the Scaffold Imaginary Mary Pat Brady 109

6 Snorting the Powder of Life: Transgender Migration in the Land in Oz Lucas Crawford 126

7 Outside Forces: Black Southern Sexuality LaToya E. Eaves 146

Part III Back and Forth: Rural Queer Life in Circulation and Transition

8 "We Are Here for You": The It Gets Better Project, Queering Rural Space, and Cultivating Queer Media Literacy Mark Hain 161

9 Queer Interstates: Cultural Geography and Social Contact in Kansas City Trucking Co. and El Paso Wrecking Corp. Ryan Powell 181

10 Epistemology of the Bunkhouse; Lusty Lumberjacks and the Sexual Pedagogy of the Woods Peter Hobbs 203

11 Rethinking the Closet: Queer Life in Rural Geographies Katherine Schweighofer 223

12 In Plain(s) Sight: Rural LGBTQ Women and the Politics of Visibility Carly Thomsen 244

Part IV Bodies of Evidence: Methodologies and their Discontents

13 (Dis)locating Queer Citizenship: Imaging Rurality in Matthew Shepard's Memory E. Cram 267

14 Queering the American Frontier: Finding Queerness and Sexual Difference in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Colorado Robin Henry 290

15 Digital Oral History and the Limits of Gay Sex John Howard 309

16 Queer Rurality and the Materiality of Time Stina Soderling 333

Bibliography 349

About the Contributors 379

Index 383

Editorial Reviews

"This new book is the first detailed and comprehensive study of queer desire in rural American and it does so from a multi-disciplinary perspective.What we read here challenges us to look at our experiences in ways that have a great deal more to form identity."

Reviews by Amos Lassen

"Rather than simply populating rural landscapes with queer folk who, in multiple senses, have been there all along, Queering the Countryside opens with a much more ambitious question: What would the study of life in the countryside look like if it pushed past its historic dependence on the fantasy-ridden spatial dichotomy between rural and urban? Imaginative, capacious, and complex."

Kath Weston

"These interdisciplinary essays, taken together, are generally successful in rejecting stereotypes of non-urban queer life as one of isolation and alienation."

Journal of American History

"Queering the Countryside operationalizes the & rural as a queer analytic that serves as a productive framework to rethink the relationship between sexuality, space, and place. It is a welcomed addition to the queer studies canon."

E. Patrick Johnson

"Together these essays gift scholars with a new chapter in the rural turn that further cracks the foundations of metronormativity. Welcome to the backwoods of North America and the forefront of queer studies."

Scott Herring

"This collection of essays is, in many ways, an important contribution to the study of LGBT individual living in rural areas."

Choice Connect

"An eclectic volume that serves the crucial function of relocating queer studies scholarship from city to country."

The Journal of Southern History

Together these essays gift scholars with a new chapter in the rural turn that further cracks the foundations of metronormativity. Welcome to the backwoods of North America and the forefront of queer studies.”-Scott Herring,author of Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

“ Queering the Countryside operationalizes the ‘rural’ as a queer analytic that serves as a productive framework to rethink the relationship between sexuality, space,
and place. It is a welcomed addition to the queer studies canon.”-E. Patrick Johnson,author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History

“Rather than simply populating rural landscapes with queer folk who, in multiple senses, have been there all along, Queering the Countryside opens with a much more ambitious question: What would the study of life in the countryside look like if it pushed past its historic dependence on the fantasy-ridden spatial dichotomy between rural and urban? Imaginative, capacious, and complex.”-Kath Weston,author of Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship

“This new book is the first detailed and comprehensive study of queer desire in rural American and it does so from a multi-disciplinary perspective….What we read here challenges us to look at our experiences in ways that have a great deal more to form identity.”- Reviews by Amos Lassen

From the Publisher