Queering the countryside : new frontiers in rural queer studies / edited by Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson and Brian J. Gilley.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

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 The Wizard 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.

Part I. New archives, new epistemologies -- 1. Out back home: an exploration of LGBT identities and community in rural Nova Scotia, Canada / Kelly Baker -- 2. Horatio Alger's queer frontier / Geoffrey W. Bateman -- 3. Sherwood Anderson's "shadowy figure": rural masculinity in the modernizing Midwest / Andy Oler -- 4. A classroom in the barnyard: reproducing heterosexuality in interwar American 4-H / Gabriel N. Rosenberg -- Part II. The rural turn: considering cartographies of race and class -- 5. The waiting arms of Gold Street: Manuel Munoz's 'Faith healer of Olive Avenue' and the problem of the scaffold imaginary / Mary Pat Brady -- 6. Snorting the powder of life: transgender migration in the land of 'Oz' / Lucas Crawford -- 7. Outside forces: black southern sexuality / LaToya E. Eaves -- 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 -- 9. Queer interstates: cultural geography and social contact in 'Kansas City Trucking Co.' and 'El Paso Wrecking Corp.' / Ryan Powell -- 10. Epistemology of the bunkhouse: lusty lumberjacks and the sexual pedagogy of the woods / Peter Hobbs -- 11. Rethinking the closet: queer life in rural geographies / Katherine Schweighofer -- 12. In plain(s) sight: rural LGBTQ women and the politics of visibility / Carly Thomsen -- Part IV. Bodies of evidence: methodologies and their discontents -- 13. (Dis)locating queer citizenship: imaging rurality in Matthew Shepard's memory / E. Cram -- 14. Queering the American frontier: finding queerness and sexual difference in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Colorado / Robin Henry -- 15. Digital oral history and the limits of gay sex / John Howard -- 16. Queer rurality and the materiality of time / Stina Soderling.

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