Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies

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.

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.