Queering the Countryside

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 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 This collection of essays is, in many ways, an important contribution to the study of LGBT individual living in rural areas. * Choice Connect * 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 * 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 * An eclectic volume that serves the crucial function of relocating queer studies scholarship from city to country. * The Journal of Southern History *

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.