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Abstract
Peculiar Places analyzes the queer history of gender, sexual, and social nonconformity in the twentieth-century rural U.S. It traces this history through the anti-idyll, a cultural discourse that countered notions of white rustic virtue by registering significant social anxiety about the apparent degradation of rural families. I contend that as the anti-idyll located gender and sexual difference in the rural U.S., it bound those forms of difference to disability and economic marginality. Whether unable or unwilling to reform their peculiar ways, rural denizens were marked as deviant less for their gender expression and sexual acts than for their queer sociality—the unconventional lives and lifestyles that they forged ostensibly beyond the gaze of social regulation. Assembling an unorthodox cultural archive of rural social difference, Peculiar Places examines the transformation of the anti-idyll from the popular science of 1910s eugenic family studies through the haunting landscapes of 1970s horror films. By analyzing the anti-idyll, the dissertation challenges imaginations of white rustic virtue and urban social pathology that have been central to U.S. national mythology for centuries.
