Content area
Full Text
Queerying the Countryside
Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies. Edited by Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, and Brian A. Gilley. New York: New York University Press, 2016. vii + 396 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $30.00 paper.
Oklahomo: Lessons in Unqueering America. By Carol Mason. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. xiii + 217 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $80.00 cloth, $23.95 paper.
Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly paid attention to the importance of place in relation to discussions of queerness in the United States, resulting in a burgeoning field of scholarship that has come to be known as rural queer studies. This vein of scholarship has criticized the bias toward the city and the prejudice against the nonurban in scholarly debates, activism, and the popular (urban) imagination regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq) people and issues. J. Halberstam, author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), has labeled this preclusion of the rural an example of "metronormativity" (12). The narrative to which the term points is surely familiar: the lgbtq subject leaves the singularly oppressive rural area, where one must hide one's "true" (gay) self, and enters the city, where one is able to finally find belonging and be one's "full" (gay) self. Rural queer studies scholars emphasize the dichotomous logics that this totalizing narrative gives rise to and ask us- as with any totalizing narrative, perhaps-to think again. Or as the editors of Queering the Countryside put it, to "think twice."
In their introduction, the editors note that for many "the term 'rural' seems to imply certain things these days, not the least important of which is a stubbornly persistent attachment to highly traditional views regarding gender and sexuality and, by extension, an aggressive, even murderous, antipathy toward gender and sexual difference" (11). This depiction of the rural is illustrated most clearly in E. Cram's chapter, "(Dis)locating Queer Citizenship," which outlines the "metronormative optics" that surrounded national press coverage of Matthew Shepard's 1998 murder in Laramie, Wyoming. Cram's analysis of the representations of the event reveals that Shepard's violent death became seen almost as an inevitability given the rural locale. This sequestering...