Description
Book SynopsisThe metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplinesart, media, literature, performance, and fashion studieshe develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater.
Impassioned and provocative, Another Country expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes's obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to le
Trade Review
Smart and edgy...the value of this book lies principally in the provocative conceptual tools it offers to articulate the roadblocks and raptures of queer migrations. -- Amin Ghaziani * American Journal of Sociology *
In Another Country, Herring responds to gaps that urban-centered studies have left opened in queer histories . . . Herring's work evidences a fierce commitment to existing queer metropolitan-migration narratives, favoring the backward, rustic and unfashionable, and embracing these stereotypes for their own subversively disruptive potentials. His quality content analysis and skillful ability to anticipate counter-arguments and avoid intellectual pitfalls keeps the reader on her toes. -- Jaime Cantrell * Feminist Formations *
Reading across the genres of literature, print and visual media, photography, and fashion, Scott Herring not only complicates the queers move from rural to urban space, but also the ways in which queers in & othered spaces enact an anti-urbanism through their own & rural stylistics. Another Country is fierce! -- E. Patrick Johnson,author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South;An Oral History
Scott Herring presents an exquisitely detailed road atlas of the complicated intersection between topography and destiny. -- Alison Bechdel,author of Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For
Writers, artists, and activists have worked throughout the past century to imagine and materialize sustainable queer lives everywhere from Oregon to Pennsylvania, from Iowa to Alabama. Herring provides the definitive account of the myriad ways that LGBT people have constituted non-urban sites as vibrant and sexy spaces of resistance to hetero- and homonormativity, to compulsory consumerism, and to entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender, and ability. In so doing, Another Country redraws the map of contemporary queer studies. -- Robert McRuer,author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
Herring has a distinctive voice, elegant with a sharp wit...a book that is as beautiful as it is brilliant. * The Journal of American History *
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: I Hate New York Urban Legends From Non-Metro to Anti-Urbanism City Subversions, Rural Stylistics, Paper Cut Politics Outsider Artifacts1. Autobiographies of the Ex-Urban Queer Modernist MetronormativityGone-to-KansasStill Life with Charles DemuthBerlin StoryRaw Deals2. Critical Rusticity An Aesthetic of Anti-UrbanityBicoastalityCountry WomenOut of the Closets, Into the WoodsRFD Country3. Southern Backwardness Your Best BubbaAlabama SouvenirsEastaboga/TaorminaCaravaggio's Rednecks4. Unfashionability Steel Boots of LeatherStyle-less"Enemy Clothing"Outdated5. Queer Infrastructure Pittsburgh to the East, Philadelphia to the WestRoads to NowhereIf OnlyAlt-Routes Coda: On the Borderlands of the Midwest Notes Index About the Author A color insert follows page
