Description
Book SynopsisRepresenting Rural Women highlights the complexity and diversity of representations of rural women in the U.S. and Canada from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The 15 chapters in this collection offer fresh perspectives on representations of rural women in literature, popular culture, and print, digital, and social media. They explore a wide range of time periods, geographic spaces, and rural women's experiences, including Mormon pioneer women, rural lesbians in the 1970s, Canadian rural women's organizations, and rural trans youth. In their stories, these women and girls navigate the complex realities of rural life, create spaces for self-expression, develop networks to communicate their experiences, and challenge misconceptions and stereotypes of rural womanhood. The chapters in this collection consider the ways that rural geography allows freedoms as well as imposes constraints on women's lives, and explore how cultural representations of rural womanhood both reflect and sh
Trade ReviewThis collection addresses how rural women, long overlooked by literary scholars, have been represented by others and themselves in various mediums from literature to social media. Anyone interested in rural women, past and present, the spaces they inhabit and symbolic imaginaries, will find it fascinating as it challenges preconceived notions about women and rurality. -- Catharine A. Wilson, Redelmeier Professor in Rural History, University of Guelph and Co-Chair of the Rural Women’s Studies Association
I found this work engrossing, fascinating, and insightful. Encompassing themes of race, class, and sexuality, it shows that cultural representations of being female and rural are myriad, complex, and multi-faceted. It offers new ways for seeing and understanding rural women’s experiences. The perceptive analyses here of how diverse rural female figures have alternatively found comfort, belonging, isolation, violence, and power offers a potent corrective to notions of rural worlds as monolithic, irrelevant, or passé. This is a wonderful and incredibly moving book. -- Nancy K. Berlage, Texas State University
Spanning over a century in the US and Canada, Representing Rural Women challenges our ideas of who rural women are and what they do. Through various media, representations of rural women and by rural women—such as Hurricane Katrina survivors, lesbians in the 1970s, fashion bloggers, trans girls, those who migrated, and more—complicate what it means to be a rural woman. Authors from a range of disciplines remind us at every turn of the multiplicity of rural experiences that counteract the way rural lives are narrowly depicted in public discourse. -- Charlotte Hogg, Texas Christian University
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Representing Rural Women
Margaret Thomas-Evans and Whitney Womack Smith
Part I: Representations of Rural Women in Literature and Film
Chapter 1. “Gone Country”: Literary Depictions of the New Woman in Rurality
Adam Nemmers
Chapter 2. Reassessing the American Migration Experience: The Dollmaker’s Gertie Nevels as an American Working-Class Heroine
Laurie Cella
Chapter 3. A Quiet, Debilitating Ailment: Racial Isolation and Rural America in Willa Cather’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s Experimental Fiction
Jericho Williams
Chapter 4. Ginseng-Gathering Women: The Underground Economy in Five Appalachian Novels
Jimmy Dean Smith
Chapter 5. The Potential to Reform Rural Fingerbone: Sylvie’s New Western Revolution in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping
Amanda Zastrow
Chapter 6. Rural Spaces and (In)Disposable Bodies in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
Jim Coby
Chapter 7. Codes of Kinship: Rural Poverty and Female Resilience in Winter’s Bone
H. Louise Davis and Whitney Womack Smith
Chapter 8. Rural Trans Girlhoods in Young Adult Fiction
Barbara Pini and Wendy Keys
Part II: Rural Women's Self-Representations
Chapter 9. Poetic Representations of Mormon Women in Late Nineteenth-Century Frontier America
Amy Easton-Flake
Chapter 10. Lightning Strikes, Burned Bread & Chipmunks: Women Lookouts in the American West
Nancy Cook
Chapter 11. A Life in the Country: Lesbians and Feminists Living on the Land
Agatha Beins and Julie Enszer
Chapter 12. On Rural Transgender Visibility
Eli Erlick
Chapter 13. Visual and Digital Representations of Canadian Rural Women’s Organizations
Margaret Thomas-Evans
Chapter 14. “Pining for High Fashion?”: Rural Women Writing on Fashion Online
Holly Kent
Chapter 15. Fantasies and Phobias: De-Mythologizing Contemporary and Historical Depictions of Rural Women
Elizabeth Thompson
Index
About the Editors
About the Contributors
