Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America Colin R.Johnson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America Colin R. Johnson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.Ever since Thomas Jefferson penned panegyrics to those who labored in the earth, conceptions of American citizenship have been organized by space: heartland conservatives versus urban elitists, tolerant cosmopolitans against atavistic hillbillies. Nowhere is this truer than in queer politics, where the urban is regarded as the iconic site of same-sex desire and the only possible location for its consummation. Though there is risk in the countryside-consider the account of Matthew Shepard, mistaken for a scarecrow when his body was discovered lashed to a fence in rural Wyoming-the solution to oppression is not metrochauvinism (197). The binaristic formulation of urban/rural and queer/straight empowers homophobia and is a myth to be resisted.Colin R. Johnson's Just Queer Folks does more than unsettle that binary; it offers a queer history of rural America, as well as an account of the normalizing national practices that transformed the countryside into the center of vicious normalcy. While he does not contest John D'Emilio's claim that urban capitalism created coherent queer identity, Johnson focuses not on identity but practices. He also refuses the oppositional status of the country and the city, since the urban sphere is a particular location, while the territory is diffuse and massive, stretching between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans with only a discrete handful of metropolitan interruptions.Over the course of six chapters, Johnson devotes much of his attention to rural, white working-class cisgender men, about whom the most substantial archive exists and for whom the prospect of queemess is now presumed most remote (23). Historically, these men have required normative discipline, because homosocial locations provide frequent contexts for the development of heterosexual masculinity (157). The final chapter, Hard Women: Rural Women and Female Masculinity, proffers compelling readings of female sharecroppers in Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) in conversation with changing standards of Depression Era fashion and Dorothy Allison's figuration of rural women as measured [and] manlike... solid [and] stolid (179-180). Female masculinity, Johnson suggests, is not simply a radical posture toward queer futurity; it also resists novel forms of feminine self-fashioning offered by modern capitalism's ready-to-wear clothing and impractical shoes. …