Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music by Nadine Hubbs

Abstract

This readable and thought-provoking volume makes an important contribution to the emerging body of research on queer working-class America. Drawing from several scholarly fields, Nadine Hubbs explores links between working-class folks and country music, and between working-class culture and queers. Her central historical argument is that until the 1970s, sexual and gender-role variance were linked to working-class culture and devalued, while since the 1970s, they have been linked to middle-class culture and tolerated or valued. What has remained constant is that whatever is linked to working-class folks is scorned. Her central sociological argument is that working-class codes and values go unrecognized by what she calls “the narrator class” (meaning middle-class academics, media, etc.), partly because the middle class defines itself by imagining itself as separate from the working class, which then must be stigmatized in order for status to accrue to the middle class. Since the middle class thus gets to set the terms, one of the few means by which working-class culture can name and honor its own experience is via country music, whose themes and tropes “afford listeners the opportunity to reflect on the significance of ordinary lives, and ordinary, utterly precedented patterns in their own lives. From a perspective sympathetic to working-class experience, this reveling in shared ordinariness can reflect a rich sociality and humble humanity” (100). She concludes that in failing to attend to and describe working-class culture accurately, the narrating class does working people a disservice that harms everyone.The three terms of the book’s title come together in several ways. One connection is Hubbs’s argument that queers have been “middle-classed.” Queers have achieved distance from our previous association with working and poor folks via becoming attached to a rights-based discourse while simultaneously striving for status by moving away from gender-role violations and toward a more Mattachine Society definition of gay life as about sexual object choice (read: “We’re just like you, only we desire those of our own sex”). Accomplishing this shift necessitated “demonizing the white working class as homophobic and erasing and depoliticizing their deep historical relations to queer culture” (30). Much of this cultural work parallels country music and the negative valence attributed to it and to its fans. As the middle class began to identify itself with tolerance, global tastes, and antiracist metropolitan multiculturalism, it imagined itself as embracing all musical and cultural styles except country. Just a few notes of pedal steel guitar or banjo are enough to call to mind bigotry, sexism, and homophobia. But this equation exists only in the mind of the middle class, which uses it to reward itself for tolerance and correct thinking.Country music is here a flashpoint or symbol—it invokes a particular, politically motivated stereotype. Hubbs also interprets country music as an expression of working-class culture and values. Though most of her argument here concerns how each class understands subjectivity and agency (drawing on accounts of classed child rearing practices and on a communications study of interactions at a cement pour), she applies these to questions of queer involvement and lack thereof in country music discourse and production. For example, can we understand country music as anti-queer because it makes no mention of gender or sex deviance? Does silence about a topic imply lack of comfort or acceptance? Hubbs responds by explaining that working-class culture values silence, particularly in areas of political or emotive contention, and that the Christianity described in the country songs she discusses is not fundamentalist or antigay but rather humanitarian and accepting. Both these conclusions derive from her contention that rather than emphasize individual achievement and creative expression of a unique self, working-class subjects “hope to withstand the world’s pressures without changing or compromising their integrity” (51). Constancy is valued over innovation, and the music is not trying to be original, nor are its listeners. The middle class may spurn this style as derivative and formulaic, but Hubbs strives to historicize that judgment.Where queers figure into this conversation gets muddier as the book progresses. Hubbs does an extended reading of Gretchen Wilson’s song “Redneck Woman,” arguing that the virile female persona of this song and this star is linked to contradictory narratives of class and gender. The song reclaims the term redneck for women, and as a source of pride and identification. Yet working-class and rural femininity exist in a different, more masculine register than middle-class femininity. According to Hubbs, the song makes a feminist case “through masculinity rather than against it” (125). Wilson adopts masculine, “hard” country ancestors, visuals, and styles in her song (off-roading, for example, and acting “tough”). If “‘Redneck Woman’ both confirms and talks back to long-standing perceptions of working-class women as excessively or inappropriately gendered” (122), what bearing does it have on queer agents or audiences? Hubbs draws a parallel (“masculine or butch personas among queer women bear long association, too, with working-class identity” [ibid.]) but goes no further. I am left wanting more theory, more data, and more analysis. What do queer producers, performers, and audiences of country music say about issues of class and gender and representation? How might we begin to understand their causal linkages?Hubbs ends with a discussion of an album privately released by the country legend David Allan Coe in 1978. This is both a very old example and a very marginal one, since the album was never mass-produced or played on the air. Hubbs’s point about the record is that though he admits to, even brags about, having sex with other men while in prison, Coe is never assumed gay, and that we need to understand that as a classed omission. The historical point is that 1978 “was a social order rooted in ideology equating the primitive, the criminal, and the disreputable with the working class; equating these same stigmatized qualities with sexual and gender queerness; and, by similar logic, equating the working class with the queer” (155). The theoretical and political point is that “the working class today serves as a prime foil against which the middle-class, politicized queer is defined” (158). When linking working-class people and cultures to country music, Hubbs makes this point powerfully. When adding in queers, her arguments are too thin—there is neither enough theory nor enough data for them to be more than suggestions. That said, they are very compelling suggestions. She ends by noting that if we continue to see and value only the types of gay identity inhabited by middle-class urban queers, we will misrecognize both who and what working-class people (queer or not) are and value, passing up any opportunity to learn and borrow from their ways of seeing and being. In the interests of appearing respectable and gaining acceptance, we will discard very cool people and pleasures. And by casting working-class people as bigots, sexists, and homophobes, we can blame all society’s ills on them, thus shrugging off responsibility, feeling virtuous, and avoiding any self-critique that might lead to change.In sum, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music adds a crucial piece to the puzzling overlap between working-class folks and queers. Too often, these categories are seen as inconsistent or even incompatible. Hubbs explains why and when that cultural assumption took shape and whose interests it serves. Her readings of country music scenes and songs add depth and explanatory power to her depictions of working-class worlds. Future scholars can build on this frame, and I hope their additions will be as readable and interesting as this groundbreaking book.