USA
rural queer studies
18. Okt 2010 20:04 ~ comments(0)
Queering the Countryside New Directions in Rural Queer Studies Conference
Unlike typical academic conferences where participants simply present truncated versions of work already in progress, the primary goal of this conference is to occasion robust discussion about the state of existing knowledge related to gender and sexuality in rural and non-metropolitan space, as well as where what we are provisionally calling “rural queer studies” can or should be headed in the years to come. In order to lay a foundation for that discussion we have invited a number of leading scholars working in this area to frame our conversation by way of prepared statements.
Although these scholars (listed to the right) will be drawing on their own research and expertise for this discussion, all have been asked to draft their comments with the following provocation in mind:
Over the past several years, scholars have begun to reckon with how little attention rural and non-metropolitan life has received in the context of discussions about gender and sexuality in the United States. This is especially true where the study of gender non-conformity and same-sex sexual behavior is concerned. Indeed, as critics including ourselves have argued, scholars have not only sidestepped or ignored the experience of those living outside urbanized areas; in some cases their work has actively, if unintentionally, fed a tendency to frame theories and accounts of queer lives in ways that effectively render rural and non-metropolitan experiences invisible, illegible or simply irrelevant to contemporary queer culture as it is usually understood.
We believe that this burgeoning critique continues to be a salient one, not least of all because there are still large numbers of people both within the academy and beyond it who find it virtually impossible to believe that queer life contains any value outside of urban areas. At the same time, we also believe that to advance the discussion, scholars must say more precisely what it is that can be gained by focusing greater attention on rural and non-metropolitan space.
With this in mind, we offer the following questions as possible points of departure for your comments. As you respond, think of your own projects as illustrations of the arguments, questions or puzzles you would like to pose to fellow workshop participants and readers of the anthology that will follow.
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Why do you think queer genders and sexualities have been so difficult to study in non-metropolitan contexts? Some scholars contend that there simply isn’t enough available evidence to support any meaningful claims or generalizable conclusions. How do you respond to this assertion? Assuming that there is in fact a scarcity of certain kinds of evidence, are there any lessons we might learn or methods we might borrow from other fields of inquiry that have had to contend with fragmentary archives or inconclusive data? Finally, are there questions we might ask about the nature of evidence itself or the disciplinary circumstances under which it gets evaluated that might help to expand our field of vision?
Are there ways in which a “rural turn” in queer studies might help to improve or augment our understanding of how race and class operate as discourses, experiences and embodied practices? Alternatively, does increased attention to space and place in queer studies interrupt, damage or detract from the efforts of scholars in queer studies examining the centrality of race and class?
What is it we can hope to know about genders and sexualities in non-metropolitan contexts given the critical tools and analytic methodologies we currently use and what have been some of the major contributions of queer work dealing with rural or non-metropolitan life thus far?
What are the limits of “rurality” as a framing device for scholarly inquiry generally and scholarly inquiry regarding gender and sexuality more specifically? Skeptics sometimes object to the term “rural” arguing that it is conceptually vague and therefore ill-suited for use as an analytic category in and of itself. Interestingly, one rarely hears similar objections with regard to the term “urban” even though the two are often imagined as being complimentary in some way. Is there perhaps a better, less binaristic way to think about the material specificity of certain kinds of space?
How does the work being done now in what we’re tentatively calling "rural queer studies" stand to transform what we know about genders and sexualities in North American culture? Looking ahead, where do we need to go from here? How do we build on existing work dealing with queer life in both rural and urban contexts without repeating some of its more egregious errors, elisions or missteps?
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