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QUEERNESS & RURALITY WIKIPEDIA PAGE PROPOSED CHANGES:

Throughout history, rural spaces have held multiple meanings and served various functions for queer individuals and communities, ranging from sites for political organizing or sanctuary to sites of repression and violence for LGBTQIA+ individuals.

Many popular representations of rurality as well as anti-LGBTQIA+ discourse citing "protecting rural values" suggest these communities intrinsically place a heightened value on “traditional moral standards.” Thus, communities in rural areas are associated with a lower tolerance for difference (including non-binary gender expression and queer sexuality) compared to urban environments. Some queer-identified individuals living in rural areas do experience antagonism, oppression, and violence matching the stereotypical representation of what it means to be queer in a rural community.

As of 2000, the U.S. Census found that 46 million people (roughly 16% of the nation's total population) live in ares with population densities of 999 people per square mile or fewer. Considering the high number of individuals and the small population densitity, the rural population of the U.S. exists across a wide geographical area. Despite the categorization based upon population density, "the rural population is not the same everywhere except in its distinction of not being urban." The variation within the category of rural is reflected in the multiple, varied experiences of queer-identified people living in rural areas.

In popular depictions, rurality is often portrayed as an inherently incompatible, or even hostile, environment for individuals who are not heterosexual and/or cisgendered. While this may be an accurate contrast between some urban and rural settings, there is significant variation within each categorization based on population density.

U.S. Rural/Urban Dichotomy and Visibility Politics
There is a wide gap in the assumed experience of queer individuals within a rural versus urban setting. Rurality is assumed to be a more repressive, less accepting environment for individuals whose sexual orientation is non-heterosexual or whose gender identity defies conventions of binary gender. In contrast, urban areas, particularly within the context of the U.S., are imagined to be safer, more accommodating spaces for non-heterosexual individuals. Queer-identified rural individuals and communities have been largely erased. Within the imagined geography of sexuality, cities are elevated as desirable destination for LGBTQIA+ individuals in rural areas. While the presence of LGBTQ bars, bookstores, and neighborhoods within population-dense, urban areas makes the presence of queer individuals and communities more visible than in less populated areas, queer-identified individuals can also be found living in rural areas all around the world.

Organizing for LGBTQIA+ issues in the post-Stonewall U.S. has centered around a politics of visibility. Within this political framework, publicly claiming a minority sexual orientation is inherently political. Visibility politics claim that, by making one's own queerness visible, 'out' individuals resist heteronormativity and the erasure of non-heterosexual behaviors and identities as well as illustrate to their local, national, and global communities that queer people exist and need equal rights and protection under the law. Therefore, visibility politics view a public declaration of queer identity as the primary road to political liberation and equality for queer communities.

Visibility politics also creates an understanding of queer lives through the metaphor of the closet (which Eve Sedgwick terms the epistemology of the closet). Within the epistemology of the closet framework, LGBTQIA+ persons are born 'in the closet' or with a repressed sexuality until the catalytic moment of 'coming out' at which point they become 'out' or publicly queer. Regional scholars have argued that the reliance upon the epistemology of the closet and visibility politics within U.S. queer activism is urban-centric, excluding and erasing LGBTQIA+ individuals and communities in rural areas across the globe. As the majority of national-scale queer activism reliant on visibility politics within the U.S. emerged out of its major cities, this ideology was "tailor-made for and from the population densities; capital; and systems of gender, sexual, class, and racial privilege that converge in cities."

Mary Gray expands upon this point in her book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America:"'...'metronormative' epistemologies of visibility privilege urban queer scenes. The systemic marginalization of the rural as endemically hostile and lacking the cultural milieu necessary for a celebratory politics of difference naturalizes cities as the necessary centers and standard bearers of queer politics and representations. Along the way all those not able, or inclined, to migrate to the city are put at a notable disadvantage not just by the material realities of rural places but also by the shortcoming of queer theory and LGBT social movement in ways we have only recently begun to explore.'"Just as this urban-centric, visibility politics model of understanding queer identity has been critiqued by regional scholars for its exclusion of rural experiences of identity formation and community building, "[m]ore recently, anthropologists working outside the United States and with diasporic communities have called into question what gay visibility means and looks like in a global context."

U.S. scholarship on queer life within metropoles further perpetuates the centrality of metronormative narratives of queer life and identity. John D'Emilio proposed a contradictory connection between capitalism and homosexuality. He argued that capitalism emphasized the importance of family units and reproduction as the primary function of that unit. However, simultaneously the anonymity of U.S. cities, a product of capitalist development, enabled networks of same-sex desiring individuals to form and a homosexual community and shared identity to emerge. George Chauncey is another historian whose work centered on queer life in urban centers. His book Gay New York examined how gay life in New York City formed around patterns of congregation and habit. Both D'Emilio and Chauncey highlight the ways that urban environments distinctly, and possibly uniquely, enable queerness. Thus, their findings to some extent reinforce a binary view of urban/rural wherein urban is perceived as a space for liberated, 'out' queer communities while rural is a space for isolated, 'closeted' queer individuals. Emphasizing the divide between rural and urban areas as a space for queer individuals also overlooks the ways that other factors (such as education, race, and class ) impact and shape the lives of queer individuals in distinct ways.

Studies and fieldwork by contemporary scholars also highlight the existence of queer lives in rural areas. In recent years, scholars of the American South and Midwest have written on queer life in rural areas, challenging the belief that rurality is inherently not conducive to queer sexual expression.

Research on migration patterns between urban and rural areas also challenges a binary view of the two categories as well as the common narrative that queer-identifying individuals 'escape' to the city over the course of their lives. In Coming Out and Coming Back: Rural Gay Migration and the City, authors Meredith Redlin and Alexis Annes' find that the migratory flow between urban and rural is not unidirectional, but rather a series of movements over time between the two spaces. This essay illustrates how queer individuals move within and between rural and urban areas in response to the ways that each space limits and/or enables their identity formation and sexual expression.

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BELOW THIS POINT - NOT QUITE READY FOR PEER REVIEW - Will work on more this week. Thx! -Frankie

History of Queer Rural Spaces
While it has often been erased, there is long history of queer desire and queer life in rural settings. Sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey and colleagues observed in a 1948 study that "the highest frequencies of the homosexual which we have secured anywhere have been in particular rural communities in some of the more remote sections of the country... This type of rural homosexuality contradicts the theory that homosexuality in itself is an urban product."

The lives of queer folk living in rural locations "embody a range of responses to the rural from Edenic and utopian to dysfunctional and oppressive." Some queer individuals grow up within rural communities and choose to stay; others leave urban areas to seek out rurality, some even establishing communities intended to function as queer utopias.

How Locals 'Queer' the Rural Landscape

In his book Men Like That: A Queer History of Mississippi, John Howard 'queers' the landscape of the state, illustrating how spoken and unspoken systems of communication were established, enabling queer individuals to connect and meet for sexual encounters.

The language used by scholars to describe as well as local attitudes towards queer sex dismiss same-sex intercourse as behavior rather than conceptualizing it as an identity or lifestyle. [QUOTE Howard/Johnson]

Rural Spaces as Queer Utopia

"We can trace a history of the perceived relationship between homosexuality and rurality which runs, to a point, hand-in-hand with the changing position of the real in the popular imagination, and more especially with its romanticization from the Victorian era onwards." Idea of nature as a queer utopia - many queer folks have moved themselves or their community to rural areas seeking haven or respite from the regulatory/constrictive elements of society and culture.

Talk about the lesbian-separatist movement; affordability of rural land; practical function of isolation; etc...

"Lesbian separatism, also referred to as political lesbianism, is an attitude and strategy present within radical lesbian feminism that insists on the rejection and refusal of participation in the social institution of heterosexuality. Lesbian separatism dates back to the late 1960s and the emergence of lesbian feminism during second-wave feminism."

"Lesbian feminists [in Australia] therefore imagined the women's lands as providing both a space away from men in which women could explore themselves as women and an opportunity for women to learn new skills and undertake for themselves the tasks that patriarchal society conventionally assigned to men."

Subheading about TERF critiques of this movement

Might borrow/adapt from existing page: "In the 1970s, women began to move to agricultural communes where they could live and work with other “country women”. In these communities, lesbian women built communes where they grew their own food and created societies away from men.  They believed that living and working in nature allowed them to embrace their inherent connection with nature. Gay men also partook in similar activities; Bell and Valentine note how the Edward Carpenter Community in England hosts Gay Men’s Weeks where they conduct events related to free-spiritedness and the embracement of one’s sexuality."

Heterosexual activities that are not heteronormative become contextually queer activities, some of which take place in rural areas, because they are viewed as a place to retreat and sexually experiment. Practicing “dogging” occurs, in which people can engage in public sex, voyeurism, exhibitionism, swinging, group sex, or partner swapping. Quiet roadsides and rest areas make for private places to meet, making cars vital for maintaining heterosexual and non-heterosexual queer interactions as well.

Masculine and feminine gender representations operate differently for those in rural areas because work done by both genders is perceived as masculine behavior in other non-rural areas. Both men and women can exhibit masculine features and be perceived as normal. Many rural women work alongside men on farms or in construction work, thus certain types of masculinity displayed by rural women is not interpreted as lesbian behavior as it might be in an urban or suburban environment. As a result of female gender representations being more masculine for women in rural spaces, femininity operates very differently there, and thus so does lesbianism. This masculine dynamic allows for some lesbians to blend in quite easily, where typical female attire can be wearing flannels and cowboy boots. However, deviations in style, such as short hair or wearing ties, can still result in judgment from the woman’s surrounding community. Emily Kayzak notes that “the sexual identity of rural butch lesbian women is not invisible in urban lesbian cultures, their more butch gender presentations do not do the same work in rural areas because those gender presentations are also tied to normative (hetero)sexuality.” Generally, lesbian-butch women are compatible with rural lifestyles as long as they can fit in with the typical masculine-female appearance. Rural spaces have even been referred to as makings for “lesbian lands,” in part due to their ability to blend in.

For rural men, on the other hand, “publicly disrupting normative gender expectations arguably remains as, if not more, contentious than homoerotic desires.” In many places, as long as a gay man subscribes to masculine representations and activities, such as wearing traditionally masculine attire and working in manual labor, acceptance comes much more easily. Deviations in appearance, like dressing up in drag, would be seen as very unacceptable, and can result in harassment. Male effeminate expressions and rurality are generally seen as incompatible. Many gay men in rural communities reject femininity and embrace masculine roles. Feminine gays typically face persecution and disapproval from their community members.

"The rural/urban spatialized-imaginary suggests that queers belong in the city, and hence are rendered invisible in the countryside."

Anti-queer Discrimination and Violence in Rural Communities
Talk about history of violence/oppression and the lack of resources/heightened social policing that enables this to occur more easily in some rural communities

In some rural communities, discriminatory legislation may prohibit queer individuals from receiving full protection of the law and access to public services. One example is Mississippi House Bill 1523 which protects the right of an individual, organization, or business to refuse services "based upon or in a manner consistent with a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction."

https://www.hrc.org/blog/bringing-equality-home-lgbt-people-in-rural-america

Might borrow/adapt from existing page: "Queer people in rural areas, as in many other places, face discrimination and violence. In small rural areas, perpetrators and victims are typically both known to the surrounding community. Even police, who are intended to hold up the law, are known to commit crimes against sexually marginalized people. Brett Beemyn’s review of John Howard’s piece "Men Like That: A Southern Queer History" explains some of the roots of violent hate crimes and discrimination against queer people. In the 1960s, amongst the acrimony of racists was the tendency to depict African Americans as sexual deviants. In addition, during the civil rights movement African Americans were known to have queer allies, thus stereotypes of racial justice supporters as engagers in perverted sexual acts became prevalent in the 1960s and the focus of discrimination spread to include queers in a more direct manner."

greater risk for lgbtq youth in rural areas -

Rural Queer Activism in the U.S.
"Despite the important legal and legislative changes made at the national and state levels, the lesbian and gay rights movement has made its most dramatic political impact in the cities." (Robert W. Bailey's Gay Politics, Urban Politics: Identity and Economics in the Urban Setting ; Columbia University Press, NY)

"Not all lesbians and gay men living in rural areas are willing to tolerate homophobic policing, social prejudice and violence, and nor do they decide that the only option left is to move away."

Recent battles for visibility (Starkville, MS Pride Parade) and to create queer spaces (Violet Valley Bookstore in Water Valley, MS)

Something like: Queer individuals in rural communities have also acted as advocates and allies for social causes that extend beyond sexuality or gender identities. Below are a few examples of this...

Environmental-Activism
examples

Anti-racist Activism
examples

Representations in Film
"Small Town Gay Bar"; "Brokeback Mountain";

Might use from existing page: Assumptions made about queer rural spaces are sometimes crude. In media, rustic sexual expression can take the form of homosexual rape, as seen in Pulp Fiction and Deliverance, and bestiality, which is also a theme in these films.

Representations in Television
"One Mississippi";

Representations in Radio and Podcast
"S-Town";