Queer Theory with a Twang

At the crossroads of identity politics, critical regionalism, cultural geography, and the history of sexualities stands the American rural queer, a liminal subject who lives in the places that, until recently, queer theory forgot. The killings of Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena in the 1990s inspired queer theorists to take into account the country cousins of gay New York and venture into times and spaces heretofore considered too unhip, dangerous, or inconsequential for urban queers to ponder. Scott Herring’s contribution to this conversation opens up the study of the so-called rural queer to more than actually existing members of the GLBTQ community in nonmetropolitan centers. In a fast-paced ride down country roads of inquiry, Herring bypasses ethnography to examine cultural artifacts that help historicize opposition to the city-centeredness of queer criticism in America.

To start, Herring positions himself adversarially, announcing “I hate New York” (1)—a nearly heretical claim that would have been unspeakable ten years ago (especially, I should think, to NYU Press). But times have changed in publishing as well as in politics since 9/11: voices from the country, the flyover zone, and the hinterlands are emerging with new force. In the case of queer criticism these are productive voices, and Herring’s book is a good example of how to channel justified anger into insightful, incisive commentary that can redirect fields of study and courses of thought. Careful to explain his brand of “anti-urbanism” as something far away from any reactionary throwback to Jeffersonian plantation ideals of the pastoral or contemporary tea party rants against big cities and big government, Herring defines his terms clearly and expansively.

For instance, Herring smartly unpacks and reloads Judith Halberstam’s by-now ubiquitous neologism, metronormativity, to make a case for showing the historical roots of opposition to it. Reminding us that the term owes as much to the idea of the metrosexual as to that of heteronormativity, Herring focuses on style. He resituates our critical gaze from the metrosexual aesthetics of consumer culture and urban queer art to what he calls “rural stylistics” in queer writing, photography, attire, and geography. His first chapter deftly examines how “modernist metronormativity” is countered by Charles Demuth’s paintings and Willa Cather’s and James Weldon Johnson’s fiction. Prefiguring later challenges to dominant modes of studying modernism, My Egypt, The Professor’s House, and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man “invert urbane stylistics via what we would come to know as disability, gender, and queer of color critiques” (61). From this retrospective angle, Herring expands into the past the critique of metronormativity much as John Howard does with his oral histories of same-sex practices in midcentury Mississippi, but Herring excavates such antiurban queer desire from artworks rather than life stories.¹

Moving from art to artifacts, chapter 2 examines two alternatives to the Advocate that also perform a “critical rusticity,” according to Herring (25). With the periodicals RFD and Country Women, both of which were founded in the back-to-the-land days of the early 1970s, Herring makes a convincing case that these were precursors of today’s queer desire to disengage from the overcorporatization of gay pride parades, the consumer culture of gay weddings, and the niche-marketing of lesbian chic. Herring celebrates the “deliberate sloppiness” and “lack of sleekness” in these magazines as conscious attempts to “replace an Advocate-inspired ‘gay nationality’ with a small-town queer regionality” (94). The crux of his take is separating these earlier magazines from today’s queer print media that suffers from a “neo-primitivism” when they are not fully ensconced in the glossy look of metronormativity. Herring therefore goes back in time, perhaps sometimes nostalgically, in what appears to be a search for a queer political integrity or authenticity.

But there is no appeal to anything wholesome or authentic in chapter 3’s consideration of “southern backwardness” (99). Here Herring reads a collection of art photography by Michael Meads titled Alabama Souvenirs: edgy images of undressed young...