In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America by Colin R. Johnson
  • Carol Mason
JUST QUEER FOLKS: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. By Colin R. Johnson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 2013.

Ethnographies, social histories, and cultural studies of queer American life in particular nonmetropolitan areas now abound. Colin R. Johnson’s Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America continues the trend of focusing on rural scenes and also carries out the best impulses of queer theory. Just Queer Folks embraces the “distrust of identity as an analytical category” (17) and historically examines discourses that led to the “heteronormalization” of rural America (3).

The first part of the book disabuses readers of the idea that rural places are naturally more prone to heteronormativity. Chapter 1 looks at discourses from U.S. agriculture that informs eugenics, hence the production of sexual knowledge, in the 1910s and 1920s. Johnson examines horticulture and animal husbandry to assert that “the American eugenics movement was born on the farm” (35), an argument that reorients inquiry away from the overtly racialized perspectives associated with fascism, settler colonialism, and plantation life to provide an analysis akin to feminist histories that recognize eugenics as mainstream rhetoric infusing daily discussions of marriage and parenting. Chapter 2 [End Page 148] then examines progressive-era rural sex education campaigns that standardized bourgeois “notions of sexual virtue and sexual vice” nationally (78).

With these two foundational analyses in place, the second part of Just Queer Folks turns more documentarian to supply cases proving “that same-sex sexual behavior and gender nonconformity were anything but rare in nonmetropolitan America during the first half of the twentieth century” (20). Johnson devotes chapters to itinerant laborers, queer eccentrics in small towns, cross-dressers in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and “hard” women—the country “drudges” (167) whose practical styles and lack of city fashion became increasingly shameful as consumerism proliferated. He thus builds on previous scholarship, advancing discussions of circulation rather than congregation as a means of procuring rural queer sexual encounters, of female masculinity, of drag practices, and of the classed issues involved in distinguishing homosociality from homosexuality. The conclusion examines a 1962 sting operation that indicates a rise in state repression of rural queer sex.

Because Johnson anticipates readers’ critiques and honest questions, this fascinating book serves as a much-needed and comprehensively researched introduction to the rural turn in queer studies. It deftly synthesizes previous work, concretizes key debates with clear examples and prose, breathes life into archival and anecdotal evidence, and provides a vivid tour of how queer practices—not identities—were gradually rather than automatically disdained. The anti-identitarian impulse allows for a complex narrative history that avoids anachronistically labeling people gay while encouraging readers to recognize an always-already queer America.

Just Queer Folks thus paves the way for scholars not only to seek out lived experiences of queers in unexpected times and places—a project that can result in slumming and voyeurism. It also sets the stage for continued inquiry into when and how nonnormative sexual practices and gender expressions became unqueered by moral reforms, conservative campaigns, economic structures, and discursive formations that use “the rural” to their political advantage. With illuminating queer historicist work such as Just Queer Folks, we can believe it when Johnson says that the rural turn in queer studies “has scarcely even begun” (9).

Carol Mason
University of Kentucky
...

pdf

Share