Another Country

by Herring, Scott

• ISBN13: 9780814737194
• ISBN10: 0814737196
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplinesart, media, literature, performance, and fashion studieshe develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater.Impassioned and provocative,Another Countryexpands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes's obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to lesbian separatist communes on the northern California coast. The result is an entirely original account of how queer studies canand shouldget to another country.

Author Biography

Scott Herring teaches in the Department of English at Indiana University. He is the author of Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: I Hate New York	p. 1
Urban Legends
From Non-Metro to Anti-Urbanism
City Subversions, Rural Stylistics, Paper Cut Politics
Outsider Artifacts
Autobiographies of the Ex-Urban Queer	p. 31
Modernist Metronormativity
Gone-to-Kansas
Still Life with Charles Demuth
Berlin Story
Raw Deals
Critical Rusticity	p. 63
An Aesthetic of Anti-Urbanity
Bicoastality
Country Women
Out of the Closets, Into the Woods
RFD Country
Southern Backwardness	p. 99
Your Best Bubba
Alabama Souvenirs
Eastaboga/Taormina
Caravaggio's Rednecks
Unfashionability	p. 125
Steel Boots of Leather
Style-less
"Enemy Clothing"
Outdated
Queer Infrastructure	p. 149
Pittsburgh to the East, Philadelphia to the West
Roads to Nowhere
If Only
Alt-Routes
Coda: On the Borderlands of the Midwest	p. 181
Notes	p. 185
Index	p. 223
About the Author	p. 237
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.