The Wildcrafting Our Queerness Project

A Note on Terms

Throughout this project, I refer to gender and sexual identity using a handful of different terms. Where appropriate, I employ the specific term that the oral history narrator uses to refer to themselves—“gay” for Bob Morgan and Dustin Hall and “lesbian” for Raina Rue, for example. When speaking more broadly about how these narrators’ work relates to a range of people and experiences across Appalachia, I use two different umbrella terms largely interchangeably, “queer” and “LGBTQ+.” This is not a perfect system, however, and both umbrella terms can have different connotations for different people and networks that make their use potentially inaccurate. For many LGBTQ+ people, especially those who are older, the word “queer” is unequivocally a pejorative slur, thrown at them by bigots to wound and to marginalize.[1] The acronym, then, is an “imperfect” though dignifying term, providing a means of expressing solidarity with other different, yet related identities in a way that is not harmful.

Still, for others the reclamation and resignification of the slur “queer” embodies the radical resistance to heterosexual and cisgender cultural norms and the political solidarity that emerges from this resistance.[2] “Queer” also refers to the academic fields of “Queer Theory” and “Queer Studies,” which use the word to describe both the intersectionality of sexuality, gender, race, class, and disability as well as the process of rejecting norms surrounding these identity categories in order to construct a more egalitarian future.[3] For those who prefer “queer,” the acronym may not be as effective in describing the political action and intersectionality that upholds marginalized gender and sexual identities. In short, using any one term to describe a large group of people who possess certain identities will be incomplete and will inevitably refer to someone in a way that does not perfectly describe their identity or their approach to visibility.[4] By using both interchangeably in most cases,[5] I aim to reflect the slipperiness of such broad categorizations, embracing the useful similarities of both terms while also leaving room to acknowledge their differences.
 
[1] Before describing any of my narrators as “queer,” I was sure to wait and hear them use that word themselves. 
[2]The radical leftist organization “Queer Nation” or the popular slogan “not gay as in happy, but queer as in ‘fuck you’” are both examples of this usage of the term.
[3] For this definition of queer, I am relying on the writing of queer theorists like José Muñoz, who wrote in Cruising Utopia that “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”
[4] Another common umbrella term that many of my narrators used is “gay,” used in a pan-LGBTQ+ sense. Dustin Hall refers to having a “gay old time” in the woods and Raina Rue expresses her desire to make art for all “country gays.” This use of “gay” is common in casual speech between queer people, I myself often use it. I refrain from using “gay” in this sense in my writing, however, due to the potential confusion between the universal “gay” and the specific “gay” which refers to a homosexual man. Moreover, to use “gay” to describe all people along the LGBTQ+ spectrum also implicitly centers queerness on homosexual men, diminishing the experiences of women and nonbinary people.
[5] There are a few instances, such as describing Hall’s paintings and Morgan’s use of sculptures as an archive, in which I specifically use the word “queer.” In these cases, I am using the word to describe the process of interrogating and reconstructing certain social norms, as queer theorists like Muñoz describe. In these few cases, I try to make the transformative nature of the artists’ work clear.

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