This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/1200px-San_Francisco_Skyline_at_night.jpg 2020-09-26T06:46:37+00:00 Metronormativity 11 Don't all queer people live in the city? plain 2020-11-24T02:44:42+00:00 The conglomeration of blame, myth, fear, and self-righteousness that surrounds the popular discourse on Appalachia applies doubly for the queer people living in the region.  The dominant cultural examples of queerness in the mountains are, for many, John Boorman’s 1972 film, Deliverance, and Ang Lee’s 2005 film, Brokeback Mountain. In Deliverance, Appalachian queerness appears solely as the rapist who attacks Bobby Trippe, an Atlanta businessman. Simply referred to as “Mountain Man” by the closing credits, the rapist embodies the classic Appalachian stereotype of a toothless, inbred hillbilly, who appears even more sinister and backwards through his violent act of same-sex rape.  In this case, the combination of queerness and Appalachian rurality takes the form of an animalistic, anti-social monster.  In Brokeback Mountain, two rural men (Jack and Ennis) engage in a gay relationship behind the backs of their wives and mountain community.  Although, unlike Deliverance, Brokeback Mountain depicts rural gay men sympathetically, its vision of queer rurality is perhaps just as dire.  Jack and Ennis’ relationship, like many fictional queer relationships (and unlike many actual queer relationships), ends after years of emotional turmoil and fear of homophobic violence when a group of men murder Jack in an apparent hate crime.  As historian Colin Johnson explains, the film is not entirely sad because of unrequited love or violence, but because it “deals with the theme of unrequited love between two men […] in rural Wyoming.” Both films suggest that the only outcome for queer people in the mountains is isolation and brutality—whether at the hands of the queer person themselves or the bigoted society which surrounds them.  The takeaway is clear: LGBTQ+ life and rural life do not mix, and everyone would be better off if queer people stayed away from the hills. 
  
  
  In his book, In a Queer Time and Place, cultural theorist Jack Halberstam uses the term “metronormativity” to describe this culturally dominant understanding that the queer and the rural are incompatible.  Metronormative narratives treat rural regions as a spatial closet out of which LGBTQ+ people must emerge by moving to the city and realizing “the full expression of the sexual self.” If queer people exist in a rural area, they are either in hiding, “out” but only suffering due to a multitude of social and political factors, or simply delusional and inauthentically queer.  In her essay, “In Plain(s) Sight,” Carly Thomsen argues that metronormativity constructs a contradictory sexual and racial conception of rurality.  She explains that metronormative thinking necessarily depends on the popular understanding of the rural as entirely white to make these regions “both wholesome and dangerous” and easy to condemn from “liberal political commitments” focused purely on superficial demographic breakdown.  In short, metronormative narratives require flattened depictions of the rural in order to advocate against it, even if such a flattening erases the presence of racial and sexual communities that metronormative narratives claim to have in their best interests.  As a result of the sheer magnitude of contemporary liberal theorizing and self-aggrandizing about the region, Appalachia has become the most mythologically rural area in the United States and the prime scapegoat for metronormative narratives.  It is the spatial closet of the nation—abandon all hope queers who enter here. 
  
  As the research of rural queer scholars shows, however, metronormative narratives misrepresent both rural areas as well as the LGBTQ+ life within those areas by constructing a binary, and thus incomplete, understanding of the ways in which LGBTQ+ people navigate their own visibility, both historically and currently.  This binary conception of visibility is typically represented by the image of the closet, which restricts queer people to being “in” or “out.”  Though his research deals with gay life in pre-World War II New York City, historian George Chauncey’s analysis of the alternate approaches to visibility taken by people in a place where queerness often faces punishment maps helpfully onto queer life in rural spaces.  Chauncey asserts that though LGBTQ+ communities may appear invisible in areas where policing of queer people is rampant, queer people often employ a “highly sophisticated system of subcultural codes” to communicate with one another without exposing themselves to the public. This pragmatic approach to queer visibility upends the binary notion of the closet entirely.  Instead of relying on being “in” or “out,” Chauncey argues, gay people at the time used metaphors for entering straight spaces like “wearing masks” or “putting one’s hair up,” suggesting the existence of “the gay world” or a “homosexual society” that is not as solitary or restricted as the image of the closet suggests.  Historian John Howard draws similar conclusions about gay men in rural Mississippi in his book Men Like That.  Howard argues that gay men in Mississippi “proved quite adept at maneuvering through hostile terrain” by altering their language and mannerisms based on their environment.  By signaling their identity in this complex manner, many queer men were able to build “material and ideological spaces and thereby regularly found themselves in the company of like-minded souls.” This “gay world” in heavily policed areas allows for a more nuanced approach to historical ideas of visibility; gay people could remain perfectly visible within the communal spaces that they have established while continuing to pass within non-gay spaces.  Metronormative narratives which position queer people in rural areas as either “in” and living inauthentically or “out” and suffering simply do not account for the multitude of alternate modes of visibility employed by LGBTQ+ communities in the countryside.
  For depictions of Appalachia and other rural areas which do not reinforce metronormative stereotypes, check out some of the texts on the reading list.