Metronormativity
In his book, In a Queer Time and Place, cultural theorist Jack Halberstam uses the term “metronormativity”[2] 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.”[3] 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”[4] and easy to condemn from “liberal political commitments”[5] 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”[6] 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”[7] 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”[8] 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.”[9] 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.
[1] Johnson, Colin R, Just queer folks: Gender and sexuality in rural America (Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press, 2013), 17
[2] Halberstam, Jack, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York City NY: New York University Press, 2005), 36
[3] Ibid.
[4] Thomsen, Carly, “In Plain(s) Sight,” in Queering the Countryside, ed. Mary L Gray et al. (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016), 259.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Chauncey, George. Gay New York: the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (London UK: Flamingo, 1995), 4
[7] Ibid., 7
[8] Howard, John, Men like That: a Southern Queer History (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xiv
[9] Ibid.