"We will discover an honourable and sustainable way to live intelligent and blissful lives as gay men and to be able to detach from a commercial and predatory gay culture whose deathwish mantra is Live Fast, Die Young, Be A Beautiful Corpse." — From the Edward Carpenter Collective’s Alchemy: Tyger Tyger! Weekend.
LGBT
Wiping Out Power (Psyche)
If metropolitan lesbians and gay men had in fact succeeded in wiping out power in relationships, all we would have to do is enjoy our egalitarian practice and let everyone else in on the secret. But that is far from the case. The prevailing sex— gender system, we have every reason to know, is geared … Continue reading Wiping Out Power (Psyche)
History v. Heritage
Part of what needs to be done is to reconstruct the genealogical descent of why one form of place identity (called 'history') is supposed to be taken as more legitimate than another (called 'heritage'). Regarding rural places, research attempting to develop this sense of a conjunctural non-essential identity has begun to consider the rural as … Continue reading History v. Heritage
Towards a Cosmic Model of Intersectionality
What physical models and/or scientific analogies can we appropriate to better understand Intersectionality? ... By this I mean--are there more robust models for conceiving Intersectionality that exceed the parameters of longitude and latitude that so often dominate discourses of Intersectionality? It seems to me that the first step is to throw away a 2-dimensional conception … Continue reading Towards a Cosmic Model of Intersectionality
A Few More Rednecks
Given the thinly-veiled self-congratulation and condescension that informs such intellectual efforts, it is not surprising that self-consciously rustic people often become emphatically anti-intellectual…Charlie Daniels (1990) follows a lyrical call for “a few more rednecks” with the threat that “you intellectuals might not like it but there’s nothing you can do,” while Aaron Tippin (1993) glorifies … Continue reading A Few More Rednecks
On Queer Metronormativity
Suffice it to say that if recent strains of queer theory and recent forms of lgbtq politics (latent and manifest) share common ground, it’s usually a dismissal of rurality as such, a dismissal not only commonplace but, let’s bet the farm on it, chronic. Much of queer studies wants desperately to be urban planning, even … Continue reading On Queer Metronormativity
Queering the South
Movement and love making, heat and heritage, pursed lips and tongues wagging, culture’s enabling constraint—all implicated in this fanning of queer desire, and well suited to (dis)orient our mapping en route, but without ever reaching a specified destination, to southern queer world making. Or, as Dolly Parton sang in Transamerica (2005), we’re just ‘‘travelin’ thru. … Continue reading Queering the South
Freedom To Marry in Alabama
Featured
What This Is
This site aspires to create an online space within which we are able to reconsider popular notions of what it means to be country, Southern, rural, small town, backwoods, and queer. The work here seeks to offer an alternative to the irrevocable metronormativity of modern queer consumer culture and the unflinching “pride” of “post-liberation” LGBT identity … Continue reading What This Is
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