Queering the Middle

Abstract

When imagined in relation to other regions in the United States, the Midwest is often positioned as the "norm," the uncontested site of middle-class white American heteronormativity. This characterization of the Midwest has often prevailed in scholarship on sexual identity, practice, and culture, but a growing body of recent queer work on rural sexualities, transnational migration, regional identities, and working-class cultures suggests the need to understand the Midwest other wise. This special issue offers an opportunity to think with, through, and against the idea of region. Rather than reinforce the idea of the Midwest as a core that essentializes and naturalizes American cultural and ideological formations, these essays instead open up possibilities for dispelling and unraveling the idea of the heartland. This special issue represents an engagement with and a creative departure from the notion of the American Midwest both as a geographic entity and as a discursive formation. The middle creates less a magisterial panoramic perspective than a queer vantage-a troubled, unstable perch buttressed by the dominance of the coasts and the "South." We believe that such instabilities are productive of alternative ways to approach space and time and to reimagine routes and paths, contours and shapes, directions and teloses of queer lives, practices, and institutions.

The Geography of Research on LGBTQ Life: Why sociologists should study the South, rural queers, and ordinary cities

“…Noteworthy is Hector Carrillo's and Jorge Fontdevila's work on Mexican immigrant gay and bisexual men in San Diego (Carrillo and Fontdevila, , ). One critique of metronormativity as a concept is that it “can also erase the complexities of gender and desire as lived by and represented by people of color in urban contexts” (Manalansan IV, Nadeau, Rodríguez, & Somerville, , p. 9). However, sociologists know significantly less about Black LGBTQ life in the cities and regions with high Black populations, namely, cities like Detroit, Michigan, in the Midwest and New Orleans, Louisiana, in the South.…”

Introduction: An Anthropological Almanac of Rural Americas

“…Nowhere is this more apparent than in the boom of rural queer studies, catalyzed in part by Mary Gray’s () ethnography of LGBT youth in Kentucky. Beyond documenting hidden histories, these scholars have interrogated the place‐ and class‐based assumptions behind putatively unmarked accounts of desire and visibility, as well as their intersection with categories of race and citizenship (Gray, Johnson, and Gilley ; Manalansan et al ). Meanwhile, Gabriel Rosenberg () showed how rural organizations like 4‐H encoded broader norms about the procreative, propertied nuclear family, and Jessica Smith Rolston () examined how kinship and gender roles were constructed in the coal mines of Wyoming.…”

‘The more South you go, the more frankly you can speak’: Metronormativity, critical regionality and the LGBT movement in Salento, South-Eastern Italy

“…Here the concept of 'critical regionality' (Binnie, 2016;Gopinath, 2007;Johnson et al, 2000) emerges. This concept relates to the necessity of restoring the importance of regional approaches to the study of sexuality and gender diversity, both at the level of the sub-territorial unit and the supra-territorial unit (Manalansan et al, 2014). Those espousing the principle of 'critical regionality' in their analyses insist on the necessity of looking at regional and local contexts beyond essentialist and Orientalist temptations, focusing on the interplay between the regional and the international spheres from a relational perspective (Binnie, 2016(Binnie, : 1637.…”