Gray, Mary L.
New York : New York University Press, c2009.
Added to CLICnet on 08/27/2015
Check CLICnet for availability
Part of the series Intersections : transdisciplinary perspectives on genders and sexualities;Intersections (New York, N.Y.)
Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Preface : Never met a stranger — Introduction : There are no queers here — Part I: Queers here? Recognizing the familiar stranger. Unexpected activists : homemakers club and gay teens at the local library School fight! : local struggles over national advocacy strategies From Wal-Mart to websites : out in public — Part II: Queering realness. Online profiles : remediating the coming-out story To be real : transidentification on the discovery channel Conclusion : visibility out in the country — Epilogue : You got to fight for your right… to marry? — Appendix : Methods, ad-hoc ethics, and the politics of sexuality studies.
- From Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker’s Clubs, Out in the Countryoffers an unprecedented contemporary account of the lives of today’s rural queer youth. Mary L. Gray maps out the experiences of young people living in small towns across rural Kentucky and along its desolate Appalachian borders, providing a fascinating and often surprising look at the contours of gay life beyond the big city. Gray illustrates that, against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America, LGBT youth and their allies visibly and often vibrantly work the boundaries of the public spaces available to them, whether in their high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, or through websites. [This book] shows that, in addition to the spaces of Main Street, rural LGBT youth explore and carve out online spaces to fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term ‘queer visibility’ and its political stakes. Gray combines ethnographic insight with…cultural critique, engaging with some of the biggest issues facing both queer studies and media scholarship. Out in the Country is a timely and groundbreaking study of sexuality and gender, new media, youth culture, and the meaning of identity and social movements in a digital age –Publisher description.
Subjects:
Requested by Kurpiers, R.