In one of the first collections of scholarship at the intersection of LGBTQ studies and Appalachian studies, voices from the region;s valleys, hollers, mountains, and campuses blend personal stories with scholarly and creative examinations of living and surviving as queers in Appalachia. The essayists collected are academics, social workers, riot grrrl activists, teachers, students, practitioners, scholars of divinity, and boundary-crossers, all imagining how to make legible the unspeakable other of Appalachian queerness. Focusing especially on disciplinary approaches from rhetoric and composition, the volume explores sexual identities in rural places, community and individual meaning-making among the Appalachian diaspora, the storytelling infrastructure of queer Appalachia, and the role of the metronormative in discourses of difference. Storytelling in Queer Appalachia affirms queer people, fights for visibility over erasure, seeks intersectional understanding, and imagines radically embodied queer selves through social media.
Hillery Glasby is an assistant professor in the writing, rhetoric, and American cultures department and a faculty fellow for the Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan State University. Sherrie Gradin is a professor of English at Ohio University. Rachael Ryerson is the director of composition and a lecturer at Ohio University.
Introduction Part I: The Heart Over the Head: Queer-affirming Epistles and Queer-phobic Challenges A Letter to Appalachia Challenging Dominant Christianity's Queerphobic Rhetoric Part II: Queer Diaspora: Existence and Erasure in Appalachia A Drowning in the Foothills A Pedagogy of the Flesh: Deconstructing the "Quare" Appalachian Archetype Pickin' and Grinnin': Quare Hillbillies, Counter Rhetorics, and the Recovery of Home Part III: Both/And: Intersectional Understandings of Appalachian Queers The Crik Is Crooked: Appalachia as Moveable Queer Space "Are Y'all Homo?": Me?tis as Method for Queer Appalachia Queering Trauma and Resilience, Appalachian Style! Part IV: Queer Media: Radical Acts of Embodiment and Resistance Working against the Past: Queering the Appalachian Narrative Writing the Self: Trans Zine Making in Appalachia Queer Appalachia: A Homespun Praxis of Restorative Justice and Rural Resistance in Appala-chian Media List of Contributors Index
"Storytelling in Queer Appalachia offers us a beautifully disruptive way to rethink our understandings of a singular Appalachia--as a place, as a people, as an ideology. These insightful chapters approach queerness-in-place through a host of engaging lenses and frameworks." --William P. Banks, coeditor of Approaches to Teaching LGBT Literature
