Peculiar Places: A Queer/Crip History of Rural White Nonconformity

Ryan Lee Cartwright
American Studies
UC Davis

Peculiar Places analyzes a deep cultural archive of rural gender nonconformity, sexual difference, and disability in the United States. The book project argues that over the course of the twentieth century, rural gossip about queer and peculiar white folks was transformed into a popular discourse of white social degeneracy: the anti-idyll. The anti-idyll is a cultural formation that identifies poor rural white communities as sites of perverse sexuality, deformed bodies, and deranged minds. Appearing in forms ranging from fiction and film to science and photography, the twentieth-century anti-idyll represented rural white social difference to a national public that found rural epistemologies of difference to be unintelligible. By examining the anti-idyll, Peculiar Places denaturalizes the norms of white rustic virtue and good health that are used to discipline rural and urban deviants alike, while analyzing the rural intersections of sexuality, disability, class, and race.