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Uncovering the history of gender and sexual nonconformity in rural America during the first half of the twentieth century
Just Queer Folks
Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
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Colin R. Johnson
"Just Queer Folks is a superb work of scholarship—an extraordinary achievement. An exciting, path-breaking book on the history of gender and sexuality in the United States, it opens new analytical ground in spaces often overlooked, during a period previously understudied. Colin Johnson mines a broad range of primary documents to interrogate the invention of sexuality in nonmetropolitan America over the first half of the twentieth century. His prose is elegant, lively, and engaging; the scholarship is rigorous; and the theoretical interventions are important. This book will be discussed and consulted for years to come."
—John Howard, Professor of American Studies at King's College London and author of Men like That: A Southern Queer History
Most studies of lesbian and gay history focus on urban environments. Yet gender and sexual diversity were anything but rare in nonmetropolitan areas in the first half of the twentieth century. Just Queer Folks explores the seldom-discussed history of same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in rural and small-town America during a period when the now familiar concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were just beginning to take shape.
Eschewing the notion that identity is always the best measure of what can be known about gender and sexuality, Colin R. Johnson argues instead for a queer historicist approach. In so doing, he uncovers a startlingly unruly rural past in which small-town eccentrics, "mannish" farm women, and cross-dressing Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees were often just queer folks so far as their neighbors were concerned. Written with wit and verve, Just Queer Folks upsets a whole host of contemporary commonplaces, including the notion that queer history is always urban history.
Excerpt
Read an excerpt from the Introduction (pdf).
Reviews
"Johnson follows the back roads of twentieth-century U.S. history, tracing same-sex desires and relations as they flourished in small towns, on homesteads, on farms, in work camps, and everywhere in between. Challenging the centrality of urbanization in narratives of queer identity formation, Just Queer Folks demonstrates the variety and range of sexual and gender expression in rural and small-town America. At a moment when the contours of gay and lesbian life are rapidly shifting, Johnson offers an original and fascinating account of the rural roots of contemporary queerness."
—Heather Love, R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
"Johnson posits that hetero-normalization was an early-20th-century phenomenon rooted in the discredited eugenics movement of its time and was a middle-class morality handed down from urban elites.... [He] doggedly decodes contrasting versions of 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' that hint at gay sex, and pores over pages of the journal of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and 1940s to breathlessly report that gay people did, in fact, exist in rural areas."
—Publishers Weekly
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Section I
1. Life Science: The Agrarian Origins of American Sexuality
2. Town and Country: Country Life and the Nationalization of Middle-Class Morality
Section II
3. Casual Sex: Homosociality, Homosexuality, and the Itinerant Working Poor
4. Community Standards: Village Mentality and the Queer Eccentric
5. Camp Life: The Queer History of “Manhood” in the Civilian Conservation Corps
6. Hard Women: Rural Women and Female Masculinity
Conclusion: Mansfield, Ohio
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author(s)
Colin R. Johnson is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies, History, and Human Biology at Indiana University Bloomington.
Subject Categories
Gender Studies
Sexuality Studies/Sexual Identity
History
In the series
Sexuality Studies, edited by Janice Irvine and Regina Kunzel.
Sexuality Studies Series, edited by Janice M. Irvine and Regina G. Kunzel, features work in the field of sexuality studies in its social, cultural, and political dimensions, and in both historical and contemporary formations. The editors seek proposals that bridge theoretical and empirical methodologies, and that are located within both disciplinary and interdisciplinary frames.