Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity

The queer recluse, the shambling farmer, the clannish hill folk--white rural populations have long disturbed the American imagination, alternately revered as moral, healthy, and hardworking, and feared as antisocial or socially uncouth. In Peculiar Places, Ryan Lee Cartwright examines the deep archive of these contrary formations, mapping racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural twentieth-century United States.

Sensationalized accounts of white rural communities' aberrant sexualities, racial intermingling, gender transgressions, and anomalous bodies and minds, which proliferated from the turn of the century, created a national view of the perversity of white rural poverty for the American public. Cartwright contends that these accounts, extracted and estranged from their own ambivalent forum of community gossip, must be read in kind: through a racialized, materialist queercrip optic of the deeply familiar and mundane. Taking in popular science, documentary photography, news media, documentaries, and horror films, Peculiar Places orients itself at the intersections of disability studies, queer studies, and gender studies to illuminate a racialized landscape both profoundly ordinary and familiar.


Author: Ryan Lee Cartwright
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 09/03/2021
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.57d
ISBN13: 9780226696881
ISBN10: 022669688X
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States | 20th Century
- Social Science | People with Disabilities
- Social Science | Sociology | Rural

About the Author
Ryan Lee Cartwright is assistant professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis.