"The Ingenuity of Living": On Seeing and Being Seen in the Queer, Crip, Rural, Midwest

Carly Thomsen | Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming | University of Minnesota | 2021 | 264 Pages |||

Ryan Lee Cartwright | Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity | University of Chicago Press | 2020 | 272 Pages

Image by Angelo Maneage

I spent the early years of my life in a rural part of northern Ohio with my underemployed mom, a severely disabled father, and a closeted gay racecar driver friend of my mom’s. The three of us in our small, unkempt house with an overgrown lawn, exuded what Ryan Lee Cartwright describes as “rural white people who contradict the promises of rural whiteness.” He explains that white supremacist and colonial imaginaries of “the country” are sullied by poor whites who “have not ‘achieved’ a normative nuclear family, and do not have ‘productive,’ unremarkable bodyminds.” In other words, queer and disabled rural life are simultaneously invisible in archetypal images of the rustic countryside and hypervisible when these ways of being threaten the purity of the idyllic frontier we call ‘rural.’  

Cartwright and Carly Thomsen are two academics grappling with how we make sense of—specifically, how we see—queer life in rural settings. In Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming, Thomsen provides a new framework of visibility politics through an ethnographic study of LGBTQ women in the rural upper Midwest. She challenges both mainstream LGBTQ groups (such as the Human Rights Campaign) as well as more radical queer groups and movements (such as Queer Bombers) for their treatment of visibility as inherently positive, with evidence from her interviews that queer women in the rural Midwest have a dramatically different relationship to being seen. Similarly, Cartwright’s Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity turns its focus on the complexity of queerness and disability in and about the rural United States. Using critical disability studies, crip theory, critical race theory, and other critical lenses, Cartwright analyzes archives of “eugenic family studies,” photography, film, and “poverty tours” to illuminate the “anti-idyll,” which he explains as “the long-standing cultural trope and societal optic that produces tales of white rural nonconformity.” 

Both books begin with the suggestion that there is no monolithic way to understand “queer rural life” because there is no monolithic version of queer rural people. In fact, many of them would not identify as “queer” at all. Instead, both Cartwright and Thomsen quote the same passage from critical sociologist Avery Gordon on the contradictory existences of marginalized people: “Even those who live in the most dire circumstances possess a complex and oftentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity,” Gordon explains. Thus, the rural queers in Cartwright’s and Thomsen’s books are, as they assert through Gordon’s framework, neither “static [...] victims nor superhuman agents.” (Incidentally, I quote that same line from Gordon in my memoir about my aforementioned family unit.) Instead, these imperfect existences make for what Cartwright describes as “bad subjects”—people who identify as LGBTQ, disabled, or both who “may reject disability politics, desiring a cure or an end to pain. [Or who…] refuse to identify as transgender. [Or who] have an addiction, or a disability caused by an accident or act of violence for which they are culpable.” Similarly, Thomsen’s interlocutors sometimes have inconvenient views on politics, perpetuate problematic “post-racial” views, and may contradict themselves in one response to another; but rather than critiquing their responses, Thomsen offers us a way to understand these hard-to-categorize ideologies as a tool of eluding visibility—because visibility doesn’t actually work for these rural women.

Importantly, both authors address the ways in which the rural becomes a site of perpetuating white supremacy and how rural queers (of any race) may be disciplined and further marginalized by those same norms. Cartwright, for example, explains how poor, disabled whites were and are complicit in settler colonialism and yet threatening to the purity of “the country” that settler colonial practices produced. Thomsen also connects the analytic of race to space and disability, explaining that when mainstream LGBTQ and disability rights movements call for being “out and proud,” they actually “compel the erasure of material bodies, and in the process render certain (spatialized and racialized) experience obsolete.” 

Additionally, both books reveal how nonconformity in rural areas makes way for a kind of survival work that operates separately from and sometimes against the state. Cartwright describes this as “the ingenuity of living” that makes the unlivable life more livable through “mutual support, nonnormative kinship arrangements, and part-time work in the informal economy.” Citing Foucault and Wendy Brown, Thomsen notes that “visibility creates the possibility of additional [state] surveillance” and shares numerous accounts of interviewees who explicitly turn away from electoral politics in general, but especially in relation to their sexuality. For example, one interviewee named Casey says that politicizing her lesbianism “doesn’t really make a difference.” She and her partner, “will be fine no matter what the law is.” This was one of many examples from Thomsen’s interviews that reveal a distrust or disinterest in formal political approaches to validating identity—whether through mainstream LGBTQ non-profit methods or radical queer alternatives. 

The books diverge methodologically, and thus different conclusions are drawn—Thomsen relies on ethnographic interviews to illustrate her argument about (in)visibility and (un)becoming, whereas Cartwright uses archives and recent media to complicate the ramifications of the “anti-idyll.” Thomsen’s writing and approach may appeal more to social scientific scholars, and Cartwright’s more narrative, theoretical writing may appeal more to critical humanities scholars. But both offer generative contributions, more broadly, to the field of queer studies through a nuanced and complicated view of the rural, and both offer a necessary intersectional queer lens to rural studies. 

Ultimately, both books ask the reader to interrogate not just ways of looking but also the implications of being seen. This site of inquiry can apply to many groups, but the focus on rural queers helps illuminate the unique vantage of marginalization that operates on discursive, material, and spatial axes. Perhaps ironically, Cartwright’s and Thomsen’s critiques of representational politics and visibility left me feeling very witnessed. Not because they provided a mirror narrative of my experience as a poor and rural-raised queer, but because they provided an analysis of the failure of the narratives that were supposed to represent me. By naming the problems of visibility politics and anti-idyll narratives, the authors create space for the possibility of messy lives and incoherent ideologies—not in a way that romanticizes any of the forms of oppression their subjects were riddled with, but because their messy lives and incoherent ideologies resist categorization, and survive anyway.