Abstract
From hovel families to lumberjacks to sexual psychopaths, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity, by Ryan Lee Cartwright, is a tour de force of the history of white rural nonconformity in the twentieth-century United States. Cartwright maps how sensationalized accounts of white rural nonconformities—from disabled bodies to inbreeding to sexual perversion—circulated and proliferated nationally. This well-written book connects these sensationalized accounts to ideas about whiteness, rural life, sexuality, disability, poverty, and social policies. These sensationalized accounts constituted the rural white anti-idyll, a “cultural trope and social optic that produces tales of white rural nonconformity” (p. 3). The narratives are part of “the estranged ways of looking that produce cultural narratives naming poor rural white communities as sites of perverse sexuality, deformed bodies, deranged minds—narratives that simultaneously, if paradoxically, appeal to white racial superiority and violent settler masculinity” (p. 3). These anti-idyll narratives appear in documentary photography and movies, in addition to horror movies like Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Deliverance, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The queercrip theoretical approach in this book analyzes the rich intersectionality of disability and sexuality with a distinct sense of place. Queercrip theory builds on both disability justice and queer theory. Anti-idyll narratives operate not just to frame the rural as the “other” but also to shore up both heteronormativity and ablenormativity, according to the arguments in this book. For example, Cartwright analyzes the ways that eugenics concepts like “feeblemindedness” and “morons” categorized both perceived intellectual disabilities and issues with moral conduct such as sexual perversion and failures of domesticity. What eugenicists termed “failures of domesticity” included figures like hobos, “loose women,” long-time bachelors in professions like being a lumberjack, and people who engaged in interracial relationships. Being labeled “unfit” for reproduction was applied to rural white people with disabilities but also to bachelor men and women and other “queer figures.” Particularly remarkable are the ways that small-town gossip about queer figures becomes transformed into a scientific pathology of idleness and feeblemindedness.
The sense of place in Cartwright's work is the rural more generally but also the distinct features of certain rural areas within the United States. The rural is not a monolith, and anti-idyll narratives have different flavors depending on the location. Peculiar Places documents how Appalachian white rural nonconformity was part of culture of poverty narratives during the War on Poverty and how the making of Deliverance in Appalachia featured rural queercrip figures who lived there, not actors. The “great dead heart” of Wisconsin, an impenetrable wild rural area in the heart of the state, was a site of tales of Ed Gein's mad man antics of sexual mutilation and gender transgression. Brandon Teena's murder in Nebraska and “hovel families” in New England are all featured in this monograph. The distinctness of each of these rural areas does not get lost in the overall analysis of white rural nonconformity.
Cartwright also avoids portrayals of rural life as backwards and white rural people as hopelessly downtrodden. Rather than framing white rural poor people as subjects of national conversations, they are also agents of their own lives. This book documents how white rural people craft or oppose these anti-idyll narratives, along with using racial hierarchies and settler colonial claims to the land to advance their own lives. Cartwright's analysis of a lumberjack retirement home in the North Woods of Northern Minnesota is remarkable. The author analyzes queercrip domesticity between the white senior men that is visible in documentary photography. The photographs show the extreme care the senior men have for each other, as they assist one another in dressing, eating, and other everyday domestic tasks. However, Cartwright is also attentive to the ways that the lumberjack retirement home has been part of settler colonial appropriation of land in this midwestern state.
This work is a strong contribution to the study of aberrant whiteness, the ways that sexual psychopathology and inbreeding are marked as white. Cartwright's chapter on eugenic family studies not only charts the fascination with the “hovel family” but also catalogues how the internal boundaries of whiteness were regulated with eugenic family studies of white rurality. This work understates its contribution to the study of whiteness, and the author could have developed this contribution more directly. The intersection of whiteness, ablenormativity, and heteronormativity is a rich site for understanding the reproduction of social inequality and racial hierarchies.
In this monograph, Cartwright weaves together the particulars of rural places, the lives of individuals, anti-idyll tropes, and the ways these tropes are taken up in social policy and mass media. Each chapter shows a distinct set of anti-idyll tropes that are familiar and yet under-analyzed to date. The book is an important contribution to understanding the ways that white rural bodies and living conditions are used to police the boundaries of whiteness and normality. Peculiar Places is a major theoretical contribution to queercrip theory along with being a readable text for undergraduates and a general audience. Cartwright writes in a way that builds theory but also remains accessible, fitting for a text so aligned with disability justice.