A good ol’ country time: Does queer rural temporality exist?

Abstract

Some queer theorists have developed a theory of ‘queer time’, while others question the metronormativity of queer studies. However, we do not yet have an account of rural queer temporality. Drawing from a wide survey of works on queer time, this article sets out to imagine what such a theory might entail and how it might demand changes of queer theory. Considerations of rural queerness have tended to be representative or ethnographic in nature. This article takes a different tack: it lays the groundwork for a ruralizing reorganization of time and queer affect. To do so, it challenges the temporal modes that often underlie the ostensibly neutral preference for cities. It imagines a queer thing indeed: rural modes influencing queer city life.

Keywords

Queer rural space Scott Herring temporality urban

‘There’s just such a nice slow pace of life!’ So say many queer urbanites when I mention my maritime Canadian upbringing. This response is a backhanded compliment that not only relies on an erroneously homogenized figure of ‘the country’ – a figure that yokes together western hamlets and eastern outposts and seaside sticks – but also imbues rural space with an essential and presumably ‘simple’ temporality. (Do urban queers who compliment the country in such a way ever consider that their experiences of rural slowness may be attributed to the fact that they are on vacation?) Such judgements about the speeds of spaces do not hold up when one inches across town in Manhattan traffic, or when one’s whole village knows the latest gossip within 30 minutes. There are many divergent ways to gauge speed. Even if I suspend the truculence with which I am wont to receive this weak compliment of ‘slowness’, a question remains: is faster better? Is ‘cutting edge’ necessarily synonymous with generative queer life?

In even this opening compliment, it is clear that ‘city’ and ‘country’ are fixed in temporal narratives that anchor urban and rural dwellers respectively to fast and new or to slow and old.¹ This article asserts that in order to blast these spatial categories out of these linear narratives of time and speed, it is necessary to query the seemingly innocent imperative to always conceive of the queer subject as moving forward. To queer time, it is crucial to ruralize – even ‘slow’ down – queer theory. Thankfully, queer theorists have started to do this by addressing the implicit (and sometimes all too explicit) metro-normativity of queer theory and queer culture.² Queer rural theory – if such a term can be coined – necessarily faces a temporal struggle: the seemingly contradictory imperatives to both frame the time for rural studies as now and also to refuse the very notion of progressive history – the dissimulating valorization of now – that helps to tightly bind cities, modernity, and cultural value together. This is a conundrum of ‘queer time’, yet queer rural theory is not yet fulsomely connected to that ubiquitous phrase. This article bridges these subfields by developing a theory of rural queer temporality.

The following may serve as a provisional definition. Rural queer temporality fights against three tightly intertwined modes of upward mobility: rural to urban, working class to (upper) middle class, and immaturity to adulthood. Against these mutually implicated narratives of ‘progress’, rural temporality revels in a series of continuous, simultaneous events that cannot be – or simply are not – absorbed into urban meta-narratives about the history of transgender or queerness. A queer rural temporality can call into question the very logic of the arrival of, and the valorization of, any simple rendering of what is the ‘the latest’ and most worthwhile. Rural attachments to the past – attachments both fantasized and experienced – can be reread into Elizabeth Freeman’s conception of the role of queer time: to ‘break open the past, slicing it into asynchronous, discontinuous pieces of time’ (2010: xii), to ‘generate … a discontinuous history of its own’ (2010: xi), and to blast apart ‘historical narrative … [that] organizes various temporal schemae into consequential sequence’ (2010: xi). Rural temporality is not anchored in ‘the country’ any more than urban styles and aesthetics are rooted to their place of origin or imagination. Influence between rural and urban modes must surely run both ways – as do our highways.

This article draws from a primarily but not exclusively American archive of thinkers and writers, such as Judith Halberstam,³ Scott Herring, Gayle Rubin, Kenyon Farrow, and Elizabeth Freeman (with supporting roles played by Kath Weston, Walter Benjamin, Karen Tongson, Heather Love, Carla Freccero, and more). This choice is a strategic one: in theory, history, and literature, New York City has long stood tall as the seat of modern queerness (and, with London, aesthetic modernism), while American queer theory has long instituted itself as globally relevant. This is neither to agree nor disagree with that relevance, but it is to say that creating a new conception of rural queer temporality from American sources is key, if one wants to address uniquely American-derived urban superiority. Luckily, there can be at least as many rural queer temporalities as there are towns that don’t make the map. While future work derived from other archives will undoubtedly provide different – and vital – answers to the questions asked here, this strategic focus also accomplishes the important task of refusing to let urban champions be the main speakers for this space (though, as a Canadian, my use of the word ‘this’ is loose; I write as a white transgender maritimer who lives close enough to the United States to feel its effects in many ways, as do many).

First, as a response to Judith Halberstam’s work on Brandon Teena, I will suggest that turning ‘queer time’ into ‘ruralizing time’ will entail a correlative shift in the concept of agency. Second, following Herring, ruralizing time will be defined as involutionary, ‘backwards’, and recursive rather than progressive, linear, and modernizing. Third, building on Herring’s rejection of urban ‘fashionability’, I turn to the question of the social class mobility often implied in urban migration and the aesthetics that memorialize it. Rubin and Farrow are important in this regard, as they underline the problematic (if not downright ‘backwards’) situations of race and class created by gay urban migration. Finally, I depart from Herring’s rejection of urban fashionability by recuperating fashion – that seen as transient, luxurious, and merely decorative – as a model for queer rural temporality (of the body and of space) that can indeed operate beyond the ‘closed time of capitalism’ into the ‘excessive time of revolution’ (Khatib, 2010).⁴

Backroad one: Halberstam’s Brandon

In her widely influential text, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Halberstam (2005) shows that the parallel binaries of rural/urban, rustic/modern, and normative/queer are indeed grouped in some representations of trans life – a grouping that cautions trans people not to live in places that are (thought to be) out of step with modern times. As is well known by now, Halberstam’s definition of normative time consists of three related modes: ‘the time of reproduction’ – wherein biological clocks and family scheduling reign – ‘family time’ – the ‘early to bed, early to rise’ habits of daily life – and ‘the time of inheritance’ – the overarching transfer of wealth and morals through one family generation to the next (2005: 5). Although the book as a whole shows alternatives to such organizations of life, the work on rurality occupies a fraught position within it. In two rather gloomy chapters (especially set against the fun tone of Halberstam’s Austin Powers chapter, for example), she considers the implicitly metronormative bent of the discourse surrounding Brandon Teena’s 1993 Nebraska murder. Halberstam implies that the Hollywood blockbuster of Brandon’s tale, Boys Don’t Cry, represents Brandon’s rural life as one that employs a non-modern temporality. That is, while ‘Brandon accedes to a modern form of homosexuality’ when his partner recognizes him as ‘really female’, his ‘death at the hands of local men can be read simultaneously as a true tragedy and an indictment of backward, rural communities’ (Halberstam, 2005: 25). The film’s hermeneutic of queer time therefore casts rurality as backwards and urbanity as modern. This juxtaposition, Halberstam suggests, figures Nebraska as an immature, stunted, and wild place where transgender is only a symptom of internalized homophobia, while the urban sphere is implicitly figured as a mature, adult, and enlightened model of homosexuality. By identifying Brandon’s body as one represented as temporally out of step with history, Halberstam’s critique all but implies that rurality is an exemplary case of her version of queer time. Indeed, as she describes it, queer time derives from ‘specific modes of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’ (2005: 6). Here the paradox emerges: although Halberstam associates queer time specifically with postmodernism, her fleeting reading of Brandon as ‘inhabit[ing] a different timescale than the modern queer’ (2005: 25) suggests that queer time might not be limited to the postmodern aesthetics usually associated with urban architecture, urban trans and queer communities, urban literature, and the parody and pastiche made possible in urban performance scenes and drag bars. Perhaps, then, living in ‘backward, rural communities’ is already to live out a different – relevant – temporality than those made possible by post/modern urban queerness.

However, urban dwellers might ask, what is radical about living ‘out of time’ in a place where one is simply stuck, through (the presumed and sometimes actual) conditions of poverty, immobility, or lack of will or other resources? The very notion of ruralizing temporality demands that this valorization of agency with regards to queer temporality is thrown into suspension. The importance of doing so becomes clear via another oft-cited figure that Halberstam champions in her text: ‘the notion of a stretched-out adolescence’ (2005: 153). While for Halberstam, there is cause to celebrate such extensions of adolescence, the case of Brandon (forever halted and memorialized in adolescence) immediately brings to mind the dangers and violences risked by actually doing so without the comfort and safety of a safe, mature, ‘adult’ – which is not to say ‘urban’ – community of affinity. Indeed, danger was real for Brandon, as it is for many urbanites. This difference (between positive and playful urban ‘adolescence’ and inhabiting ‘adolescent’ rural spaces) is the gap in Halberstam’s work from which this article emerges; it is a gap out of which ‘queer time’ may be extended beyond implicitly (and explicitly) urban models of community. As Halberstam suggests via her brief example of Mark Doty’s AIDS-focused poetry, queer temporality has no certain relationship to agency. That is, ‘[W]hen one leaves [normative] temporal frames’ (2005: 6), it is only sometimes of one’s choosing and certainly never resides totally under one’s own design. Queer subjects are – with great variation – pulled into queer time, pursuant of it, made to deal with it, happy to struggle to form a life within it, and sometimes die of our ambiguous imbrication in it. The concept of rural temporality is a fine reminder of this affective and agential ambiguity. The extended adolescence attributed to rural spheres is – unlike that attributed by Halberstam to urban queer and punk subcultures – one that, sometimes painfully, seems to precede one’s will. Is this merely to suggest that rural dwellers are ‘stuck’ in adolescence? On the contrary, the following sections aim to recuperate this seeming loss of agency into a productive rupture into urban queer agency and histories, both of which also occupy ambiguous and compromised relationships to agency and will.

Backroad two: Herring’s backwards movement

In the preceding section, I have suggested that in her attempt to account for her implicitly urban focus, Halberstam actually configures rural queerness as an icon of queer temporality – an equation that draws out an ambiguity with regards to agency and choice. While above the extended adolescence of rurality was configured as doubled-edged – both painful and radical – in Scott Herring we find an author who, in revelling on the radical side of rurality, illustrates the power of queer rural appropriations of authority. Herring admits that anti-urbanism hasn’t always had a radical bent; he reminds readers that ‘in the eighteenth century it connoted a Jeffersonian ideal of non-urban agrarianism’ (Herring, 2010: 11), which in turn aligned with nostalgic, conservative moralities. Nonetheless, he suggests that current queer anti-urbanism offers an alternative to some of the trappings of urban queer subjectivity. Herring’s formulation focuses on what rurality can do rather than on what happens to queer people in rural locales, a revolutionary perspective at a time when the stories of Matthew Shepherd and Brandon Teena are still the most common ones told about rural transgender or queerness. His definition of rural is also quite different. For instance, he acknowledges that any tenuous divide between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ consists of ‘language game[s]’ and leads to a ‘definitional roundabout’ (2010: 8). After all, does ‘rural’ describe small municipalities of 200 and under, 20 000 and under, or cities with a population of almost 1 million people but a low population density?⁵

Although Herring follows Halberstam’s point that queer, urban, and modern have been braided together to great effect, Herring pressures Halberstam’s work in several ways. Namely, he looks to affirmative rural styles, focuses on rural aesthetic production (rather than on rural tragedies and urban aesthetic styles), and writes with attitude from the South. One of the main interventions Herring makes is explicitly temporal; he reclaims the ‘backwardness’ stereotypically attributed to rural spheres. Making use of Kath Weston’s work, Herring argues that ‘Southern backwardness’ is often associated with temporal ‘backwardness’, most prominently expressed in the caricature of the US South as a frozen region outdated by supposedly more progressive spaces across the nation (2010: 114). The backwardness that is attributed to the southern USA is a key ‘temporal norm’ that ‘structure[s] queer metronormativity’ (2010: 114), inasmuch as calling one sphere ‘backwards’ implies the forward movement of one’s own (urban) sphere. Or as Weston puts it in a seemingly simple (and still relevant) claim: there is ‘a broader cultural tendency to map time onto space by characterizing inland locations as ‘ten years behind’ cities on the coasts’ (quoted. in Herring, 2010: 114).

Herring, however, seeks to reclaim the quality of backwardness as a radical rural mode. He mounts this reclamation of backwardness through a close reading of Michael Meads’ art project Alabama Souvenirs, which he reads for its critical use of backwardness as an aesthetic. In Herring’s view, Meads’ photographic aesthetic reactivates the anti-urban critical potential of the ‘backwards’ stereotype by restaging scenes from classical art in rural locales and with bodies marked as rural. The project consists of choreographed ‘portraits’ of Alabama men, each of which cites classical conventions of, for instance, Pater and Caravaggio. The most obvious example is Aaron: as a Caravaggio VI (1994), in which a young man strikes a pose quite similar to Caravaggio’s iconic Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604–1605), save for Aaron’s substitution of a beer can, white briefs, toolkit, and garage for Saint John’s staff, robes, and wilderness. The citationality of this work comprises what Herring calls ‘anachronistic stylistics’ (2010: 103), or, in other words, a kind of aesthetic backwardness or anti-modernity.⁶ For Herring, the strength of this out-of-time aesthetic citation is not only to revel in the backwardness to which rural queers are already relegated, but moreover, to develop a queer aesthetic that resists assimilation into urban hermeneutics and that bars urban viewers from recognizing themselves in the images (Herring, 2010: 103). As Herring sees it, Meads’ rural restaging of Caravaggio is a way of rejecting the ease with which contemporary urban gay white male communities tend to ‘cross-identify with’ or absorb rural and pastoral imagery of the past as their ‘lascivious ancestors’ (2010: 115). In other words, for Herring, rural style that claims temporal backwardness is able to escape urban capture; such works are not easily appropriated and plotted at an early and long-gone point of queer history. They remain, Herring suggests, inassimilable images or events.

Why does Herring develop such a temporally focused aesthetic strategy of rural backwardness? As he shows very clearly, urban superiority depends upon the figuration of urban queerness as, precisely, the newest. One of Herring’s examples of this temporal superiority complex is Edmund White’s memoir-travelogue, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (2014 [1980]). In the following passage, readers witness once again the equation of urban queerness with a temporal mode of living that is, quite simply, faster.

New York gays are justifiably proud of their status as tastemakers for the rest of the country … Our clothes and haircuts and records and dance steps and décor – our restlessly evolving style – soon enough to become theirs … [W]e get to participate in whatever is the latest. We are never left out of anything; we know what’s happening. (White: 259–260, quoted in Herring, 2010: 18)

Taking Halberstam and White together, an ironic formulation of the relationship between urban and rural locales emerges here: when it comes to fashion and queer culture, rural locales can only be derivative. (White writes of ‘our restlessly evolving style – soon enough to become theirs’ (Herring, 2010: 18).) But, when it comes to matters of hate and conservatism, rural locales are suddenly independent, capable of producing their own attitudes, and have certainly not learned such hatred from city-based institutions and cultures. Together Halberstam and White complete this cycle: the former asserts that it is important to acknowledge that many forms of fear, racism, and paranoia ‘take shape’ (Halberstam, 2005: 29) in rural locales, while for the latter whatever queerness that appears in the country takes shape elsewhere. At first, Herring responds to White’s placement of New York queers at the cutting-edge of time with two succinct questions: ‘Really? How come?’ (Herring, 2010: 18). This is a feisty response that makes a point worth considering: What kind of evidence must one have in order to self-proclaim the superiority of one’s lifestyle in the manner White does? In Herring’s view, White’s urban authority is claimed via his judgements about temporality: urbanites are ‘up-to-date’, ‘the latest’, and their style will ‘soon enough’ appear in the country. Not only does such judgement depend upon (the elision of) racial and socioeconomic factors, but as Herring points out, it relies on certain ‘aesthetic norms’ (Herring, 2010: 18) as well. As Herring writes:

In just a few sentences White manages to encapsulate these stylistics not only for ‘proud New York gays’ and their enclaves but – in what we’ll come to see as an all-too-familiar elision – for the rest of the country as well. Think of it as circum-Manhattan performance where the remainder of the United States becomes Greater New York City. (2010: 18)

Herring’s point is deceptively simple: the judgement and elision of rural queerness is not even accomplished through a blatant anti-ruralism per se, but is, rather, displaced onto or transformed into seemingly innocent discourses of style, fashion, and time. Herring insists that aesthetic preferences and norms disguise suspicious judgements about the temporality of rural life. This leads him to – rather than try to ‘fit’ rural queers into urban aesthetic norms – develop his own model of ‘rural stylistics’ (2010: 22) that aims to introduce rural disruptions to urban queer temporality. While values such as ‘cosmopolitanism, sophistication, knowingness, refinement, wordliness [sic], and trendy fashion’ are considered the hallmarks of modern metropolitan queerness, Herring

turn[s] the tables to chart how stereotypically ruralizing stylistics of rusticity, stylelessness, unfashionability, anti-urbanity, backward-ness, anti-sophistication, and crudity try to undercut the metronormative demands made on modern queer life. (Herring, 2010: 22)

Instead of taking issue with how rural queers are interpreted as lying outside of these progressive values, he takes issue with the temporality of these values themselves.⁷ This is a crucial reminder of the ways in which aesthetic judgement can stand in for problematic dismissals of other places and styles of life. However, in so responding to White’s valorization of (his own) urban self-fashioning, Herring dismisses ‘fashion’ out of hand. In Herring’s account, fashion is associated with a great degree of leisure and wealth – and certainly, Edmund White’s description of clothes, haircuts, records, dance steps, and décor give him many reasons to do so. Next, I review texts that, taken together, show that Herring is right to take umbrage with the implicit class mobility implied by urban migration and development. After this attempt to historicize Herring’s ethic of ‘unfashionability’, I will show that ruralizing temporality must (via a departure from Herring) be redefined as itself a kind of crucial refashioning of time in its own right.

Backroad three: Revisiting Rubin

In recent years, activists in New York and San Francisco (and surely many less publicized queer towns!) have taken up the intersecting issues of queer class politics and urbanism with vigour. Kenyon Farrow, former Executive Director of the NYC group Queers For Economic Justice, for instance, regularly writes about (often gay-led or gay-supported) campaigns for the increased social policing of public space, particularly of gentrifying spaces that were formerly home to less affluent queer communities of colour. As he suggests, after decades of aggressive re-zoning and gentrification in Manhattan, ‘queer people of color throughout New York city share [a] landless status’, becoming ‘refugees … in a city where cultures are defined as much by the place they claim as the identities they represent’ (Farrow, 2010). One of the main objectives of groups such as Queers for Economic Justice is to resist the assimilative pull of the increasingly middle- and upper-class mainly white gay community – or, more specifically, to help reverse or challenge the classist violence that this community sometimes visits upon working-class queers through both campaigns against street-involvement in their neighbourhoods and through their prioritization of political goals that invest in state control (such as marriage laws and military inclusion). The heart of the article is Farrow’s description of a cultural moment that illustrates just such a conflict between different socioeconomic elements of gays and queers. In his telling, formerly queer spaces of Manhattan ‘quickly became extremely hostile to black and Latino queer youth’ as the areas gentrified.

[While] by the 1980s, the strip of Christopher Street west of Seventh Avenue and down to the piers was the main social space for the black and Latino queer community … a campaign spearheaded by ‘block associations’ (most notably Residents In Distress, or RID, an acronym that many of the youth took as an allusion to a brand of lice remover), prompted heightened policing of the area. (Farrow, 2010)

Anecdotal evidence of class and race conflict amongst very different gay, queer, or trans factions is plentiful in an age of upwardly mobile bourgeois homosexuality. In her widely read essay ‘Thinking Sex’ (1993 [1984]), Gayle Rubin predicted some aspects of this kind of urban-queer conflict. Rubin historicizes the urban aura of queerness by attending to the labour conditions that made what Kath Weston calls ‘the great gay migration’ (1995) to cities possible in the first instance. As Rubin puts it, ‘the relocation of homoeroticism into these quasi-ethnic, nucleated, sexually constituted communities is to some extent a consequence of the transfers of population brought about by industrialization’ (1993 [1984]: 17). One of these transformations had to do specifically with the migration of labourers: ‘as laborers migrated to work in cities, there were increased opportunities for voluntary communities to form’ (1993 [1984]: 17). Quite against the image of decadent faggots of leisure that some histories (even White’s) might ask us to picture, Rubin points out that the great gay migration was very much about labour and working-class people. Most importantly for my purposes here, Rubin also predicts that class-based problems will accompany queer people living in cities; not only does she suggest that ‘the relative prosperity and cultural florescence of the gay ghetto may be equally fragile [as Depression-era post-Renaissance Harlem]’ (1993 [1984]: 24), but she also predicts that gays who would move into ‘central but rundown’ neighbourhoods and dominate the affordable-housing market would create conflict with the poor communities of colour who would be pushed to the borders of the area. As Farrow and others suggest, queer communities, impoverished communities, and communities of people of colour cannot be so strictly delineated from each other, either by identity or by neighbourhood. Rubin’s point, however, stands: gay urban migration is infused through and through with socioeconomic impetuses and outcomes – often tense ones.⁸ It is very selective, then, to think exclusively or especially of rural spheres when trying to sort out the relationship of racism to space.

Despite Rubin’s accurate prediction of urban/sexual/racial/classist conflict, Halberstam reads Rubin’s essay through a pro-urban lens. As she states:

Most theories of homosexuality within the twentieth century assume that gay culture is rooted in cities, that it has a special relationship to urban life, and that as Gayle Rubin comments in ‘Thinking sex’, erotic dissidents require urban space because in rural settings queers are easily identified and punished; it made sense [for Rubin] to contrast the sexual conformity of small towns to the sexual diversity of big cities. (Halberstam, 2005: 35)

As I’ve suggested here, Rubin says no such thing: on the contrary, Rubin highlights the labour and class dynamics of the great gay migration and suggests that queers found (even made) plenty of new problems in cities.⁹ Indeed, Rubin prophesies that ‘like blacks who fled the south for the metropolitan North, homosexuals may have merely traded rural problems for urban ones’ (Rubin, 1993 [1984]: 24). This is not a statement that flatters urban queernesss! Indeed, if, as Rubin argues, many of these new urban problems are racially-charged ones of spatial control and social class, then what is needed for rural queer and transgender studies is a conception of rurality that goes far beyond campaigning for ‘inclusion’ in metro-centred conceptions of queerness. Rather, to echo Herring’s reclamation of rural stylistics and rejection of urban narratives of modernity and sophistication, one might instead begin with the premise that urban queer stylistics and norms have been designed directly out of economic and temporal ideologies and histories that are, at best, ambivalent to the goals and needs of rural queers and transgender people (and of those who are most in need in cities).¹⁰ There cannot, in other words, be a mode of rural queering or transing that does not equally disrupt the normativizing forces of class, race, and fashion. I have shown in this article that beyond the ‘intersections’ of rural queerness with ideas about time and about class, such ideas actually underpin the judgements whereby rurality is seen as both menacingly backwards and poorly unfashionable.

Backroad four: Rural refashioning

A vital question remains: is White’s urbanizing, superior version of urban ‘fashion’ (in which the word is used mainly to claim one’s position at the cutting edge of ‘fast’ culture) the only way of employing ‘fashion’ to queer ends? Could rural queer fashioning refer instead to a continuous series of creative events rather than to the hip/ster clothing and wealth the word now signifies – and which Herring is right to call out? I now argue that a temporality of fashion can indeed be turned towards (and derive from) concerns with social class, place, and seemingly regressive citationality. One way to do this is to look to various strands of Marxist theory that have paid attention to the pitfalls of those linear narratives of time that usually locate queers and cities happily together in the present and future. (Indeed, the status of temporality in Marxism is another precedent for ‘queer time’, and is also a logical next step to address the questions of class raised by Farrow, Rubin, and Herring.) While readers of Marx have noted two temporalities in his work – ‘a closed time of capitalism and a disruptive, excessive time of revolution’ (Khatib, 2010) – the most influential rewriting of Marxist temporality derives from Walter Benjamin’s last known piece of writing, On the Concept of History (1940). In this text, Benjamin develops the concept of Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’ (Benjamin, 2003 [1940]: 395) which he describes as (1) non-linear, inasmuch as it disrupts the continuum of history, and (2) event-based rather than sequence-based, inasmuch as it revels in singular happenings that are not fixed into larger trajectories. As Benjamin puts it, ‘historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself’ (2003 [1940]: 395). Crucial for my purposes here, Benjamin figures evental (event-based, non-progressive) temporality as a kind of fashion that looks back to the past in order to incite revolution. As he puts it:

[T]o Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past. (Benjamin, 2003 [1940]: 395)

For Benjamin, then, blasting the past out of its seemingly proper place in a historical continuum is to fill the supposedly homogenous empty time of history with non-linear events of ‘now-time’, a temporality that is both citational, a mode of fashioning, and a risky leap. In this image of revolutionary recuperations of outmoded historical ‘fashions’, Benjamin provides a model for ‘blasting’ the figure of the queer out of its urban trajectory by citing outmoded (indeed, ‘rustic’) rural styles of life. As a mode of temporality, fashion – as Elizabeth Freeman suggests of ‘style’ – ‘neither transcends nor subsumes culture but pries it open a bit, rearranges or reconstitutes its elements, providing glimpses of an otherwise-being that is unrealizable as street activism or as blueprint for the future’ (Freeman, 2010: xix). A turn to rural aesthetics and speeds, in this sense, would see the persistence of anti-modern or unfashionable fashions not as failures to ascend to urban fashionability but rather as small unorganized blasts levelled against the seeming solidity of urban-focused queer history. Indeed, as Dianne Chisholm argues in Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City, Benjamin offers us ‘a way of seeing antitheses of history that are catastrophically obscured by myths of progress’ (Chisholm, 2005: 2). When the relationship between rural and urban is regarded as antithetical, their synthesis – what leads a culture ‘forward’ – is built on concealment and loss. In Benjamin’s rewriting of the trope of fashion as a mode of history and time, the need to tweak Herring’s keen account becomes evident: queer rural subjects need not reject fashion (and in so doing shore up an impossible sense of the self as un-aestheticized or as purely anti-fashion) but could instead refashion the narratives and capitals of fashion.¹¹ After all, locating the spectre of ‘fashion’ exclusively in the urban realm is also to locate a few other associated phenomena of transience and décor exclusively there: modifying bodies, bodily ornament, anachronistic uses of décor and texture, and other queer modes that certainly happen in many places and times.

Is it possible to relocate Benjamin’s ‘now’ time – derived from his studies of the arcades in Paris – to a matter as seemingly small as transgender and queer ruralism? On the surface, this does not seem plausible. After all, Herring points out in the quotation given earlier that rural queers must reclaim the ‘stereotypically ruralizing stylistics of rusticity, stylelessness, unfashionability’ (Herring, 2010: 22 emphasis added) and so on. But history occurring in the form of fashion, as Benjamin describes, is a different matter: it may well consist in citations and leaps into the past. Freeman too looks to Benjamin to develop her theory of queer time. In her estimation, Benjamin ‘historicized’ and valorized ‘the pause’, ‘recognizing that it provides an antidote both to traditional historicist models of progress and to the ‘revolutionary’ ideology of a complete break from the past’ (Freeman, 2010: 155). Freeman’s focus on ‘the pause’ as a mode of queer time is instructive here: for she and Benjamin, ‘making time stand still’ – a description attributed to rural realms with pathos and nervous nostalgia – is to create tension between a ‘lost element of the past and something occurring right now’ (2010: 155). This, in sum, is also a way that queer theorists could reread the temporal ‘regressions’, ‘slownesses’ or ‘standstills’ of rurality: as recursive rewritings, be they earnest or self-consciously citational, of times that are seen, from the perspective of the urban cutting edge of modernity, as already over and useless.

This might seem like a tall order, but valuing and effecting non-linear non-progressive movements of time has in fact been central to queer theory. As Carla Freccero suggests in Queer/Early/Modern, although the ‘theoretical provenance’ of queer theory seems to lie ‘firmly within the late twentieth century’, ‘the spirit of queer analysis’ has been its ‘willful perversion of notions of temporal propriety and the reproductive order of things’ (2005: 2). Two examples must suffice here. In its own right, Freccero’s turn to pre-modern texts takes queer theory into an even more temporally ‘improper’ territory (to use a spatial metaphor). While for White and others, the value of the ‘queer’ consists in its position at the forefront of the modern (and postmodern), Freccero shows that certain modes of queerness were operative not only before the aesthetic modernism of the 1900s that so influenced contemporary queer culture and theory but also before the project of modernity itself – of which the city is an icon. Secondly, Heather Love, in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, ‘traces a tradition of backwardness in queer representation and experience’ (2007: 146). In Love’s ambiguously redemptive analysis of backwardness, she names ‘loneliness, regression … antimodernism, [and] immaturity’ to her list of ‘queer historical structure[s] of feeling’ (2007: 146). The point (and paradox) here is this: queer rurality is disdained or ignored precisely for its relegation to pre-modernity, anti-modernity, and backwardness. These are exactly the temporal and affective modes that theorists such as Love and Freccero keenly define as the new (and very old!) directions of queerness. This disparity suggests that only certain kinds of anti-modernity and backwardness – urban ones? ironic ones? fashionable ones? – are admissible. Of course, it would be silly to completely valorize or reject a concept as dynamic and open-ended as ‘backwardness’, but at this moment it seems equally silly that queer theory does not yet widely recognize that so many of the new tropes, modes, and watchwords of the field align so closely with – even derive from – conceptions of rurality. Again, the urban caricature of queerness conceals its country roots.

Digging new dirt roads

‘There’s just such a nice slow pace of life!’ Speeds are shrewdly organized in urban and rural spaces. Rural dwellers rush to the bank that closes at 5 p.m., make late payments, work overtime, and submit late paper revisions – just as urbanites sometimes stretch slowly through the yoga studio, shuffle inch by inch towards the front of a line that leads to a gay bar, or wait months for a restaurant reservation. This article has thus far shown why speed cannot be so simply attached to space. Ruralizing queer time was seen to involve three main shifts in understanding: (1) from ‘rural’ as a place of non-choice to a place that makes clear the compromised conditions of choice for all practitioners of queer time, especially conditions of class; (2) from ‘rural’ as regressive to rural as involutionary;¹² and (3) from ‘rural’ as unfashionable to rural as adhering to its own temporality of fashion that blasts urban stylistics out of their comfortable place at the late eve of the future. It would be prudent to conclude with examples of some ways in which I see this theory of rural queer temporality working in practice. This is a challenge if one’s interests lie in sparking new ways of thought and feeling that readers can bring alive in multiple, ambiguous, and even contradictory, ways. Still, there are plenty of examples of experimentation in queer rural temporality, to which it is useful to look for inspiration and caution, and as significant afterlives of less perceptible ruralizing affect.

As many will know, the Radical Faeries, for instance, are a loose network of men who regularly attend ‘gatherings’ (like retreats) in rural locales. The most remarkable facet of Faerie culture (for the present argument) is the way in which they implicitly associate their rejection of mainstream assimilationist gay culture with an escape from urban spheres. Yet, as Scott Lauria Morgensen argues with great respect and care for the Faeries, a nostalgic desire for ‘primitive’ and ‘natural’ origins – origins coded by the Faeries as indigenous – is one of the main motivations for this retreat to the rural. As Morgensen suggests, their travels to rural locales ‘placed gay men in motion from modern to primitive and settler to indigenous … The emergence of Radical Faerie culture is therefore a mediation of the colonial conditions of modern sexual minority identity in the United States’ (2009: 68–69). (Morgensen paints a generous picture of this mediation, suggesting that by occupying rural land, the Faeries are in their own way dealing with what it means to live as a white person in colonial culture.) Secondly, it is interesting to note that the Faeries’ rurality takes the form of a retreat, not a migration. On one hand, this reduces rural temporality to the carnivalesque, in which a rural locale becomes a ‘special’ place to be visited in order to relieve the pressures of ‘real’ (urban) life, as Bakhtin famously suggests. However, the form of the ‘retreat’ also allows for the idea – one worth noting for future experiments – that ‘the rural’ could be associated not with empty spreads of space but with condensed queer strength, with bursts of energy, (and with chances to reckon with one’s privilege).

Another example, the lesbian-feminist communes of the 1970s, adopted a very different temporal approach in some regards. Although these too were largely based in (perhaps nostalgic) desires for a return to an original nature, the communes sought to be sustainable rather than carnivalesque. As Bell and Valentine (1995) make clear, such attempts at rural utopias inevitably meet with challenge – for instance, the difficult issue of what to do with boy children on women’s communes – but still offer wisdom to would-be queer rural dwellers. The eventual closure of most of these cultures speaks, Bell and Valentine (1995) suggest, to the near impossibility of sustainable long-term living in a purely anti-modern space. As some new queer urbanites will know, it’s not always possible to ‘go back’. This is precisely the lesson that is worth noting: the temporality of rural queer experimentation need not aim for, or be judged by, longevity or permanence. Perhaps queer rural temporality consists partly in knowing when to abandon a line of flight that is no longer allowing for new, generative, experience. (There is a lesson here for urbanites who seek to institutionalize and memorialize whenever possible.)

As with experiments in urban queer living, these examples are neither perfect parables nor blueprints for life. The stronger suggestions for praxis that may be derived from this article are, I suspect, far less determinate. They are ideas for remaking rural and urban emotional attachments. Queer theory must contend with this possibility: that (1) naturalized city preference, and (2) the ways in which such feelings obscure dissimulated histories and contexts, are the twin affective modes of metronormativity. And, it must be firmly acknowledged in light of this article that the temporalities on which urban superiority depends – progressive narratives of history, the valorization of an unproblematized ‘cutting edge’, and the absolute break from the (rural) past – are precisely what Halberstam and Freeman have characterized as the very antithesis of queer time. At this juncture, I return to a symptomatic moment of Halberstam’s widely celebrated text. As Karen Tongson notes in Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011), Halberstam bookends her chapters on Brandon’s rurality by stating her continued dread of the rural, even though the chapters are offered as apologies or explanation for her previous urban bias (Tongson, 2011: 5). As Halberstam opens the chapters: ‘It is still true that a densely packed urban street or a metallic skyline can release a surge of excitement for me while a vast open landscape fills me with dread’ (2005: 22). The irony here is this: while Halberstam defines space as practice, she attributes affective qualities to the ‘vast open landscape’ as though the landscape’s meaning and agency resides in and of itself. The rhetoric used in the foregoing paragraph echoes this double standard: the city only ‘release[s]’ excitement, thereby acting upon and colliding with apparently pre-existing aspects of herself. The rural, however, ‘fills [her]’ like a malignant force acting upon a passive bystander. In this juxtaposition of rhetoric, the city is where queers do queerness, and the country is where things are done to queers. (Here, the continued relevance of Bell and Valentine’s work is clear: they remind readers that ‘the relationship between sexuality and rurality has been shown to be ambivalent, contextual and malleable’ (1995: 120)). This is not at all to diminish the influence of Halberstam’s work on research in this area; rather, it is to point out the extent to which anti-rural sentiment may still be stated as a politically neutral preference for cities.

This is also not to say that a person absolutely ought not to prefer cities over rural realms. Such an affective overhaul of one’s long-entrenching habits of feeling would be impossible, excessively prescriptive, and invested in a break from one’s past that itself mirrors problematic desires to disown the past. Rather, it is to ask queer subjects to undertake a more difficult process of self-reflection with regards to how one’s desires for spaces take shape. These inclinations for certain spaces do not precede one’s valuation and adoption of certain temporalities. Queer theorists are, after all, very ‘sophisticated’ with regards to thinking through how and why one’s preferences for genders, sexualities, and partners take shape and change. The task now is to ask, at every register of queer subjectivity, feeling, background, and affects, why a city feels good – if it does. It is to ask: what are the unspeakable losses that an urbanized queer body accommodates, conceals, and mourns? What rural ‘pasts’ live in us as dormant kernels of new queerness?

Footnotes

Notes

Lucas Crawford is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick (Canada). Lucas is the author of a book of poems, Sideshow Concessions, which won the 2015 Robert Kroestch Award for Innovative Poetry, and of a critical monograph, Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space (Routledge 2016). Lucas is from rural Nova Scotia.

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