Another Country

Scott Herring teaches in the Department of English at Indiana University. He is the author of Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History.

Smart and edgy...the value of this book lies principally in the provocative conceptual tools it offers to articulate the roadblocks and raptures of queer migrations. - Amin Ghaziani (American Journal of Sociology) In Another Country, Herring responds to gaps that urban-centered studies have left opened in queer histories . . . Herring's work evidences a fierce commitment to existing queer metropolitan-migration narratives, favoring the backward, rustic and unfashionable, and embracing these stereotypes for their own subversively disruptive potentials. His quality content analysis and skillful ability to anticipate counter-arguments and avoid intellectual pitfalls keeps the reader on her toes. - Jaime Cantrell (Feminist Formations) Reading across the genres of literature, print and visual media, photography, and fashion, Scott Herring not only complicates the queers move from rural to urban space, but also the ways in which queers in & othered spaces enact an anti-urbanism through their own & rural stylistics. Another Country is fierce! - E. Patrick Johnson,author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South;An Oral History Scott Herring presents an exquisitely detailed road atlas of the complicated intersection between topography and destiny. - Alison Bechdel,author of Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For Writers, artists, and activists have worked throughout the past century to imagine and materialize sustainable queer lives everywhere from Oregon to Pennsylvania, from Iowa to Alabama. Herring provides the definitive account of the myriad ways that LGBT people have constituted non-urban sites as vibrant and sexy spaces of resistance to hetero- and homonormativity, to compulsory consumerism, and to entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender, and ability. In so doing, Another Country redraws the map of contemporary queer studies. - Robert McRuer,author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability Herring has a distinctive voice, elegant with a sharp wit...a book that is as beautiful as it is brilliant. (The Journal of American History)

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: I Hate New York Urban Legends From Non-Metro to Anti-Urbanism City Subversions, Rural Stylistics, Paper Cut Politics Outsider Artifacts1. Autobiographies of the Ex-Urban Queer Modernist MetronormativityGone-to-KansasStill Life with Charles DemuthBerlin StoryRaw Deals2. Critical Rusticity An Aesthetic of Anti-UrbanityBicoastalityCountry WomenOut of the Closets, Into the WoodsRFD Country3. Southern Backwardness Your Best BubbaAlabama SouvenirsEastaboga/TaorminaCaravaggio's Rednecks4. Unfashionability Steel Boots of LeatherStyle-less"Enemy Clothing"Outdated5. Queer Infrastructure Pittsburgh to the East, Philadelphia to the WestRoads to NowhereIf OnlyAlt-Routes Coda: On the Borderlands of the Midwest Notes Index About the Author A color insert follows page