LGBT seminar highlights rural queer studies

In Aesop’s fable “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” a pair of mice realize just how different rural and city life can be.

This weekend, several speakers will explore a similar theme in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community during “Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies,” a two-day symposium presented by multiple departments at IU.

Saturday’s presentation, located in the Indiana Memorial Union’s Frangipani Room, will be free and open to the public.

The conference will begin at 8:30 a.m. and features noted scholars, said co-organizer Mary Gray, an associate professor of communication and culture.

“There will be a collection of presenters who I would argue are founders of what we would call rural queer studies,” Gray said. “These are people who, early on, asked, ‘why is it we don’t study LGBT trends and cultures outside of cities?’ The scholars will discuss their sense of where we are at with LGBT issues.”

Colin Johnson, a gender studies assistant professor and the symposium’s other co-organizer, said the conference is an attempt to shine a spotlight on the understudied experience of LGBT people who live in non-metropolitan areas.

“Traditionally scholarship has focused on urban spaces,” Johnson said. “When people think of gay, they tend to think of cities. They don’t think of places like rural Indiana
and Utah.”

The presentation will feature speakers from IU, other American universities and from England. It will be followed by a reception at FARMbloomington.

The day will conclude with a public performance in Woodburn Hall 101 by the Eggplant Faerie Players, an LGBT performance group from rural Tennessee.

“The whole presentation is a nice mixture of scholarship studying queer rural life and folks who live those lives in very intentional ways,” Gray said.

Sunday’s session will consist of a series of closed workshops where 35 young scholars will receive instruction and advice for dissertations Gray said will be collected into a book.

The idea for the symposium first came to Gray and Johnson two years ago, when they were discussing each other’s work.

“We started talking about absence of this conversation in most gay and lesbian scholarship. We realized it would make a lot of sense to bring younger scholars together with a group of scholars to talk to about these projects,” Gray said. “We want to recognize that there is now a fairly strong group of people doing this work.”

Johnson said Bloomington is the perfect place for such a discussion because of its high number of rural queer scholars and IU’s legacy of sexual and
gender research.

“With places like the Kinsey Institute, IU has a long history of studying sex and gender and creating conversations on these issues for many years,” Johnson said. “This symposium is a chance to start a new conversation.”