Lesbian Farmers and Two Americas: Gay Rights, the Production of Place, and Rural Displacement.

Professor Carly Thomsen, Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies will give a talk as part of the 2016-17 Life of the Mind Series.

In this talk, I examine how the rural is produced by LGBTQ organizations and federal agencies conducting outreach in rural areas, as well as those liberal supporters of this work. More specifically, I analyze the ways in which LGBTQ people in the rural upper Midwest are produced as out of place by U.S. based LGBGTQ rights groups and activists. I ask: How is place produced in order to produce certain people as dis-placed? To answer this question, I consider discourses surrounding two particular campaigns: the USDA’s Rural LGBT Summits and the Human Rights Campaign’s “Project One America.” I also draw from the interviews I conducted with more than fifty LGBTQ women in rural South Dakota and Minnesota to highlight the ways in which my interviewees mitigate and challenge dominant understandings of queer rurality. I argue that these campaigns and the discourses surrounding them highlight the degree to which queer rurality is imagined as out of place—displaced simultaneously from conceptions of the rural and of LGBTQ life—and, further, that discourses of queer rurality function, ironically, to displace the lived experiences of rural LGBTQ people.