Review of /Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity/ (2021) by Ryan Lee Cartwright

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:

The anti-idyll is a "longstanding cultural trope and social optic that produces tales of white rural nonconformity" (3). This optic is used as a way to name the presumed failures of rural communities to perform whiteness "properly - namely, by refusing to adhere to its demands of heteronormativity and ablenormativity. Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of Rural Nonconformity (2021) by Ryan Lee Cartwright seeks to challenge the anti-idyll through an examination of its proliferation in American cultural history and the ways in which it has left rural communities marginalized. The book functions as a genealogy of the sensationalized anti-idyll, in which Cartwright maps out the origins and expansions of the idea throughout the twentieth century. However, they recognize that there is no straightforward history of social difference in rural communities, and instead use their chapters to provide examples of how a narrative of such a history was created through different cultural artifacts and practices.