Storytelling in Queer Appalachia: Imagining and Writing the Unspeakable Other [Paperback]

In one of the first collections of scholarship at the intersection of LGBTQ studies and Appalachian studies, voices from the region’s valleys, hollers, mountains, and campuses blend personal stories with scholarly and creative examinations of living and surviving as queers in Appalachia. The essayists collected inStorytelling in Queer Appalachiaare academics, social workers, riot grrrl activists, teachers, students, practitioners, scholars of divinity, and boundary crossers, all imagining how to make legible the unspeakable other of Appalachian queerness.
 
Focusing especially on disciplinary approaches from rhetoric and composition, the volume explores sexual identities in rural places, community and individual meaning-making among the Appalachian diaspora, the storytelling infrastructure of queer Appalachia, and the role of the metronormative in discourses of difference.Storytelling in Queer Appalachiaaffirms queer people, fights for queer visibility over queer erasure, seeks intersectional understanding, and imagines radically embodied queer selves through social media.Hillery Glasby is an assistant professor in the writing, rhetoric, and American cultures department and a faculty fellow for the Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan State University.
 
Sherrie Gradin is a professor of English at Ohio University.
 
Rachael Ryerson is the director of composition and a lecturer at Ohio University.
 Introduction
Hillery Glasby, Sherrie Gradin, and Rachael Ryerson

For a decade I had bought into the dominant narrative in LGBTQIA spaces that because I am queer I could never live back home. I was told—in not so many words—that I could not have my queerness and my mountains, too, that I would not be safe there, that I would not be able to survive, much less thrive. This is a common experience for those of us who have left the small towns and rural areas where wlS,