Mary Gray’s Out in the Country provides a concise history of queer scholarship that has led to the privileging of urban spaces and urban perspectives. She then challenges this metronormative notion by exploring the lives and identity formation of young queer people in rural Kentucky. Gray’s book differs from the articles first and foremost in that she focuses on youth rather than adults; the median age of her interviewees was just sixteen and a half years old. In focusing on youth, she observes active identity formation as opposed to collecting stories of formation that has already occurred as the other researchers do. This work is a critical part of the existing scholarship on the queer urban-rural binary; it is referenced in all of the other
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They then introduce four competing perspectives that they will test their data against (p. 1260-1262). The first perspective is that rural settings are harmful to gay and lesbian people compared to urban environments. The second perspective posits that rural settings are more beneficial. “According to this perspective,” they write, “rural residents are thought to be in better mental shape than their urban peers because they are less likely to be exposed to the stresses and strains of modern life, including noise, crowding, pollution, traffic, crime, and ethnic conflict” (p. 1261) The third perspective asserts that differences in wellbeing are not actually due to the environments themselves, but are instead due to other differences in the composition of these rural-urban LGBT cohorts “in terms of gender, age, income, educational attainment, race, presence of children, partner status, and employment status” (p. 1261). Any significant differences in wellbeing should then disappear if these variables are controlled for. The fourth perspective they evaluate is that differences in well-being may result from self-selection between well-adjusted and poorly-adjusted gay and lesbian individuals either migrating or not migrating to and from urban and rural areas, with one cohort potentially congregating in one type of area for some reason. …show more content…
By nature, this allows for more objective study of their intended subjects. They noted in their Limitations section, however, that this has its drawbacks (p. 1274); even though their study encompasses exponentially more individuals than any other work described here, they still consider their sample too small, and they use a (sexual) behavioral method of classification rather than a more complex, self-identified method of classification for their “participants,” like that of Kazyak and Gray and Annes & Redlin. While other researchers expressed concerns over missing a potential non-queer-identifying population, Wienke & Hill were conscientious of conflating sexual behavior with sexual identity. The authors also had no way of collecting information about their subjects’ past feelings of well-being, which were crucial to the other studies’ analysis of identity formation; they were, however, still able to categorize subjects based on whether they had migrated between rural areas and cities or
They then introduce four competing perspectives that they will test their data against (p. 1260-1262). The first perspective is that rural settings are harmful to gay and lesbian people compared to urban environments. The second perspective posits that rural settings are more beneficial. “According to this perspective,” they write, “rural residents are thought to be in better mental shape than their urban peers because they are less likely to be exposed to the stresses and strains of modern life, including noise, crowding, pollution, traffic, crime, and ethnic conflict” (p. 1261) The third perspective asserts that differences in wellbeing are not actually due to the environments themselves, but are instead due to other differences in the composition of these rural-urban LGBT cohorts “in terms of gender, age, income, educational attainment, race, presence of children, partner status, and employment status” (p. 1261). Any significant differences in wellbeing should then disappear if these variables are controlled for. The fourth perspective they evaluate is that differences in well-being may result from self-selection between well-adjusted and poorly-adjusted gay and lesbian individuals either migrating or not migrating to and from urban and rural areas, with one cohort potentially congregating in one type of area for some reason. …show more content…
By nature, this allows for more objective study of their intended subjects. They noted in their Limitations section, however, that this has its drawbacks (p. 1274); even though their study encompasses exponentially more individuals than any other work described here, they still consider their sample too small, and they use a (sexual) behavioral method of classification rather than a more complex, self-identified method of classification for their “participants,” like that of Kazyak and Gray and Annes & Redlin. While other researchers expressed concerns over missing a potential non-queer-identifying population, Wienke & Hill were conscientious of conflating sexual behavior with sexual identity. The authors also had no way of collecting information about their subjects’ past feelings of well-being, which were crucial to the other studies’ analysis of identity formation; they were, however, still able to categorize subjects based on whether they had migrated between rural areas and cities or