Peculiar Places

"Ryan Lee Cartwright's book narrates the queer history of gender, sexual, and social nonconformity in the 20th-century rural United States. Cartwright contends that in that period rural American gossip about queer and peculiar white neighbors was transformed into a popular discourse of white social degeneracy. He points to a tension between the idyll (rooted in the national myth of the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer and his idealized family) and the anti-idyll (the gender perversion, deviant sexuality, and uncouth moral values that are associated with rural white populations).Cartwright examines the anti-idyll in different genres from the 1910s through the 1990s: popular science in the 1910s and early '20s, documentary photography in the '30s, news media in the '50s, political rhetoric in the '60s, horror films in the '70s and early '80s, and documentary films in the 1990s"--