The queer recluse, the shambling farmer, the clannish hill folk — white rural populations have long disturbed the American imagination, alternately revered as moral, healthy, and hardworking, and feared as antisocial or socially uncouth. In Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (University of Chicago Press, September 2021), Ryan Lee Cartwright examines the deep archive of these contrary formations, mapping racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural 20th century U.S.

About the author

Cartwright is affiliated with the graduate groups in Cultural Studies and Performance Studies, as well as the designated emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research, and is coordinator of the Disability and Social In/Justice DHI research cluster. Cartwright holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, and their work has been funded by the ACLS, NEH, Hellman Family Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, and American Philosophical Society, among others. Prior to their appointment at the University of California, Davis, Cartwright was associate editor of MNopedia, a digital encyclopedia of Minnesota created by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Access the book at University of Chicago Press.