This paper explores the politics of rural LGBTQ+ Pride events. Drawing on experiential, oral, and visual ‘data’ collected from Pride events around the United States this project seeks to situate rural Pride events within a... [ view full abstract ]
This paper explores the politics of rural LGBTQ+ Pride events. Drawing on experiential, oral, and visual ‘data’ collected from Pride events around the United States this project seeks to situate rural Pride events within a framework of queer consciousness. This best positions me to think about how people attach meaning and operationalize Pride events in particular ways.
Pride events can be traced back to the Stonewall Inn in New York City. In June 1969 police raided the (queer) bar and, in turn, a riot broke out to resist state policing efforts. One year later the first organized Pride marches took place in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Now, nearly 50 years later, Pride events have spread across the country and around the world. Metropolitan Pride festivals have developed into multi-million dollar corporate events which undoubtedly shapes their structure and interest—but do rural Pride events, with less corporate investment and public interest, emulate a metropolitan LGBTQ+ politic (often that of “visibility”) and festival structure or do they deflect and imagine their own? This analysis focuses on ‘the rural’ and incorporates ‘the urban’ as comparison. Overall, I’m interested in how people develop their (queer) identity and (queer) politics in a globalized society.
I take an interdisciplinary approach to the research project by incorporating auto/ethnography, photo-elicitation, and oral history. Feminist methods and queer theory orient this research in that I am interested in developing knowledge (by exhibiting praxis) for social change. I choose to employ auto/ethnography, in particular, to pay close analytical attention to how people navigate through space and draw symbolic boundaries via discourse.
