Y'all Means All

The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia

Z. Zane McNeill, Z. Zane McNeill

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781629639253
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Y'all Means All is a celebration of the weird and wonderful aspects of a troubled region in all of their manifest glory! This collection is a thought-provoking hoot and a holler of "we're queer and we're here to stay, cause we're every bit a piece of the landscape as the rocks and the trees" echoing through the hills of Appalachia and into the boardrooms of every media outlet and opportunistic author seeking to define Appalachia from the outside for their own political agendas. Multidisciplinary and multi-genre, Y'all necessarily incorporates elements of critical theory, such as critical race theory and queer theory, while dealing with a multitude of methodologies, from quantitative analysis, to oral history and autoethnography.

This collection eschews the contemporary trend of "reactive" or "responsive" writing in the genre of Appalachian studies, and alternatively, provides examples of how modern Appalachians are defining themselves on their own terms. As such, it also serves as a toolkit for other Appalachian readers to follow suit, and similarly challenge the labels, stereotypes and definitions often thrust upon them. While providing blunt commentary on the region's past and present, the book's soul is sustained by the resilience, ingenuity, and spirit exhibited by the authors; values which have historically characterized the Appalachian region and are continuing to define its culture to the present.

This book demonstrates above all else that Appalachia and its people are filled with a vitality and passion for their region which will slowly but surely effect long-lasting and positive changes in the region. If historically Appalachia has been treated as a "mirror" of the country, this book breaks that trend by allowing modern Appalachians to examine their own reflections and to share their insights in an honest, unfiltered manner with the world.

SECTION 1

Finding Self and Discovering Queer in Appalachia

Trans Appalachian: An Interdisciplinary Exploration

Beck Banks

Since the late 1800s, Appalachia has existed in a constant state of being “rediscovered” within American culture. During these cycles of rediscovery, ideas about Appalachian people, their bodies, and the region’s displacement in time emerge. As I began to think about transgender studies and Appalachian Studies in tandem and how they encompass my identity, the overlapping patterns and surrounding dialogue became increasingly apparent. While we can celebrate the rising queer voices of Appalachia, the time is ripe to address specifically the transness of Appalachia. Trans Appalachia speaks to these themes surrounding the body, media attention, and experience of time (aka temporalities). It aims to create space for trans people in Appalachia, at least intellectually, with hopes of more.

Media Attention: Appalachia

As I write this, it is November 2020. The film adaptation of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Family and Culture in Crisis premieres on Netflix this month. The book proved to be a phenomenon, spending over seventy weeks on the New York Times bestsellers’ list. The sales of the book coincided with the lead-up to the 2016 elections. As was stated by the press, Trump’s win was due to “Trump Country,” an election nickname for Central Appalachia.¹ The region experienced one of its resurgences in the American cultural and media landscape.

The author of Elegy, J.D. Vance, never lived in Appalachia, nor did his parents.² His grandparents resided in Eastern Kentucky until their teens. Vance makes an outsider claim to the region, writing a pulled-up-by-the-bootstraps memoir about escaping Appalachia’s inherited violence and poverty. It’s gross and exploitive and profoundly in line with the Appalachian stereotypes.

Rollback to the 1960s, with Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Appalachia was as prominent in the news as it was on prime-time television programming that focused on Appalachia. The Beverly Hillbillies was one of the decade’s top-rated shows, with The Andy Griffith Show, The Waltons, and Hee Haw not far behind. Tangentially related shows like the rural-set Green Acres and Lassie performed well too. As American Studies scholar George Lipitz noted, there was a nostalgia for rural life as the US began to become increasingly urbanized.³ The capturing of these cultures on the small screen is referred to as an imperialistic measure.⁴ This was one more way to claim territory in the US and tame a land too often portrayed as wild. The focus, as can be seen in the aforementioned examples, was quite white as well.

While the civil rights movement was gaining momentum, it was simply racist that television focused on poor white people, as historian Anthony Harkins points out.⁵ It was a way to erase Black people and the nation’s role in their marginalization. The same can be said for the War Against Poverty, which focused on Appalachia instead of places with higher numbers of Black people. That isn’t to dismiss the people of color in Appalachia; though those stories are rarely told. As Appalachian Studies scholar Elizabeth Catte points out,⁶ Appalachian people of color are erased time and time again. When the coal-mining industry was booming, she found that, depending on the place, the mines employed between 20 to 50 percent Black men. The influx of Mexican and South American immigrants to the region in the 2000s never makes the Appalachian narrative either. These are not stories that get told when the media speaks of Appalachia.

Instead, television’s “hillbilly” portrayals were often childlike and white, as Media Studies scholar Horace Newcomb pointed out.⁷ The Beverly Hillbillies’ Clampett family never adapted to their home of Beverly Hills. They wore ragged clothes, cooked the same opossum food as before, and cracked Confederacy jokes in their mansion. They were perceived as not deserving their money, because they didn’t know what to do with it. While Andy Griffith was not childlike—because he’s a sheriff—side characters like Gomer Pyle and Barney Miller were. These tropes exist within hillbilly portrayals as one more way to show their difference. Newcomb notes a binary in this representation; Appalachia is the “Other.” People outside of it can feel better about themselves, because they aren’t from there. That same trope resurfaced in the 2016 Trump election, when the region was dubbed “Trump Country” in news coverage. It is similar to travel magazine writing about the region in the late 1800s: it objectified; it saw another kind of human. Speaking of which, transgender people have experienced this treatment too.

Media Attention: Transgender

In 2014, Laverne Cox graced Time magazine’s cover in an issue dubbed “The Transgender Tipping Point.”⁸ The magazine itself is often cited as a tipping point in transgender recognition too, at least in contemporary times. It should go without saying: transgender people have always existed. Much like Appalachia, trans people also get rediscovered in the press. They have a history of being over-medicalized and two-dimensional. This reductive portrayal echoes the portrayal of Appalachia.

Within American mass media and international news, Christine Jorgensen made headlines in the 1950s after seeking a medical transition in Denmark. She spent the rest of her career speaking on late-night shows and doing the lecture circuit. Tennis star Renee Richards made news for petitioning and getting to play women’s tennis in the 1970s. Stories about transgender people appear for a while and float back out of the American consciousness.⁹

If not for Caitlyn Jenner, perhaps attention to transgender issues would have waned among the public. In 2015, Jenner came out as transgender in an article with a front-page picture in Vanity Fair. This public relations tactic made major waves. Laverne Cox and Janet Mock— prominent trans women of color and activists—were eclipsed. More attention was paid to Jenner by the mainstream press for a considerable amount of time.

While there are benefits to trans visibility, there is a trap within it. With it, violence toward transwomen of color has increased. Jenner, whose politics are in line with MAGA, proved to be a trans spokesperson for cisgender people only (those whose gender aligns with assigned sex at birth). I might also ask what venture capitalist and memoirist J.D. Vance did for Appalachia. Both Jenner and Vance purported to represent a group of people but did little to nothing to benefit those populations. Profiteers exist everywhere.

The Body

Catte’s polemic What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia links J.D. Vance and Henry Caudill to eugenics proponents.¹⁰ Caudill and Vance are key bestselling authors associated with Appalachia. Henry Caudill wrote about Appalachia in his 1960s book Night Comes to the Cumberlands. While Caudill tried to get people in Eastern Kentucky sterilized, Vance’s ideology and relationships line up with eugenics. Both appear aligned with this concept of breeding people, a dangerous idea that seeps into Appalachian narratives. Stereotypes seem to posit Appalachian people as products of cousinly love, deeply inbred, riddled with health issues, and, well, responsible for their own poverty. Systemic problems aren’t acknowledged. Eugenics is.

The idea of wrong bodies, lesser bodies, appears throughout transgender studies. Some people consider trans people to be derived from medical treatment alone and to be freaks. These ideas are explored in trans scholarship, be it Susan Stryker’s use of Frankenstein’s monster to illustrate trans rage or Sara Ahmed’s social hammers that tell the body what it needs to be.¹¹ The lesser-body idea can be applied in Appalachian, race, disability, queer, trans, and class-oriented studies. All of this can be brought together to explore marginalized identities. This flawed-body concept extends to other areas, such as the concept of the wrong time and place.

Process/Ritual/Time

Appalachia is often referred to as out of step with time. It is considered backward, existing in the past. These thoughts sound like a queering of temporality. Time relations could be different instead of out of sync with the surrounding world. Trans is sometimes perceived as a throwback to the binary or as too radical for the present; either approach pushes transness and Appalachia out of the present. This displacement is one more power play. Screen studies can help illuminate how different processes of time and communication influence Appalachian and transgender portrayals.

Horace Newcomb says that Appalachia’s nature is at odds with that of the television industry.¹² By classic television standards, a good producer makes a show that gets advertisers, a concept that can be updated to include subscriptions now. Newcomb pulls from communication theorist James Carey’s conception of transmission/transactional and ritual communication to explain how television needs to be more ritualistic in its program design.¹³ To make representation better, the media industry would benefit from viewing programming and storytelling as a process. While I’m not advocating the trans representation on Grey’s Anatomy, the series did work with GLAAD to develop a transgender plotline. This approach displaces the rush for time and money, shifting it to a mildly ritualized production approach.

Television and news outlets would also do well to see trans and Appalachia as process-oriented, not just transactional objects. Instead, both are too often steeped in binaries, placing those people in stark contrast to others in society. I wonder if mainstream media can capture the ritualized communication in understanding our marginalized identities, be it in collective, ritual-oriented cultures or journeys of self-understanding. Instead, groups like the Instagram account and zine creator Queer Appalachia, the multi-media group Transilient, the arts and media hub Appalshop, and more take (or took) the responsibility of approaching these more nuanced stories.

There are other issues at play too. Trans people often struggle to get jobs. Appalachia does face an economic disadvantage. These populations encounter problems with getting their stories told, or even imagining telling them; poverty creates a focus on survival. The overlapping of these identities seemingly would face more problems, even more so with race and ability. These complexities present one more reason to explore the intersection of these disciplines and identities: to understand the unique challenges transgender people in Appalachia face, encourage empathy and work toward positive change. If Appalachia can embrace its transness, its queerness, that would send an immensely powerful message to the rest of the country. Perhaps, they are the ones who need to understand what’s happening now.

Conclusion

Trans (and queer) and Appalachia seem like a contradiction to most, which is a prime reason why it should be explored. This “contradiction” means people have yet to wrap their minds around this world and the ideas that could be found within these merging identities. Hopefully, the concepts presented above serve as a launching ground to take off from, to evolve. There is room for a lot more work.

In looking at Appalachian Studies and trans studies together, the ideas in political scientist Cathy J. Cohen’s piece “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” come to mind.¹⁴ Expanding the conversation to include people who feel marginalized in society and at different places in the system allows for the alignment and, thus, empowerment of a group. It opens a discussion that should make systems of oppression accountable.

NOTES

1. 1 While there are many examples of “Trump Country” in the press, the following are a couple of notable pieces: Larissa MacFarquhar, “In the Heart of Trump Country,” New Yorker, October 10, 2016, accessed October 8, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/in-the-heart-of-trump-country. Lisa Lerer, “Once a Clinton Stronghold, Appalachia Now Trump Country,” PBS, May 3, 2016, October 8, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/once-a-clinton-stronghold-appalachia-now-trump-country.
2. 2 J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016).
3. 3 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
4. 4 Ibid.; Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Horace Newcomb, “Appalachia on Television: Region as Symbol in American Popular Culture,” Appalachian Journal 7, nos. 1–2 (Autumn–Winter 1979–1980): 155–64.
5. 5 Harkins, Hillbilly.
6. 6 Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia (Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2018).
7. 7 Newcomb, “Appalachia on Television, 155–64.
8. 8 Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tippi...