Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future

Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future, edited by Zane McNeill and Rebecca Scott, is a collection of essays that utilizes queer theory to analyze the varying ecologies within Appalachia. Unlike other works and imaginings of Appalachia, this book notes that the authors are not reversing marginalization discourses of Appalachia or celebrating its differences from other regions of the United States, because to do so risks normalizing tropes and harmful rhetoric and ideas of Appalachia. This work is in conversation with other texts such as Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Indiana University Press, 2010); Y'all Means All, edited by Zane McNeill (PM Press, 2022); Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia, edited by Stephen L. Fisher and Barbara Ellen Smith (University of Illinois Press, 2012); as well as What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte (Belt Publishing, 2018). McNeill, Scott, and contributors provide a collection of essays critical to this discourse, pointing out in Deviant Hollers that a significant amount of work on Appalachia runs the risk of self-indigenizing white Appalachians and thereby overlooking Indigenous, Black, and other non-white populations of the region. McNeill and Scott have gathered a set of essays that imagine possible futurities while also avoiding these pitfalls. Many of these essays utilize the first-person perspective, as I will do in my review.Deviant Hollers adopts a queer framework in a region of the country that is often imagined as hostile to queer people. Numerous chapters within the book address this issue, and Baker A. Rogers focuses specifically on the idea of the gay imaginary, which is the metronormative belief that queer people must move to cities to be safe and to be happy. However, Rogers and other writers note that for many queer Appalachians, home is interconnected to geography. Moreover, queer life in rural spaces can be expressed in ways that are very different from how they may be expressed in cities. Expressions of queerness can be intimately bound up with geographical cultures and the spaces in which people live. Deviant Hollers highlights the significance of displacement, and the gay imaginary may be used to demean LGBTQ+ people in Appalachia, depicting them as ignorant people who are harming themselves by living in an unsafe space, rather than examining the lack of safety for people throughout the United States and the systemic forces that contribute to anti-LGBTQ+ sociopolitical realities.Zane McNeill and Rebecca-Eli M. Long grapple with this discourse of safety in the chapter titled “Intoxicated Subjects: Queer Bodies and Ecologies in ‘Trumpalachia.’” McNeill and Long examine Appalachia as a queer ecology, arguing that the region itself is non-normative. It is frequently cast off, positioned as out of place within the United States. The history of mining and other extractive economies has led to the region being labeled and understood as “toxic.” Editors McNeill and Scott carefully weave together queer ecology and critical geography studies to craft a depiction of Appalachia as an Othered region. Indigenous and BIPOC Appalachians are further Othered, as the image of Appalachia within the mainstream American imagination is overwhelmingly white, rural, and impoverished.Within the context of this anthology, displacement is used not just in terms of queer people, but also in terms of Indigenous peoples and realities. Jessica Cory explores the ways in which self-indigenizing works to further the belief that Native people are “deviant” in and of themselves and can never be included in conceptions of modernity. Cory's analysis is couched within the usage of queer ecology. Cory defines ecologies as “the relationships between organisms and the environments they inhabit through spatial and temporal means. . . . They include humans and other-than-human entities” (81). Through the lens of queer ecologies, Cory explores a dual model of settler colonialism and internal colonialism. The latter applies largely to economic exploitation of the colonized. The economic exploitation of the region is an essential aspect of this collection, which grapples with the problems of how to address and imagine futures that confront colonialism.The economic exploitation of Appalachia is a commonly discussed topic. If these discussions de-center neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and internal colonialism, the blame moves from systems of oppression to individuals suffering from the impacts of economic exploitation. Tijah Bumgarner explores the intersections of economic exploitation and addiction through recounting a project in which a father was filmed while nodding off in a chair due to OxyContin. Bumgarner asks us to consider what the responsibilities of artists and perhaps even scholars are, when it comes to depicting and discussing subjects such as addiction. How do we grapple with addiction, while not furthering classist narratives?Gabe Schwartzman responds to this question with a call to co-develop queer futures. Schwartzman tells a story of participating in a protest against mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining. Schwartzman describes the narrative of coal mining as a man's job. It is a difficult and dangerous job. The imaginary coal miner is a stand-in for patriarchal conceptions of masculinity. A future beyond and outside of these conceptions, which depend upon an extractive economy that harms the very communities it promises to benefit, necessitates a queer future. A queer future, for Schwartzman, is the re-imagination of Appalachia that breaks with a nostalgia for an extractive past. Schwartzman provides us with concrete examples to turn to—Staying Together Appalachian Youth (STAY) and Southerners on New Ground (SONG), which are organizations maintaining and strengthening queer communities. Schwartzman contends that within these organizations and projects like them, we find queer futures, where alternative kinships, communities, and economies are coming into existence.Overwhelmingly, the book raises important questions and pushes its audience to consider Appalachian studies through intersectional frameworks. As a white scholar-activist from the South, I am deeply interested in their analysis of the ways in which white scholar-activists can overlook our place in settler colonialism. Although white Southern scholars may experience harmful marginalizations, we cannot ignore our place in colonialism. The book carefully and lovingly calls us to consider ourselves and our own positionality.Although I am not a queer theorist and was originally skeptical of queer ecologies, this anthology has thoroughly challenged my original biases. If we adopt a perspective of Appalachia that grapples with its Othering by mainstream American society, then Appalachia is invariably a queer space. Moreover, by embracing queer ecologies, we may yet broach the topic of how to best realize non-normative futures.