Abstract
The English countryside is not typically imagined as a place accommodative of queer people and desire. Whilst it is acknowledged that LGBTQ+ people live rurally, less is documented of how, through which relations and in which political arrangements, a queer rural becomes.This thesis theorises queer rural life by visibilising and narrating ‘geographies of churn’, which describe modes of spatial transformation and cultural performance that affect emancipatory rural spaces and foster queer community. ‘Churn’ is a cyclical, spatial and social process, involving gestures of suspension, excitement and settling. Drawing on queer theory, cultural geography, performance, film and screen studies, See Here presents a novel methodology for researching subaltern emplacement, comprising co-created ‘video portraits’, mobile interviews and a 14-monthperiod of ethnographic fieldwork across the county of Somerset, South West England.
The introduction synthesises literature on rural geography, queer theory and the subfield of rural queer studies to suggest a queer theory of rural space. This positions rural as a spatial genre that ‘becomes’ with modes of satisfaction, contributing an affective perspective of spatial form to rural studies. Queer is positioned as a dis-solving force that breaks spatial forms and social norms apart so that they may become open to new configurations. ‘Geographies of churn’ are introduced as a spatial-and-affective theory of queer rural life and a subaltern strategy that disrupts, suspends, excites and re-arranges space.
Chapter two describes the thesis’ novel methodology, emphasising the innovative potential of video portrait co-creation as a tool for: relating in research, data generation, and analysis in the form of the ‘re-view’. As such, this thesis collapses the distinctions between method, analysis and research presentation, by ‘going with’ video’s formal and affective qualities towards speculative and intimate enquiry.
Chapters three, four and five respectively concern churn’s modalities - suspension, excitement and settling - and present seven co-created video portraits depicting rural queers in areas of their choosing. Chapter three demonstrates video’s potential for geographic research, considering composition and duration as modes for analysing spacetime, through which queer relations to rurality and racialisation surface. Chapter four orients to queer performance. In particular, drag is taken up as an embodied practice and mode of critique, by which both queerness and rurality become amplified, churn is excited and rural communities engaged as spectators. Chapter five considers the dis-connecting, flat and communalising practices of queers ‘settling down’ in the countryside, providing an ambivalent corollary to the assumption that queer life is necessarily loud, visible or straight-forwardly oppositional.
Lastly, the conclusion re-views the thesis to emphasise the significance of affective and queer nonsexualities in understanding subaltern emplacements. Taken as a whole, See Here constitutes a methodologically innovative and analytically rich mediation of rural social and emotional geographies, carving out space for the everyday politics and promises of queerness to be appreciated in a rural, English context.
| Date of Award | Mar 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Stephen Maddison (Supervisor) & Nicholas McGlynn (Supervisor) |