Visibility Interrupted

"Carly Thomsen’s Visibility Interrupted is a must-read for any LGBTQ (loving) people who have ever thought that being 'out, loud, and proud' was a good thing. Disclosing how visibility politics emerges out of urban spaces and presumes that the rural is unbecoming, Thomsen goes on to demonstrate what women in rural South Dakota and Minnesota can teach us about LGBTQ politics, the rural, and the relation between the two. Provocative, extensively researched, and delivered in Thomsen’s lively voice, this groundbreaking ‘queer archive’ offers a new understanding of sexuality as spatial and a more capacious politics inspired by LGBTQ rural life."—Rosemary Hennessy, Rice University

"Visibility Interrupted advances research and energizes debate in an emergent and under-examined area in LGBTQ studies: queer rurality. Not only does this work critique dominant queer metronormativity in the field, it also critically displaces the strongly masculinist conception of the bucolic and the rustic by focusing on LGBTQ women’s identity formation, world-making processes, and community-building practices in the rural Midwest. Carly Thomsen argues for complicating the queer rural Midwest and queerness in general by offering a critical optic that refuses the flattening of the pastoral and envisions alternative formations of LGBTQ future."—Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

"Despite decades of critique of visibility politics, the rural continues to persist as an inherently oppressive space for queers. This is an energizing read, both as a synthesis of these debates as well as a fresh take on the suturing of LGBTQ visibility to hegemonic constructs of race and capitalism. Uninterested in a politics of inclusion, Carly Thomsen artfully situates visibility as a form of labor—the work of producing and curating oneself inevitably for capitalism and for the state—that is unappealing and unnecessary for her rural lesbian interlocutors. Visibility therefore becomes a political aim that preempts other horizons of political action. Anchored in the growing scholarship on rural queer studies, Visibility Interrupted is also a major contribution to queer and feminist theory, critical race studies, and critical disability studies. The thought-provoking stories of these irreverent lesbians reveal the imaginative paucity at the heart of urban metronormative sexual cultures."—Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University

 

"As the first book-length study to focus on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) women in the rural Midwest, Thomsen’s Visibility Interrupted identifies and responds to the shortcomings of an LGBTQ activist agenda that views visibility as a foremost catalyst for social change."—Gender & Society

"A well-researched, notable addition to the expanding field of rural queer studies. Visibility Interrupted complicates assumptions about metronormativity, successfully demonstrating that LGBTQ people do live in rural settings and enjoy happy, liberated lives far from inferior to those of their urban counterparts. Focusing on LGBTQ women in the Midwest—specifically South Dakota and Minnesota—the book also aids in addressing the dearth of queer studies of women when compared to those of gay men."—Choice