Sexuality, Race, and Space in the Rural Inland Pacific Northwest.

Scholarly and popular understandings of rural transgender and queer people still tend to assume that they can only live well by moving to urban places. These metronormative narratives suggest that rural queer and trans lives are unlivable or impossible. Yet, much scholarly and activist work in recent years demonstrates that, despite these narratives, queer and trans people do live and even thrive in these impossible places. Drawing on an analysis of interviews with queer and transgender people living in the rural inland Pacific Northwest, this paper expands the geographic scope of LGBTQ research and is part of a larger effort to show how space and place are primary to understanding the production of sexual, gender, and racial inequality. The findings contribute to increased spatial understandings of intersecting inequalities along with knowledge of rural queer and transgender lives by focusing on what queer people in which rural spaces are brought into the fold of rural communities and who is excluded. Specifically, the analysis examines how: first, differences of scale and population density among rural areas create unexpected terms of inclusion and exclusion. Second, the inclusion, or at least tolerance, of some white queer and trans people is premised on rural specific manifestations of heteropatriarchy and settler claims to rural land. Overall, this paper shows that sexuality, gender, race, and nation are intimately intertwined and shaped by the particular histories and contemporary social dynamics of the places where rural queer and transgender people live their everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]