Dissertation Research 

Our current understanding of queer subjectivity and its emergence has been largely understood through metronormative frameworks in which the existence of queer people outside the city is rendered impossible. However, a growing body of research on rural queer life has illuminated how queer people negotiate their identities, leaving how queer subjectivity is governed across the institutional contexts of the family, religion, and the state, undertheorized in contexts outside the metropole.

In addressing this gap in our current understanding, I propose a theory of governing silence(s) to address how the silence encountered across the institutional landscape governs the expression of gender and sexuality. Governing silence(s) are the structuring rhetorics deployed within institutional settings by authoritative actors that seek to foreclose vocabularies of selfhood. As a consequence, the intended silence provokes LGBTQ+ Mississippians into confronting and articulating a queer selfhood, even under oppressive contexts.

This dissertation employs the use of archival data from two archives—Queer Mississippi Histories Project at the University of Mississippi and GAZE magazine Digital Archive at Rhodes College—in theorizing governing silence(s) and their impacts across the institutional settings of the family, religion, and the state.

In examining each of these institutional settings, I found that:

• Governing silence(s) have emerged as a defining discursive tool in the governance of gender and sexual expression in contemporary society.

• The family, as an institution, plays a distinctive role in the deployment of governing silence(s) and often does so in ways that directly impact the articulation of a queer subjectivity.

• Religion, and more specifically evangelical Christianity, informs and saturates the gender and sexual politics of Mississippi structuring the expressive and embodied parameters of normative gender and sexual subjectivity

• The state, in collusion with other institutions, has shifted away from a quiet tolerance of the LGBTQ+ community toward the explicit repudiation, condemnation, and suppression of queer subjects

• Life history interviews revealed how refashioning the silences one encountered when coming out of the closet, rejecting homophobic discourse, and embracing a visible queer presence in their community became an effective means by which LGBTQ+ Mississippians confronted and disrupted governing silence(s).

In elevating the normative parameters around a gendered and sexual self, governing silence(s) seek to reproduce the conventional Western norms associated with the contemporary expression of gender and sexuality. Such norms, rooted in the somatic fictions of heteronormativity and the gender binary, establish and enforce the acceptable boundaries of normative/desirable/ (re)productive subjectivities.

The central questions that this research will addresses are the following:

• How might geographic location, especially outside metropolitan contexts, influence and inform how queer individuals come to form a queer subjectivity?

•  How do rural queer folks come to understand their identity within larger discourses of queerness?

•  How do state and localized politics and culture impact the formation of queer subjectivity in rural contexts?