Distancing and Difference: Intragroup Boundaries and Rural LGBTQs

• In Event: 090 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Queer Sexual Communities

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with thirty-five LGBTQ people in a rural region of the Midwest, this paper documents the “intragroup boundaries” that LGBTQ people draw between themselves and other gay people. Participants reject the urban, gay male norm depicted in media and popular culture, as well as in some academic scholarship. Contrary to other scholarship and hypotheses about how marginalized communities construct identity and community, LGBTQ people in this region also distance themselves from other gay people. And rather than draw on local culture to construct a distinctly rural gay identity, they instead assert an “individualism.” LGBTQ people in this region describe drawing intragroup boundaries because of 1) the material, geographic, and cultural constraints making them unwilling and unable to identify with hegemonic depictions of what it means to be gay 2) a strategy for acceptance from the dominant heterosexual, religiously and politically conservative local community in which they live. Extending the concept of symbolic boundaries to include those who draw boundaries between themselves and members of their own sub-group, this paper highlights the unintended consequences and personal costs to LGBTQ people who employ this strategy, and the resulting difference and inequality that boundaries produce.

Author

• Holly Donovan, Boston University