NOLOSE, Intersectional Politics, and the Urban/Rural Queer Split

[starstealingirl]

The theme of this year's NOLOSE conference was "More Than Just Fat: The Intersection of All Our Identities." The conference's concentration on building a complex, coalitional movement recognizing the need to take a variety of identities and experiences into account-- for example, race, disability, trans identity, age, and the experiences of "

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Gini's Response Part 1

[giniliz]

Thanks for getting this written up and this discussion going somewhere beyond just some frustrated conversations between the two of us. Some additional thoughts of mine regarding rural fat queer radicalness:

I do, indeed, prefer smaller and even slightly more conservative areas. I like being a big fish, and I also like being The Local Radical. Radical in a small conservative town, however, may not look radical to those who are from more progressive and urban areas. I work in a job where I honestly have to define "GLBT" every single day for people on campus, and tossing in a Q or switching up the L and the G are the hot "new" topics of debate. I love retreating to space (such as NOLOSE) where such conversations are entirely old and I can catch the pulse of a larger movement that is moving forward at a faster pace, but the practical matter remains that I cannot take a whole suitcase of language, ideas, etc from such space and just plop them into rural southern Illinois and expect them to work.

As for queerness and fatness in areas such as this, a large part of it is due to practical realities of population density. If you have 450 people in a town (as the sign outside Makanda actually claims), the number of fatties and the number of queers is going to be small. The overlap is going to be, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that a large need I see working in areas like this is for tools and frames that can move people of all identities to a broader understanding of social justice and (perhaps without using the phrase too loudly) radical politics. Queer fat activism for me in this time and place is going to have to involve working with groups on issues of poverty, racism, reproductive rights, etc... and bringing my queer fat self to those tables. In a rural area, intersectionality in political action is practically a given, because the 10 progressive people in the area are all simultaneously running the entire show of all progressive action for the area. There often just aren't enough of us to have isolated causes that are completely unaware of one another. That said, however, I do see some groups in this area (and others in which I have lived) falling into the trap of social justice issue isolation. I have seen it lead to burnout, fighting over limited time and resources, etc. And I have seen it lead to no change whatsoever. Rural areas are ripe for intersectional approaches to activism.

You brought up the matter of college and university campuses. That alone deserves some focused attention, in my opinion. Often in conservative areas and rural areas (frequently, though not always, the same areas) that house a university, the town-gown divide is sharp, and there is a great deal of community distrust for the "liberal politics" flowing from the educational institution. Many students find themselves just biding their time until they can escape and go back to a city, but how might that relationship be altered? I think there needs to be some conversation, especially for those of us who expect to remain in rural areas, about how to connect with the surrounding rural areas instead of seeing them as hopeless or irrelevant.

When I lived in Macon, I learned a bit about the "Rural Pride Initiative" that sought to provide support and resources and community for LGBT folk living away from Atlanta. Their goal was to create viable options other than moving to the city. As a friend and I were discussing just yesterday, the world could probably use a few more queer fat farmers! The priorities of the queer fat farmer, however, are likely to be pretty darn different from those found in the urban centers of the current developing movement. The language, communication strategies, etc may be different. Are we prepared to deal with that? (Side note: related matters even came up at the Town Hall meeting when a few folks expressed a desire to be contacted by phone instead of email.) Do we have space to recognize the radical awesomeness of a queer fat farmer who gets together with 2 other nice folks in town once a week to eat pie and talk about how to get some better people on the school board to address the abstinence-only sex "education" curriculum?