Queering the Midwest

Clare Forstie is Education Program Specialist at the University of Minnesota's Center for Educational Innovation. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University.

We are everywhere-even in small post-industrial cities in "flyover country." Queering the Midwest offers an astute analysis of the ambivalence many of us feel toward the LGBTQ communities that nurture us. We can't live with them, but can't live without them. It upends simple notions of progress, coming out, and even liberation without diminishing their importance for overcoming stigma and anchoring the self. * Arlene Stein, author of Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity * Queering the Midwest is a readable book about the complex way that community happens. I appreciated the way this research centers friendship instead of partners, organizations, or bars in the lives of LGBTQ people. This book makes us rethink the role of institutions and relationships in making LGBTQ community in small cities and in the Midwest. * Amy L. Stone, author of Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South * Forstie 'Midwesternizes' LGBTQ studies, convincingly demonstrating that conventional understandings of community gleaned from gayborhoods don't always hold water beyond the big city. It is impossible to be ambivalent about this timely account of the role of that emotion in LGBTQ life today. As rich and satisfying as mom's hotdish, Queering the Midwest is a landmark study. * Greggor Mattson, author of forthcoming he Cultural Politics of European Prostitution Reform: Governing Loose Women *