Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music

Abstract

Abstract I’ll listen to anything but country. This popular phrase allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive, “omnivore” musical tastes, with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how US provincial white working people have emerged, since the 1970s, as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that render white working folk a perpetual bigot class. With rigorous class analysis, Hubbs traces changes in American tolerance over time and demonstrates that the working-class homophobe is a figure with a recent history. For most of the twentieth century, middle-class respectability rested on rejecting as “deviant” both queer people and the working-class acceptance of them. Today, homophobia is attached to the working-class “masses,” and middle-class Americans affirm their distinguished individualism by rejecting country music and the working-class bigotry it symbolizes. Skillfully weaving together historical inquiry, an examination of classed cultural repertoires, and a close listening to country songs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics.

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