Rednecks, Queers, and Country MusicIn her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase "I’ll listen to anything but country" allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive "omnivore" musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how 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 frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture. |
Contents
| 1 | |
PART I REDNECKS AND COUNTRY MUSIC | 21 |
PART II REDNECKS COUNTRY MUSIC AND THE QUEER | 105 |
Outro | 159 |
Notes | 163 |
| 195 | |
| 209 | |
| 223 | |
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Common terms and phrases
accessed African American album audiences bigotry Bourdieu Bryson Chauncey Chely Wright class cultures Clean Hot Buns Coe’s communities context coun country music country songs country’s critique Cyphert David Allan Coe dominant culture example Fillingim Foo Fighters Forbis Frank’s Fuck Aneta Briant gender Gretchen Wilson Grossman hard country Hell Yeah hillbilly homophile homophobia homosexual identifies identity images individual Kansas thesis Keep It Clean Kusserow label Lawler lesbian LGBTQ listeners Loretta Lynn Love male Malone Merle Haggard middle middle-class middle-class culture moral notion one’s Ortner Outlaw Country percent persona perspective Peterson political poor and working-class queer race racial Redneck Woman resentment Rhetoric rock rural sexual singer Skeggs Snibbe and Markus social society song’s southern status style taste themes track transgender University Press values Virile Female Westboro Baptist Church white working class white working-class Wilson working-class cultural working-class subjects working-class women Wright