Queer Country

Country music is often said to be “three chords and the truth.” But the country music industry and related musical genres have not been particularly friendly to queer or trans musicians. Queer country musicians have developed a strategy of sincerity to engage critically with the postmodern deconstruction of essentialism (through which queer and trans experience has been understood as liberatory but also dangerously rebellious) while continuing to desire authenticity (in which their identities are accepted as real, human, and understandable to a cisgender and straight audience). Queer Country argues that country and folk music’s fraught framing of common personhood, authenticity, and otherness (concepts especially important to and actively debated among transgender and queer people) are appealing in order to create stories of self, yet they simultaneously invite critique of tradition. Queer Country identifies a meaningful development in modern queer and transgender life and contemporary vernacular music, using ethnography, musical analysis, and historical methods to understand its contributions to changing notions of gender, genre, and tradition.