Peculiar Places narrates queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity in twentieth-century rural United States. Ryan Lee Cartwright contends that, during the last hundred years, rural American gossip about queer and peculiar white neighbors crystallized into a national optic of white social degeneracy. Cartwright points to a tension between the idyll (rooted in the national myth of the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer and his idealized family) and the anti-idyll (the aberrant sexuality, gender transgression, and anomalous bodies and minds that are associated with rural white populations). Cartwright examines the anti-idyll in different genres from the 1910s through the 1990s: popular science in the 1910s and early psquo;20s, documentary photography in the msquo;30s, news media in the Bsquo;50s, poverty tours in the osquo;60s, horror films in the esquo;70s and early msquo;80s, and documentary films in the 1990s.
