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If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know that its subjects sweep a wide range of eras and locales: this year’s research has taken me to 17th century France, pre-Meiji Japan, Roaring 20s America and Renaissance Italy to name a few.
So it is a bit of an unusual pleasure to share a book review of a time and place much, much closer to home for yours truly: Appalachia. But when I stumbled upon Y’all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia with its stunning cover art, I couldn’t resist. This volume, edited by Z. Zane McNeill but shaped by contributions from seventeen authors, attempts to recast and reframe the dominant, overwhelmingly cishet narratives which are preloaded within discourse about Appalachia (a discourse which, curiously, often neglects and ignores actual Appalachian voices). But as the editor argues in the volume’s introduction, “[t]his collection is born out of optimism,” to write a new story of Appalachia, or at least showcase the “emerging” voices which have been shut out of it for so long.
Does Y’all Means All succeed in that ambition?
Back Home in the Hills
For those unfamiliar with my posts describing my personal journey, I hail from the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Knoxville, Tennessee. But those same posts confirm that, at least for me personally (and I suspect many others) there are deep tensions within the experience of growing up queer and Appalachian at the same time – tensions, perhaps, which have only been heightened over the last decade as “Appalachia” has taken on an especially turbulent political and social narrative amid wider American convulsions.
But that turbulent narrative is far from new to American social discourse and, as the manifold authors of Y’all Means All can attest, queerness is hardly new to being in, or of, Appalachia. The seventeen contributors to this expansive volume span the breadth, width and depth of Appalachia as a region, culture and history. Their identities cover a range of the queer spectrum, hitting the various letters of our beloved “Alphabet Mafia” acronym with alacrity. The themes and topics of their respective pieces were no less diverse.
I confess, as someone who spent her girlhood in the region and spends a great deal of time there even now, I was surprised and even amazed to see this volume on the Pride Month display at my local Barnes and Noble (in, you guessed it, Knoxville). It seemed like a book that was purposefully written as the next stepping stone to the journey of personal exploration I’ve wound through for the last several years – impossibly perfect for me.
Of course, the truth of reading this book – rather, grappling with its meanings and implications for my life thus far – was a bit more complicated.
Tolling Bells
At the risk of turning this review into an utterly dull “pros and cons” analysis, I prefer to start with highlighting those essays within this volume that I found most memorable, striking and relatable to my own experiences as a queer Appalachian. Essays, I suppose, that rang like tolling bells in my mind and kept me coming back to this volume over the months I spent digesting it. I suspect that another reader, reviewing the same seventeen essays, would reach an entirely different conclusion on their “favs” list based on their own responses to a given author or subject matter, and I concede that my list here is thus utterly subjective.
The volume itself begins strong with an essay by Beck Banks considering the parallels between transgender and Appalachian identity. Banks is a fellow East Tennessean, but I found more to love in their essay than just their background (and incisive critiques of now GOP Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance). I especially appreciated the discussion of “lesser bodies” and “othering” as those concepts are applied to both Appalachians and transgender people, and how challenging these ideas can be done on an intersectional basis to challenge wider systemic problems.
As a history buff at heart, I was also deeply moved by Samantha Allen’s essay in the volume’s second section on conducting queer historical research in Johnson City (I swear this review isn’t a love letter to Tennessee). This essay reveals the profound history of the LGBTQIA+ community of East Tennessee amid the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, the formation of an organization called “TriPride” which started pride celebrations in the region, and the individuals who lived and loved throughout these moments of local queer history.
Black queer perspectives are also prominent in this volume; I particularly enjoyed Heather Byrdie Harris’s essay on critical queer activism and their arguments for rewriting queer histories and centering Appalachia and the South as “cradles of social change”. Their illumination of “disidentification” as a strategy of resistance especially suitable to the queer Appalachian experience strikes me particularly as someone who has done a great deal of wrestling with what Appalachian identity means to me, and how it influences who’ve I’ve now become.
Each of these essays – and many others, such as those centering disability and aging among queer Appalachians – are richly developed and, to be frank, heavy material. One of my favorite contributions toward the end of Y’all Means All is Brent Watts’ essay on the Mothman – which casts the cryptid as a queer (or “queered” icon). This essay touches on the creative and spiritual aspects of queer identity in Appalachia. His analysis of the subversive Mothman within wider “folkloric” discourse focuses on the famed creature’s parallels to queer ideas and queer individuals. I admit that I found this essay simultaneously puzzling and fascinating, but it brings a dose of levity to the overall tenor of Y’all Means All.
On the other hand…
While there is much to appreciate in Y’all Means All, and nearly all readers could gain from picking it up, the book will not necessarily have universal appeal. The considerations I raise here are not traditional critiques, but rather caution signs for readers who may have a particular expectation or assumptions about this volume going in.
My greatest hesitation with recommending Y’all Means All boils down to structure and format; the volume is heavily influenced by, and reflective of, academic writing styles. I’ve noted that seventeen essays fill these pages with a tremendous amount of information. Much of this information is dense and pedagogical in nature, and some essays are more accessible to the average reader than others will be. It is unsurprising that various facets of queer and critical theory appear and reappear throughout the pages. While wholly appropriate to the volume, the uninitiated reader (or, say, a younger reader in high school or their early college years) might lack foundational knowledge in these concepts and find some essays and passages more challenging than others.
The heavily academic style, in some respects, also leaves the volume somewhat disjointed. Readers who pick up Y’all Means All should be prepared for a great deal of skipping back and forth between topic areas, themes and differing perspectives. While this is normal for an edited volume, readers should be aware that this is not a linear, conventional narrative going in and the contributions vary widely.
In this vein, readers should also not expect a volume centered around personal anecdotes; while some essays are indeed entirely or mostly reflective of the authors’ testimonies, most essays in this volume are dealing with a community or wider societal theme and the author’s opinions thereof (for example, aging queer populations or queer social media platforms). For some readers this may be a strength and their personal preference. For myself, I had hoped for more of the personal touch with individual (and collective) stories as my initial enthusiasm for the volume largely derived from curiosity about how other Appalachians experiences compare and contrast with mine.
Worth the Read?
In the grand scheme, these considerations are minor compared to what the volume has to offer. For an interested reader ready to grapple with the subject matter, Y’all Means All is an incisive survey into what queerness has and continues to represent in Appalachia – the people, the communities, the history and the region’s uncertain future.
To be sure, the volume is better suited for a reader who is already reasonably well-versed in queer subject matter and inquiry, and particularly a reader amenable to the aforementioned stylistic choices. That said, this book is useful (and indeed an important resource) far beyond reader groups local to Appalachia or even from the queer community itself. As with Appalachia itself, here there is something to learn for everyone.