Synopses & Reviews
"One of the most important scholarly discourses on country music of this decade."
Jewly Hight, Wondering Sound
"The implications of Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music go far beyond the social and sexual politics of a popular music form. . . . With a light and confident hand and an eye on historical context . . . [Hubbs] makes a strong plea for the redneck and the queernot necessarily always different peopleas significant and positive actors in American life."
Brian Morton, Times Literary Supplement
"Academics dont pay enough attention to class. . . . Nadine Hubbs . . . makes the case for paying more attention . . . , suggesting the potential for real political collaboration between the working and the middle classes."
Kreg Abshire, New Books in Pop Culture
"Opens up a conversation about class thats long overdue."
Heather Seggel, The Progressive Populist
"An important book that is . . . as much about moral questions as it is about political, social, and cultural concerns. Our challenge is now to act upon the kind of fortitude and consciousness of resistance the author finds at the heart of working-class culture."
Ian Peddie, Popular Music and Society
No book in 2014 made me think more than Nadine Hubbss Rednecks, Queers And Country Music, a vigorously written study . . . whose argument is as tight as a groundhog trap in Tennessee.”
Books of the Year 2014, The Herald Scotland
"It has been a long time since a scholarly book gave me this much sheer pleasure. Hubbs's dazzling discussions of songs and music history are like candy, and I consumed them eagerly. The focus on class is long overdue and entirely welcome. This book exemplifies a revitalized and analytically potent resurrection of class studies, and one that is rich, embodied, and granular. The bibliography and literature reviews are themselves a breathtaking contribution, but that pales before the books own innovative claims and arguments. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music vaporizes a whole collection of received assumptions about the relationships among class, musical cultures, and politicsmost specifically, the pervasive characterizations of the middle class as queer tolerant and the working class as homophobic. A theoretical tour de force."Gayle Rubin, author of Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader
"In lucid, economical prose and in eloquent detail, Nadine Hubbs describes the cultural poetics of working-class subjectivity. She treats country music and the communities of taste (and distaste) to which it gives rise as rich sources of information about the symbolic language of social inequality in the United States. One of her brilliant insights is that toleration of homosexuality has gone from being a symptom of working-class pathology in the early twentieth century to being a manifestation of middle-class enlightenment by that centurys end, while homophobia has been transformed from an ostensibly reasonable and justified middle-class attitude to an allegedly bigoted working-class one. The result of this analysis of changing social attitudes is a major reconceptualization of the history and politics of sexuality in the U.S." David Halperin, author of How to be Gay
"Stunning! With this serious and sophisticated examination of musical culture among working class people, Hubbs gives us another myth-busting book about American musicality's entanglement with American gender and sexuality." Suzanne G Cusick, Professor of Music, New York University
"Rednecks, Queers and Country Music is a persuasive call to hear country music in totally new ways. Hubbs boldly and baldly identifies what is really at stake when we imagine country as the sound of bigotry, whether racist, sexist, or homophobic. She compels us to listen anew for the genres unexpected echoes of distinctively white working-class gender and sexual identities and for its persistent reminders that all sorts of marginalization resonate on related frequencies. Her arguments will upend contemporary orthodoxy about the politics of country music." Diane Pecknold, author of The Selling Sound: Country Music, Commercialism, and the Politics of Popular Culture
Review
"This is one of the most intellectually stimulating books I have read in a long time."
Review
Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music is an intellectual tour de force that offers a nuanced exploration of the ways that white middle-class attitudes toward country music and white working-class modes of discourse have led to the marginalization of the white working class in political and cultural discourse.
Synopsis
In her provocative new book
Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of Americas 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 Hubbss view, the popular phrase Ill 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 countrys 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.
Synopsis
"In lucid, economical prose and in eloquent detail, Nadine Hubbs describes the cultural poetics of working-class subjectivity. She treats country music and the communities of taste (and distaste) to which it gives rise as rich sources of information about the symbolic language of social inequality in the United States. One of her brilliant insights is that toleration of homosexuality has gone from being a symptom of working-class pathology in the early twentieth century to being a manifestation of middle-class enlightenment by that centurys end, while homophobia has been transformed from an ostensibly reasonable and justified middle-class attitude to an allegedly bigoted working-class one. The result of this analysis of changing social attitudes is a major reconceptualization of the history and politics of sexuality in the U.S." David Halperin, author of How to be Gay
About the Author
Nadine Hubbs is Professor of Women's Studies and Music, Faculty Associate in American Culture, and Director of the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI) at the University of Michigan; she is the author of the award-winning book The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (UC Press).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
INTRO
PART I. Rednecks and Country Music
1. Anything but Country
2. Sounding the Working-Class Subject
PART II. Rednecks, Country Music, and the Queer
3. Gender Deviance and Class Rebellion in Redneck Woman”
4. Fuck Aneta Briant” and the Queer Politics of Being Political
OUTRO
Notes
References
Subject Index
Song Index