Title: QueerCrip History and the 1960s Spectacle of White Appalachian Poverty Tours, Ryan Lee Cartwright
Abstract: This chapter from Peculiar Places: A QueerCrip History of White Rural Nonconformity (Chicago, 2021) examines how disability, sexuality, and gender intertwined in concerns about white Appalachian poverty in the 1960s. When poverty was “rediscovered” in the 1960s, racialized political concerns sent “poverty tourists”—politicians, journalists, social workers, volunteers, and college students—flocking to predominately white communities in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and other parts of the central and southern Appalachian Mountains. Michael Harrington and other 1960s poverty warriors attributed the social problems of white rural America to a muted form of mental and economic depression, saying that poor people were “maimed in body and spirit.” Even so, white men with temporary physical disabilities were the poster child for War on Poverty publicity, despite the fact that disability rarely healed according to curative time and most War on Poverty program specifically excluded people with disabilities. After offering a queercrip analysis of white Appalachian culture-of-poverty theory, I turn my focus to the mundane, material conditions of two specific poverty tours. In the first, I examine a controversial presidential visit to a poor white family who became fodder for gossip when the expected rehabilitation narrative was disrupted by the complexities of being poor and disabled. In the second, through a social worker’s account of the anxiety that poor white West Virginia men faced in navigating poverty bureaucracy, I consider how mental disabilities such as depression combined with labyrinthine bureaucracies to make poor people feel estranged. (Content note: discussion of familial CSA on p. 120)
BIO: Ryan Lee Cartwright is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Cartwright’s research focuses on disability, gender, and sexuality on the social and spatial margins. His first book, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (University of Chicago Press, 2021), maps racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural US, from the 1910s to the 1990s. Cartwright’s second book examines how chronic illness came to be understood as a gendered, racialized “social burden” in the early-to-mid twentieth century US. His work has been funded by the ACLS, NEH, Smithsonian Institution, American Philosophical Society, and Hellman Family Foundation, among others. Prior to his appointment at the University of California, Davis, Cartwright was associate editor of MNopedia, a digital encyclopedia of Minnesota created by the Minnesota Historical Society.
Date
-