Home Is Where Your Politics Are

Queer Activism in the U.S. South and South Africa

By Jessica A. Scott

Rutgers University Press

Home Is Where Your Politics Are is a transnational consideration of queer and trans activism in the US South and South Africa. Through ethnographic exploration of queer and trans activist work in both places, Jessica Scott paints a vibrant picture of what life is like in relation to a narrative that says that queer life is harder, if not impossible, in rural areas and on the African continent. The book asks questions like, what do activists in these places care about and how do stories about where they live get in the way of the life they envision for the queer and trans people for whom they advocate? Answers to these questions provide insight that only these activists have, into the complexity of locally based advocacy strategies in a globalized world.

Jessica Scott has brilliantly pulled the rug out from under the feet of comparative studies. Empirically and theoretically sophisticated, this tour de force gracefully explodes the blueprint of metronormativity in queer research and activism in the United States and South Africa. By understanding the processes through which danger/inhospitability is amplified and practices invested in gerrymandering sexual geographies, this mature queer work of homemaking and placemaking announces the expiration date of geopolitical and metronormative exceptionalisms. S. N. Nyeck, author of African(a) Queer Presence: Ethics and Politics of Negotiation

Home Is Where Your Politics Are is a timely and remarkable book that uncovers the relationship between queerness and land in the US South and South Africa. Deeply reflexive in her positionality and methodological embeddedness, Scott forces us to rethink rural spaces and the political activism that queer people engage in to make and shape their lands. A necessary book for all those invested in transnational queer activist struggles for land, home and belonging. Zethu Matebeni, co-editor of Beyond the Mountain: Queer Life in "Africa’s Gay Capital"

JESSICA A. SCOTT is an associate professor of gender studies at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia.

1 Introduction
2 Positionality and Method
3 Sites of Struggle
4 Welcome to Modernity
5 Metronormativity as Alienation
6 Queer Organizing in Out-of-the-Way Places
7 When Whiteness Gets in the Way
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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