Rednecks Queers and Country Music

About this book

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.