Metro-Chauvinism K

Ballroom Link
The affs invocation of the drag ballroom reflects the bias of urban
normalization in queer scholarship; this methodology frames queer
identity as distinctively metropolitan and crowds out rural queer
identities
Mentanko 13
Josh Mentanko (graduate student in history at York University, studying modern Mexican cultural history). Just Queer Folks:
Gender and Sexuality in Rural America by Colin R. Johnson. Lambda Literary. 20 August 2013.
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/08/20/just-queer-folks-gender-and-sexuality-in-rural-america-by-colin-r-johnson/

The popular narrative of gay liberation seems inseparable from the urban landscape.
From the drag balls of 1920s Harlem to the Stonewall Riots to the devastation of HIV/AIDS, rural
Americas participation in gay history is largely restricted to its renowned
repressiveness, propelling gay men and women to coastal cities where they find
tolerance and each other. In Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America, Colin R. Johnson seeks
to disrupt the story of rural prejudice and urban liberation with his account of rural
Americas distinct contributions to modern sexual identities. John DEmilios landmark essay
Capitalism and Gay Identity describes how postwar urbanization created opportunities for young, newly independent gay men and
women to create sexual communities outside of the stifling effects of familial and small-town supervision. While paying respect to
DEmilios contributions to writing a history of American sexuality, Johnson relies on DEmilios thesis as a foil for his own study.
Johnson might overstate the impact of DEmilios essay to understandings of American sexual history, but the

point that the

majority of gay histories have been written by men who experienced urban gay
liberation movements of the 1970s is well taken. In writing a history of sexual identities, Johnson sees
a gap for the story of rural sexuality left by historians , including DEmilio, whose writings were
motivated by historically specific political investments (8). Johnsons goal is two-fold,
and it drives the organization of his study: 1) highlight the rural origins of modern American sexual
identities and 2) show how urban, mostly governmental, institutions targeted distinct
rural sexual practices for reform. Throughout the period under study, the goal of these urban
interlopers was to spread knowledge about proper sexual behaviour , which typically occurred
between one man and woman united by marriage. Reformers were especially eager to eliminate
bestiality, which was seen as the major problem in rural sexuality.

RTBF Metaphor Link

Carloss deployment of the right to be forgotten is an additional
link. Selective forgetting is a tool that modern rural communities
used to erase their queer histories.
Johnson 13
Colin R. Johnson (Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies, History and Human
Biology at Indiana University Bloomington). Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. Temple University Press
(June 14, 2013). http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2262_reg.html

One of the most curious aspects of historical knowledge is the centrally important
role that forgetting plays in its production. Indeed, if knowledge of the past was never
lost by individuals or societies, there would be no compelling reason to write history. At
the very least, whatever qualified as historical knowledge under such conditions would undoubtedly look very different from what
typically passes for historical knowledge in our world, plagued as it is by amnesia. Amnesia

may not be the best

word to characterize the kind of forgetting that prompts the production of new historical
knowledge, however, because, although it is assuredly selective, this forgetting
is seldom arbitrary. Consider the state of contemporary knowledge about same-sex
intimacy and gender nonconformity in rural and small-town America. In their 1948 study Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male, sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey and colleagues observed rather
nonchalantly that ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in
general were all widely known to engage in same-sex sexual activities. These are men who have
faced the rigors of nature in the wild, Kinsey explained. They live on realities and on a minimum of theory. For Kinsey, saying that
these men lived on realities and a minimum of theory meant that they tended to sidestep the thorny issue of the relation of sex and
identity in favor of a somewhat less troubled and troubling pragmatics of pleasure. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex
is sex, Kinsey explained, irrespective of the nature of the partner with whom the relation is had. . . . Such groups of hard-riding,
hard-hitting assertive males would not tolerate the affections of some city groups that are involved in the homosexual [sic]; but this,
as far as they can see, has little to do with the question of having sexual relations with other men.1 Like

most people
struggling to generalize about the meaning of experiences that are as particular as sex or
feelings about sex, Kinsey clearly bears the mark of his own place in history. For
example, while it makes sense that he does not mention women, given the fact that his comments were made in the context of a
study that deals exclusively with male sexual behavior, his decision to characterize these particular men as
hard-riding, hard-hitting, assertive, and notably realist betrays a fairly uncritical
embrace of a very specific vision of American manhood and masculinity deeply rooted in
a frontier mythology that historian Peter Boag contends had itself been actively cleansed of any trace of gender ambiguity
by the time Kinsey made these observations.2 Still, Kinsey eventually managed to get his point: the highest frequencies of the
homosexual which we have ever secured anywhere, he wrote, have been in particular rural communities in some of the more
remote sections of the country. . . . This

type of rural homosexuality contradicts the theory that

homosexuality in itself is an urban product.3 Because Kinsey characterized these
findings as a contradiction of an existing theory regarding the origin of homosexuality,
we can fairly assume that he expected that they would come as a surprise to many
readers in 1948. Given the social and political climate of postwar America, it is easy to understand why. After all, as historian
David K. Johnson has shown, at the time perverts and sexual degenerates were far more likely to be imagined sitting in desk
chairs at the U.S. State Departments oflfices in Washington, D.C., than occupying horse saddles.4

The interesting

question for my purposes, however, is why this passage still seems surprising
today , roughly three and half decades into the collective scholarly enterprise of writing
the history of gender and sexuality in the United States and some sixty years after
Kinsey pointed to a long and extensive history of same-sex sexual behavior and gender

nonconformity in rural communities. To answer that question in anything except the most superficial manner, we
must return to certain aspects of Kinseys statement, particularly his oblique reference to a theory that homosexuality is itself an
urban product and his mobilization of the term rural itself. First, however, let me describe the scope of this book and explain the
contribution it seeks to make. This book argues that rural and small-town Americans witnessed a gradual normalization of the
discourses of gender and sexuality over the course of the twentieth century. Specifically, it contends that an

emerging
discourse of sexuality permeated the American landscape during the first half of the
twentieth century and in so doing transformed the way that many rural Americans made
sense of gender and sexual behavior. Sometimes this transformation occurred when farmers encountered
itinerant sex educators or rural social reformers bent on uplifting the degenerate countryside by ministering the gospel of moral
and sexual hygiene. Other times it happened when young men from farming families enrolled in courses on selective breeding at
land-grant colleges and universities-courses that quickly turned toward the subject of eugenics and the importance of monitoring
sexual behavior in human beings. On still other occasions it happened when rural women felt ashamed while perusing the pages of
newspapers or ready-to-wear clothing catalogues and found massproduced representations of feminine beauty that seemed in no
way related to them, their bodies, or the conditions under which they lived and worked. All

of these encounters
caused rural Americans to question long-held beliefs about race, class, sex, and gender.
Over time, such encounters also prompted many of them to reshape and reorder
those beliefs in deference to an increasingly national sensibility about the
meaning of sex and gender, a sensibility that typically was presented as being more
modern and therefore superior to their own. In making the case that rural and small-town Americans
thinking about gender and sexuality was gradually transformed over the course of the twentieth century, this book both
builds on and largely concurs with much existing scholarship documenting what might
be referred to as the heteronormalization of American culture as a whole. Where it
differs from some of that scholarship, however, is in its insistence that, as a process,
heteronormalization was neither a particularly smooth one in rural areas and small
towns, nor uncontested. This book maintains that during the twentieth centurys early decades,
especially, what looks from todays perspective like decidedly queer behavior was
anything but uncommon or unheard of in the hinterland. For example, certain populations, particularly
populations of laboring rural men, regarded sex between men as acceptable if women were nowhere to be found. Similarly, in small
towns, it was often assumed that one of the local tomboys or sissies might simply never outgrow their juvenile resistance to
becoming a proper young lady or a well-mannered young gentleman. Later, during the Great Depression, when hundreds of
thousands of young men from decimated farms and beleaguered small towns left home to work in Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
camps throughout the United States, they brought many of these attitudes with them. These

men created an
expansive homosocial world in which cross-dressing and eroticized horseplay were seen
as largely unremarkable pastimes pursued in the context of an emergency work relief program that had, ironically,
been created primarily to preserve their endangered manhood.

Bringing the Ballroom to Debate Link & Turn

The 1ACs attempt to bring the ballroom into this space relies on an
implicit privileging of the urban. The rural is always too vast and too
vague to fit into local praxis. The assumption that the urban
ballroom can be neutral elides historical context and dooms the
perm.
Johnson 13
Colin R. Johnson (Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies, History and Human
Biology at Indiana University Bloomington). Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. Temple University Press
(June 14, 2013). http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2262_reg.html

If it has at times been difficult for scholars to contemplate what a history of queer life in
rural America might look like because their own historical circumstances made the
privileging of identity as an analytic category seem not only prudent but also necessary,
doing so has also been difficult because the very idea of the rural is vexed at an
epistemological level. This is because the terms urban and rural describe very different
things. Since the words are often used as antonyms, this statement will probably come as little surprise. But antonymy is not
quite the kind of difference that I mean. What I mean is that they are qualitatively different, not in the sense that they are
qualitatively opposite terms, like tall and short, but in the sense that they are qualitatively mismatched, like apples and
oranges. The fact that apples and oranges are both fruits may make them seem like a reasonable pairing, but they do not form an
antonymous dichotomy, since one could just as easily substitute kiwi fruit for oranges. As

such, they form what Eve

Sedgwick might call a binarism: a pair of terms that operate as if they are exact
opposites when, in fact, they are not. Beyond asserting opposite-ness in place of
difference, binarisms also help to neutralize our awareness of power differentials by
obscuring the fact that one term is almost always valorized in relation to the other. Thus,
difference becomes evidence of natural complementarity while relative privilege is
reduced to mere difference. Under this formulation, determining whether urban or
rural is the more valorized of the two often depends on the context in which these
terms are used. Where the practice of writing the history of gender and sexuality is
concerned, however, I would argue that urban, or metropolitan, has functioned very
much as the valorized term. Whatever their advantages or disadvantages may be as actual places in which to live, cities
are valorized as spaces in a conceptual sense to the extent that their demographic density and geographic specificity make it

Because
the scale of modern urban life is both that of the individual and that of the masses,
whatever happens in cities seems to register as being meaningful on both a personal and
social level. When discussing urban space, it is comparatively easy to leap from extreme
specificity to broad generality without even necessarily noticing that one is doing so. For
relatively easy-and I stress the term relatively-to analyze and discuss them as social systems that change over time.

example, one riot becomes a turning point in the history of group consciousness; one bar becomes the geographical epicenter of a
movement.24 By

contrast, the sense of geographical enormity that the term rural implies
often seems to make whatever it is too vague and too demographically diffuse to
qualify as legitimately representative of anything in any historical sense. The very vastness that
the terms nonmetropolitan otherness suggests often seems to have the effect of rendering the territory that it describes completely
irrelevant with respect to what might reasonably be considered American society as a whole.25 As

such, anything that

happens there-wherever there may be-seems either premature or belated, overly
local or underly national, too banal, or so in extremis that it simply cannot, or ought not,
bear the weight of social or historiographical generalization. If the rural is often seen as being
conceptually too small or too big to organize meaningful historical claims around, the urban is usually regarded as

being appropriately scaled for the purpose of making generalizable claims on the
strength of numerous examples.

Case Turn
Metro-chauvinism turns the case. The supremacy of the urban is the
root cause of status quo hetero-normativity.
Munt 13
Sally R. Munt (professor of gender and cultural studies, and director of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Sussex).
Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America, by Colin R. Johnson. Times Higher Education. 26 September 2013.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/just-queer-folks-gender-and-sexuality-in-rural-america-by-colin-rjohnson/2007557.article
Colin Johnsons pioneering book argues that the

way we think about modern lesbian, gay and queer

identity forms a kind of metro-chauvinism. Western gay culture read as something
formed out of the benevolence of urban capitalism reeks of the romanticisation of the
American city as a place of freedom. To be urban is, of course, to be urbane, and hence procuring laissez-faire
permission to be queer. Kath Westons depiction of LGBTQ history in her 1995 paper, Get thee to a big city: Sexual imaginary and
the great gay migration, has unintentionally served as the sine qua non of sexual possibility: that to

be queer, one must

adopt metropolitan values and race right outta that little town. Small town, small
mind has become a self-evident truth. This social history of rural and small-town
America punches such complacent urbanism (in which rural = backward, and urban =
progressive) on its nose. Instead, Just Queer Folks takes the reader on a journey through the non-metropolitan US in the
first half of the 20th century, observing how heteronormalisation was imposed on the back roads of the
nation by centralised state discourse and the conservative forces of capitalism. Via
carefully prepared case study after case study, Johnson shows us how largely poor and
working-class men and women lived out their queer diversity in situ, and he argues that small
towns and rural communities accommodated eccentricity and often protected their
own. Throughout, he reviews the dominant idea of the queer social by inviting reconsideration of the dynamics of alterity and
exclusion, and challenges the preconception that to be queer is to be urban, white and middle class. There are two types of framing
that organise queer sociality: the distinctive and the diffuse. The first way in which we may consider queer sociality is with reference
to the distinctively queer, in which we imagine all the ways in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer peoples form
their own communities of affinity and build up coherent, discrete and overlapping social worlds in which to belong. We can identify
common structural elements or distinctive characteristics within a subcultural formation such as queer. The second way in which
we may consider queer sociality is with reference to the diffusely queer, in which we grapple with how the social is contested and
in one way or another, or in various ways, always shot through with the pink thread of queer. Imagine all the myriad ways in which
our societies can be described as perversely charged with deconstructive elements. Johnsons acute social and cultural analysis
argues for the diffusely queer, but in doing so he also gives great detail of just how agrarian geographies sustained and protected
their queer sensibilities. Whether

he is talking about homosocial hobos before and during the

Great Depression, camp life in Roosevelts Civilian Conservation Corps or the hard
women of the rural poor, the author writes unsentimentally and respectfully about the
types of queer performances that permeated ordinary America. He links state
programmes and large economic transitions to the nationalisation of middle-class
morality, showing how ultimately the urban triumphed and provided a catalyst to queer
migration. Commenting on his own queer childhood in Illinois, Johnson says: I spent
much of my own adolescence misreading the homophobia I encountered there as being
somehow uniquely local in origin. As I would later discover, however, it wasnt local; it was everywhere. In Just
Queer Folks, he both reorients a clich of rural backwardness and challenges the convention
that metropolitan gays somehow have it easy. It is his political acuity, grounded in meticulous archival
evidence, that makes this social history so good.

Alternative
The alternative is to find home on the range. The range will never be
as clear or easy to define as the ballroom, but that is precisely why the
alternative is key to rupture the metro-normative imagery of the
status quo. Focus on particular urban places like the ballroom allows
the right-wing to redefine the rural in a heteronormative fashion. The
subtle reframing of the alt is key to reclaim the rural as a site for
queer liberation.
Johnson 13
Colin R. Johnson (Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies, History and Human
Biology at Indiana University Bloomington). Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. Temple University Press
(June 14, 2013). http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2262_reg.html

Although histories of gender and sexuality that take particular urban spaces as their
first organizing principle will probably always end up appearing to make more
sense than histories that take the rural in its place, this does not necessarily mean
that they are more accurate. What it means is that the scale of the narratives such
histories tend to lay out are often easier to grasp in a conceptual sense. Unlike rural
areas, cities are both particular places and representative spaces. For this reason,
historians will always be able to justify focusing sustained attention on particular urban
social systems.26 So long as there remains space on library shelves to house them, every book that meticulously documents
the rise of lesbian and gay culture in an American city will represent a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the history
of gender and sexuality in the United States. The

stakes are somewhat different when one moves

beyond the halls of the college or university, however. Outside of academe, Americans
continue to clash bitterly over homosexualitys proper place in American culture. If
Richard Nixon attempted to stoke the conservative imaginary in 1969 by positing the
existence of a silent majority, conservatives today often invoke rural and small-town
America for much the same purpose. The difference, as Lauren Berlant has noted, is that simple majoritarianism
no longer serves as the basis on which conservatives make claims for the urgency or legitimacy of their positions. Rather, they draw
heavily on the minoritarian logic of the American Civil Rights Movement, depicting themselves and their conservative ideology as

Rurality
serves a crucial function within this polemic. Precisely because the term rural evokes
the image of a sprawling geography that is either in a state of precipitous population
decline or already devoid of human life, it is the perfect spatial homologue for right-wing
polemic. On one hand, rural life is depicted as what is most typically American , if by typical
one means that form of life characteristic of the most number of square miles. On the other hand, rural life is also
depicted as increasingly untenable, a threatened form of existence preserved by a
struggling minority under constant siege by the forces of globalization. I have no particular
benighted, besieged, and at the mercy of powerful special interests that threaten to drive them to extinction.27

objection to either of these representations of nonmetropolitan life in the United States today, since both are accurate to some
degree. What

does concern me, however, is the alarming ease with which right-wing pundits
seem to be able to mobilize the connotative extremities of the term rural to further a
heteronormative, and often downright homophobic, political agenda. For example, on August 22,
2001, a Washington Post article reported that the number of same-sex couples in the United States had exceeded half a million for
the first time. Demographers agreed that this number underrepresented the true size of the lesbian and gay population in the United
States, since it did not include either members of same-sex couples who had elected not to report their relationship as a domestic
partnership or single lesbians and gay men. What it clearly did represent, however, was a threefold increase over similar statistics
gathered ten years earlier. Already on guard, conservative pundits fired back, insisting that the homosexual lifestyle remained a
regrettable choice of a geographically isolated minority. Speaking on behalf of the Family Research Council, Kristin Hansen noted

that What weve seen in the numbers thus far is that homosexuals are located by and large in urban areas. The fact that they are
located mostly in cities does not indicate that homosexuality is widespread.28 Given the fact that more than three quarters of all

One thing that it

certainly suggests is that the discourse of sexuality in the modern United States is a
profoundly spatial one. Precisely because the discourse of sexual identity has
Americans live in statistically urban areas today, one is naturally left to wonder what it does indicate.

evolved over the last century in spatial terms because where Americans find
themselves has come to play such an important role in determining what kind of
people they are free to becomethe solvency of political claims that are organized
around the issue of sexual identity is likely to be strengthened or weakened by the
subtlest shift in emphasis in arguments about what does and does not constitute
the norm where American geography is concerned.

Role of the Judge & Ballot

The role of the judge is to be a queer historian, complicating the
urbanization of queer historiography. Use the ballot to rewrite the
queer history of the rural.
Status quo metro-chauvinism has retconned queer rural histories and
lexicons into the urban paradigm. Queer rural historiography is key
to reclaim the rural as a site for queer liberation.
Mentanko 13
Josh Mentanko (graduate student in history at York University, studying modern Mexican cultural history). Just Queer Folks:
Gender and Sexuality in Rural America by Colin R. Johnson. Lambda Literary. 20 August 2013.
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/08/20/just-queer-folks-gender-and-sexuality-in-rural-america-by-colin-r-johnson/
The second part of Just Queer Folks focuses on the itinerant working poor of the interwar period. Popularly

known as
tramps and hobos, the men who drifted across 1930s America in search of work
employed a lexicon for describing sexual relations between men that overlapped with
prisons and urban environments. Despite this, much of the historiography of sexuality
presumes the urban origins of terms like wolf and punk (used to describe the active and passive
participants respectively in homosexual sex). Johnson makes us question the essential
urbanness of early twentieth-century male sexual cultures by positing their
rural origins in the same way Regina Kunzel argued we should make room for the distinct contributions of the penitentiary in
Criminal Intimacy. Just Queer Folks aims to illustrate the rural origins and complicate the
story of rural prejudice not by showing what was so particularly gay, in the
modern sense, about these places, but by revealing the array of sexual identities and
practices that were accommodated across rural America before World War II. Combating the
insufferably cramped logic of modern sexual identitarianism (18), Johnson defines his methodology as
queer historicist as opposed to studying traditional social history, which sought to
uncover traces of the present identities in the past. Just Queer Folks succeeds by finding an astonishing
variety of queer activities in the past whose queerness has become illegible to us today. The final two chapterson
the idealized male bonding of government work camps in the 1930s contrasted with the
shame felt by rural women in response to feminine marketing of clothing and
appearance from urban areasillustrate why a queer historicist approach has
expanded the range of materials to study sexual history. Sedgwicks
description of shame as a fundamentally queer affect allows Johnson to include hard
women, the famous dust bowl era mothers with their broken shoes, bad teeth, and
weather-beaten faces, in a story of queer rural history because normative femininity ,
conveyed to them through institutions and commercial marketing, rendered their womanhood perpetually
uncertain. While rural womens claim to femininity was weakened by their geographic
isolation, all male work in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps celebrated the
hard work of rural life. Men lived communally, entertained each other with genderbending performances, and celebrated the male physique honed by hard labour in body
building competitions. Johnson attempts to make the point that because the hardened

bodies of farm wives confounded gender norms, they qualify as a kind of queer figure ,
made to feel shame for their opposition to normative gender notions. The men in CCC camps, in
contrast to rural women, had their masculinity bolstered by their experiences in the CCC. Although their behavior
reads as non-normative from the standpoint of contemporary sexual and gender norms,
rural, government-sponsored work camps of the 1930s seemed to indulge aspects of it,
including mock drag performances. The tolerance of certain queer practices in the
CCC illustrates the rural origins of aspects of queer culture, such as 1950s physique culture,
proving that rural America could even provide a refuge from intolerance .
The CCC camps also reveal how the normative gender expectations of rural men and women resulted in divergent experiences,

where the roughness of rural life left women feeling shame and men feeling pride. Johnsons Just Queer Folks expands

the

repertoire of sources available to historians studying American sexuality and, most

importantly, convincingly argues that a queer rural history requires greater
attention for its contribution to the development of modern sexual identities, as well
as resistances to them. Although the scope of Johnsons conclusions do are not always matched with equal breadth and
diversity of sources, those sources consistently fascinate and surprise, and his readings of hard women portraits in particular
display an agile working of queer historicism to chart new territory of historical investigation.

Case
The law is malleable and optimism is justified; pessimism ignores
specific reforms that both achieved lasting reductions racial
inequality and spilled over to broader social movements
Omi and Winant 13
Michael Omi (Sociologist at UC Berkeley, focusing on antiracism scholarship and Asian American studies) and Howard Winant
(Professor of Sociology affiliated with the Black Studies and Chicana/o Studies departments of UC Santa Barbara), Resistance is
futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, Special Issue: Symposium Rethinking Racial Formation Theory. 2013.

Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and
permanent. There is little sense that the white racial frame evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time.
They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely a distraction from more
ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society (Feagin and Elias
In

2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call surface flexibility to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but
are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase racial democracy is an oxymoron a
word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete
democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA,

we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial
democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic
policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the

present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to
restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites employment, health,
education persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime
home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices;

It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and

Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout US
history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that
have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era. Feagin and Elias claim that
we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement ,
and that we overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial
inequalities (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about racial reaction in
many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously.

a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in

While we argue that the right wing was able to rearticulate race and racism
issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement , we also believe that there are
limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape. So we agree
that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that
is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that
Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved
irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the
results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of
the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights
Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v.
Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the
substantial agreement with us.

late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his interest convergence hypothesis effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's
famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 We have lost the South for a generation count as

The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways

convergence?
. As Antonio Gramsci argues,
hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this
process; here the US racial regime under movement pressure was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms which he calls
passive revolutions cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the

important if partial victories that shifted the racial

state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further
victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social
interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society . Indeed we have argued that in many ways the
realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were

most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA
was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not
only the inclusion of racially defined others and the democratization of structurally
racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil
society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and
deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by
the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality,
social justice and inclusion accomplished by other new social movements: second-wave
feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and anti-war
movements

among others. By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social

movements were subject to the same rearticulation (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of colourblindness and its variants; indeed all these
movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their
confrontations with the various backlash phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of colourblindness, reveal the
transformative character of the politicization of the social. While it is not possible here to explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption
of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti-democratic social movements
that are evident in US politics today. What are the political implications of contemporary racial trends? Feagin and Elias's use of racial categories can be imprecise. This is not
their problem alone; anyone writing about race and racism needs to frame terms with care and precision, and we undoubtedly get fuzzy too from time to time. The absence of a
careful approach leads to racial lumping and essentialisms of various kinds. This imprecision is heightened in polemic. In the Feagin and Elias essay the term whites at times
refers to all whites, white elites, dominant white actors and very exceptionally, anti-racist whites, a category in which we presume they would place themselves. Although the
terms black, African American and Latino appear, the term people of colour is emphasized, often in direct substitution for black reference points. In the USA today it is
important not to frame race in a bipolar manner. The black/white paradigm made more sense in the past than it does in the twenty-first century. The racial make-up of the
nation has now changed dramatically. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the USA has become more coloured. A majorityminority national
demographic shift is well underway. Predicted to arrive by the mid-twenty-first century, the numerical eclipse of the white population is already in evidence locally and
regionally. In California, for example, non-Hispanic whites constitute only 39.7 per cent of the state's population. While the decline in the white population cannot be correlated
with any decline of white racial dominance, the dawning and deepening of racial multipolarity calls into question a sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit black/white racial
framework that is evident in Feagin and Elias's essay. Shifting racial demographics and identities also raise general questions of race and racism in new ways that the systemic
racism approach is not prepared to explain.3 Class questions and issues of panethnicizing trends, for example, call into question what we mean by race, racial identity and race
consciousness. No racially defined group is even remotely uniform; groups that we so glibly refer to as Asian American or Latino are particularly heterogeneous. Some have
achieved or exceeded socio-economic parity with whites, while others are subject to what we might call engineered poverty in sweatshops, dirty and dangerous labour settings,
or prisons. Tensions within panethnicized racial groups are notably present, and conflicts between racially defined groups (black/brown conflict, for example) are evident in
both urban and rural settings. A substantial current of social scientific analysis now argues that Asians and Latinos are the new white ethnics, able to work toward whiteness4
at least in part, and that the black/white bipolarity retains its distinct and foundational qualities as the mainstay of US racism (Alba and Nee 2005; Perlmann 2005; Portes and
Rumbaut 2006; Waters, Ueda and Marrow 2007). We question that argument in light of the massive demographic shifts taking place in the USA. Globalization, climate change
and above all neoliberalism on a global scale, all drive migration. The country's economic capacity to absorb enormous numbers of immigrants, low-wage workers and their
families (including a new, globally based and very female, servant class) without generating the sort of established subaltern groups we associate with the terms race and racism,
may be more limited than it was when the whitening of Europeans took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words this argument's key precedent, the
absorption of white immigrants of a different color (Jacobson 1998), may no longer apply. Indeed, we might think of the assimilationist model itself as a general theory of
immigrant incorporation that was based on a historically specific case study one that might not hold for, or be replicated by, subsequent big waves of immigration. Feagin and
Elias's systemic racism model, while offering numerous important insights, does not inform concrete analysis of these issues. It is important going forward to understand how
groups are differentially racialized and relatively positioned in the US racial hierarchy: once again racism must be seen as a shifting racial project. This has important
consequences, not only with respect to emerging patterns of inequality, but also in regard to the degree of power available to different racial actors to define, shape or contest the
existing racial landscape. Attention to such matters is largely absent in Feagin and Elias's account. In their view racially identified groups are located in strict reference to the
dominant white racial frame, hammered into place, so to speak. As a consequence, they fail to examine how racially subordinate groups interact and influence each others
boundaries, conditions and practices. Because they offer so little specific analysis of Asian American, Latino or Native American racial issues, the reader finds her/himself once
again in the land (real or imaginary, depending on your racial politics) of bipolar US racial dynamics, in which whites and blacks play the leading roles, and other racially
identified groups as well as those ambiguously identified, such as Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans (MEASA) play at best supporting roles, and are sometimes cast
as extras or left out of the picture entirely. We still want to acknowledge that blacks have been catching hell and have borne the brunt of the racist reaction of the past several
decades. For example, we agree with Feagin and Elias's critique of the reactionary politics of incarceration in the USA. The new Jim Crow (Alexander 2012) or even the new
slavery that the present system practises is something that was just in its beginning stages when we were writing Racial Formation. It is now recognized as a national and indeed
global scandal. How is it to be understood? Of course there are substantial debates on this topic, notably about the nature of the prison-industrial complex (Davis 2003, p. 3)
and the social and cultural effects of mass incarceration along racial lines. But beyond Feagin and Elias's denunciation of the ferocious white racism that is operating here,
deeper political implications are worth considering. As Alexander (2012), Mauer (2006), Manza and Uggen (2008) and movement groups like Critical Resistance and the Ella
Baker Center argue, the upsurge over recent decades in incarceration rates for black (and brown) men expresses the fear-based, law-and-order appeals that have shaped US
racial politics since the rise of Nixonland (Perlstein 2008) and the Southern strategy. Perhaps even more central, racial repression aims at restricting the increasing impact of
voters of colour in a demographically shifting electorate. There is a lot more to say about this, but for the present two key points stand out: first, it is not an area where Feagin
and Elias and we have any sharp disagreement, and second, for all the horrors and injustices that the new Jim Crow represents, incarceration, profiling and similar practices
remain political issues. These practices and policies are not ineluctable and unalterable dimensions of the US racial regime. There have been previous waves of reform in these
areas. They can be transformed again by mass mobilization, electoral shifts and so on. In other words, resistance is not futile . Speaking of electoral shifts and the formal
political arena, how should President Barack Obama be politically situated in this discussion? How do Feagin and Elias explain Obama? Quite amazingly, his name does not
appear in their essay. Is he a mere token, an oreo, a shill for Wall Street? Or does Obama represent a new development in US politics, a black leader of a mass, multiracial party
that for sheer demographic reasons alone might eventually triumph over the white people's party, the Republicans? If the President is neither the white man's token nor Neo, the
One,5 then once again we are in the world of politics: neither the near-total white despotism depicted by Feagin and Elias, nor a racially inclusive democracy. President Obama
continues to enjoy widespread black support, although it is clear that he has not protected blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in history. He has not explicitly
criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers rights particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other
people of colour are concentrated. He has not intervened to halt or slow foreclosures, except in ways that were largely symbolic. Workers and lower-middle-class people were the
hardest hit by the great recession and the subprime home mortgage crisis, with black families faring worst, and Latinos close behind (Rugh and Massey 2010); Obama has not
defended them. Many writers have explained Obama's centrism and unwillingness to raise the issue of race as functions of white racism (Sugrue 2010). The black community
and other communities of colour as well remains politically divided. While black folk have taken the hardest blows from the reactionary and racist regime that has mostly
dominated US politics since Reagan (if not since Nixon), no united black movement has succeeded the deaths of Malcolm and Martin. Although there is always important
political activity underway, a relatively large and fairly conservative black middle class, a black bourgeoisie in Frazier's (1957) terms, has generally maintained its position since
the end of the civil rights era. Largely based in the public sector, and including a generally centrist business class as well, this stratum has continued to play the role that Frazier
and before him, Charles S. Johnson. William Lloyd Warner, Alison Davis and other scholars identified: vacillation between the white elite and the black masses. Roughly

similar patterns operate in Latino communities as well, where the working towards whiteness framework coexists with a substantial amount of exclusion and superexploitation. Alongside class issues in communities of colour, there are significant gender issues. The disappearance of blue-collar work, combined with the assault by the
criminal justice system chiefly profiling by the police (stop and frisk) and imprisonment, have both unduly targeted and victimized black and brown men, especially youth.
Women of colour are also targeted, especially by violence, discrimination and assaults on their reproductive rights (Harris-Perry 2011); profiling is everywhere (Glover 2009).
Here again we are in the realm of racial politics. Debate proceeds in the black community on Obama's credibilty, with Cornel West and Tavis Smiley leading the critics. But it
seems safe to say that in North Philly, Inglewood or Atlanta's Lakewood section, the president remains highly popular. Latino support for Obama remains high as well. Feagin
and Elias need to clarify their views on black and brown political judgement. Is it attuned to political realities or has it been captured by the white racial frame? Is Obama's
election of no importance? *** In conclusion, do Feagin and Elias really believe that white power is so complete, so extensive, so sutured (as Laclau and Mouffe might say) as
they suggest here? Do they mean to suggest, in Borg-fashion, that resistance is futile? This seems to be the underlying political logic of the systemic racism approach, perhaps
unintentionally so. Is white racism so ubiquitous that no meaningful political challenge can be mounted against it? Are black and brown folk (yellow and red people, and also
others unclassifiable under the always- absurd colour categories) utterly supine, duped, abject, unable to exert any political pressure? Is such a view of race and racism even
recognizable in the USA of 2012? And is that a responsible political position to be advocating? Is this what we want to teach our students of colour? Or our white students for
that matter? We suspect that if pressed, Feagin and Elias would concur with our judgement that racial conflict, both within (and against) the state and in everyday life, is a
fundamentally political process. We think that they would also accept our claim that the ongoing political realities of race provide extensive evidence that people of colour in
the USA are not so powerless, and that whites are not so omnipotent , as Feagin and Elias's analysis suggests them to be. Racial formation theory allows us to see that there are
contradictions in racial oppression. The racial formation approach reveals that white racism is unstable and constantly challenged, from the national and indeed global level
down to the personal and intra-psychic conflicts that we all experience, no matter what our racial identity might be. While racism largely white continues to flourish, it is not
monolithic. Yes, there have been enormous increases in racial inequality in recent years. But movement-based anti-racist opposition continues, and sometimes scores victories.
Challenges to white racism continue both within the state and in civil society. Although largely and properly led by people of colour, anti-racist movements also incorporate
whites such as Feagin and Elias themselves. Movements may experience setbacks, the reforms for which they fought may be revealed as inadequate, and indeed their leaders
may be co-opted or even eliminated, but racial subjectivity and self-awareness, unresolved and conflictual both within the individual psyche and the body politic, abides.
Resistance is not futile.

2NR

AT Perm
1. The aff does not get perms in a method debate. It assumes a
notion of fiat that doesnt make sense without a plan. The 1AC
role of the ballot forefronts the performative and methodological
but Carlos has not performed a queer rural historiography.
2. The perm is co-option. I am the only one performing historical
analysis of metro-normativity. The perm steals my performance
which makes it impossible to have a comparative method.
3. The perm cant solve and links to the kritik; it subsumes rural
historiography under the urban paradigm which footnotes the alt and
destroys its transformative potential
Johnson 13
Colin R. Johnson (Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies, History and Human
Biology at Indiana University Bloomington). Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. Temple University Press
(June 14, 2013). http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2262_reg.html
In the context of disciplinary history, this problem is equally acute. While

historians have in some ways taken a

leadership role in challenging metronormative assumptions about the spatial
parameters of queer life in the United States, much of their work over the last decade or so
clearly bears the imprint of the historical professions customary habit of understanding
and representing the world in terms of periods and regions. 20 Thus even some
of the studies that have taught us the most about the history of same-sex sexual behavior
and gender nonconformity in rural and small-town contexts are still liable to readings
that subsume their contributions on this level into other analytic categories. For
example, John Howards field-defining Men Like That: A Southern Queer History is arguably a
study of queer life in rural America during the midtwentieth century, but it is
indisputably a study of queer life in the American South.21 Similarly, the work of
scholars such as Susan Lee Johnson and Peter Boag deals partly with the history of same-sex
sexual behavior and gender nonconformity in remotely situated logging and mining
camps in states such as Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, but it is typically characterized by others and
themselves as contributing to western history rather than rural history.22 Indeed, regional
imaginaries operate centrally in the historical accounts that all three of these scholars have provided, which is simultaneously
entirely appropriate and thoroughly indicative of one of the major conceptual challenges this book addresses. Something about the

Why, this book

the idea of the rural so difficult to work with in and of itself, and why does it so
often end up taking a conceptual backseat relative to other frames of
concept of the rural environment simply does not stick in quite the same way that other analytic categories do.
asks in part, is

reference in scholarship dealing with the history of gender and sexuality in the United
States, particularly given the fact that the critique metronormativity has been so widely embraced? Furthermore, what would it
mean to insist on ruralitys categorical salience in the ongoing work of investigating the history of queer life in the United States?

4. The links swamp the perm. Each link is a disad to including

Carloss methodology. My links are super-specific, so they should
substantially indict the perm.
5. There is no net benefit to the perm. Mentanko says that the
alternative provides a better model for inclusiveness which
means the alt solves the whole case on its own.
6. The 1AC was not neutral. It was an active presencing of the urban.
The affs telling of history frames the world in a metro-normative way
which dooms the perm. The metro-normativity still bleeds through
even if the 1AR disclaims it.
Johnson 13
Colin R. Johnson (Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies, History and Human
Biology at Indiana University Bloomington). Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. Temple University Press
(June 14, 2013). http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2262_reg.html

Beyond combating selectively some of the amnesias that surround the history of
gender and sexuality in rural and small-town America, this book seeks to remind
readers of two other very important points. First, normalizing discourses are
always precisely that. They are not empirical descriptions of individual
experience or lived reality, although they do significantly reshape experience and
reality. Even when normalizing discourses succeed in effecting significant change in the world, they seldom yield changed
realities that are entirely consistent and well ordered in an epistemological sense. Rather, vestiges and shades of
whatever sex and gender ways were partially displaced by these normalizing discourses
almost always continue to bleed through in the context of everyday life,
sometimes long after an ascendant regime of knowledge has been widely accepted as the
new common sense.

7. That also proves the perm is severance out of the affs

method. The AC was a centering of the urban. Allowing the aff to
recenter the debate with the perm severs out of the affs choice
to focus the debate on urbanized represenations. Severance is a
voting issue because I cant engage in a performative method
debate if the aff refuses to defend a stable method.
8. The perm cant work because when the urban and rural are
combined, the urban will always be implicitly privileged; its
easier to identify the specific ballroom in our minds than the
vastness of the range, meaning the perm crowds out the alt
thats Johnson.