By BRIGID PARKER

On Thursday, February 27, students and staff gathered in WAC’s South Lounge alongside Jason Alley of Beloit’s anthropology department and Dr. Clare Forstie, queer sociologist and staff at St. Paul College, for an intimate discussion of Forstie’s latest book, “Queering the Midwest.”

“Queering the Midwest” recounts Forstie’s ethnography of the Queer community within an unnamed small, midwestern city. In choosing this setting for her ethnography, Forstie aimed to chronicle an experience personal to her, as a Queer individual who grew up in a small American city, as well as bring light to the stories of others living in these types of communities. In Forstie’s words, Midwestern stereotypes “tend to flatten [the] experiences” of Queer folk, and she hoped to add dimension to these individuals in her book by detailing the complexities of their communities. 

The Midwest, especially the non-Metropolitan Midwest, is not particularly recognized for its progressiveness in regard to LGBTQ acceptance, nor does it have a reputation for strong renunciation of these groups. It is this ambivalent middle-range that interests Forstie, as she tells the story of Queerness in an area where Queer folk are safe and accepted, but not necessarily uplifted or given much notice at all. 

Though only an hour, Forstie and Alley were able to cover a multitude of different elements of the Queer experience, from loneliness to survival to joy, paying special attention to the concept of ambivalence, a key theme in “Queering the Midwest.” Forstie argues that embracing ambivalence, which is a fancy word for having mixed or contradictory feelings, and “making sense of the both/and perspective” is crucial to our understanding of LGBTQ communities and their formation. She acknowledges that community can be a place for both acceptance and exclusion, and that this context is important to understanding the stories of her participants. 

Clare Forstie’s work on Queer community is a refreshing change from the studies we may normally see, which often focus on larger metropolitan areas and overlook the Midwest as a place for progress and inclusivity. Her ethnography is a necessary addition to LGBTQ studies, and shows us to embrace our communities, even with their contradictions. 

_{Featured image: NYU Press}