Lucy Mooring

Nowt As Queer As Folk

Friday 26th February 2021 - 4-5:30pm GMT

Format

Lucy's talk will be streamed as a pre-recorded video followed by a live Zoom Q&A.

Biography

Lucy is currently an undergraduate at the University of Warwick. She studies sociology and in the summer of her first year was awarded URSS funding for a research project entitled 'nowt as queer as folk'. Her research seeks to understand the intersections and realities of Queer women and rural space. She identifies as queer and is from rural North Yorkshire. Therefore, she feels a personal, as well as academic investment in her research. She is interested in queer biopolitics/biopower and the relationship between queer bodies and the state. She is also attracted to work on the politics of space, and environment, sapphic culture throughout the 19th century broadly, and on queer political economy.

Abstract

Queerness is often posed as antithetical to rural spaces, indeed when authors discuss rural settings in a queer context it is often to further a narrative that it is a place of homophobia and isolation. This talk attempts to counter these notions by uncovering how queer, rural women have historically found themselves and one another. Be this through; lesbian newspapers, phonebanks, zine culture, separatist communes, and the contemporary relationship between queer women and the internet. This perspective forms a critique to the rural to urban trajectory so often imposed as a necessary journey of queerness- the end of which is found in gentrification, consumerism, and queerness as simply capital accumulation.