Out on Rural Lands: Country Queer Dis/Orientation and the Potentialities of Loneliness

Print culture has historically been a critical medium for the formation and articulation of lesbian communities and publics. Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) is regarded as one of the foundational texts of the second wave of lesbian literature and more broadly as an influential novel within lesbian cultures. In their readings of the novel, critics have tended to center upon protagonist Stephen Gordon's negative affects—most notably shame and loneliness—as arising from her gender nonconformity and her struggle to find a place for herself within queer cultures of her day. In this article, I attend to Stephen's feelings of unbelonging as also arising from forms of metronormativity. Holding Stephen's love for her home estate at Morton and her enmeshment within its land and history alongside ongoing calls to resist homonationalism, I argue for an understanding of The Well as a text that demonstrates the limits of the nation as a space for creating queer belonging. In keeping with Heather Love's (2009) assessment of the political utility of queer critics engaging with negative affects, I point toward recent work in rural queer community-building through the Country Queers Oral History Project that speaks to ways organizers have begun to address the sources of un-belonging and alienation that produce Stephen's seemingly bottomless well of loneliness. This work attends to rurality and queerness as compatible rather than incompatible sites of belonging while rejecting ties to nation in favor of rural, place-based liberation politics.