Writing "Home" in Rural Queer Teacher Narratives: A Collaborative Autoethnography

This dissertation seeks to investigate the lives of rural queer teachers in their communities and schools. I explore how notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ might keep queer teachers in their rural locations despite an overwhelming discourse that associates the rural with rejection and homophobia. This study is a collaborative autoethnography that employs writing and discussion groups to explore rural queer life through Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical notions of the rhizome, assemblage, and perpetual “becomings” as a result of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. This framework informs the theoretical and methodological components of the study by demonstrating how group members negotiate their multiple identities as queer, educator, and rural community member, while also mapping “becomings” that occur within the collaborative writing group. I also investigate how the theoretical works on utopia by Cvetkovich (2008) and Muñoz (2009) might be utilized as a way to re-imagine the rural queer experience.