Available From UC Press

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics.

In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase “I’ll listen to anything but country” allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive “omnivore” musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class.

With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible.

Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

Nadine Hubbs is Professor of Women's Studies and Music, Faculty Associate in American Culture, and Director of the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI) at the University of Michigan; she is the author of the award-winning book The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (UC Press). 

“One of the most convention-busting books I’ve ever read.”—Joshua Friedberg, Country Queer

"It has been a long time since a scholarly book gave me this much sheer pleasure. Hubbs's dazzling discussions of songs and music history are like candy, and I consumed them eagerly. The focus on class is long overdue and entirely welcome. This book exemplifies a revitalized and analytically potent resurrection of class studies, and one that is rich, embodied, and granular. The bibliography and literature reviews are themselves a breathtaking contribution, but that pales before the book’s own innovative claims and arguments. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music vaporizes a whole collection of received assumptions about the relationships among class, musical cultures, and politics—most specifically, the pervasive characterizations of the middle class as queer tolerant and the working class as homophobic. A theoretical tour de force."—Gayle Rubin, author of Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader

"In lucid, economical prose and in eloquent detail, Nadine Hubbs describes the cultural poetics of working-class subjectivity. She treats country music and the communities of taste (and distaste) to which it gives rise as rich sources of information about the symbolic language of social inequality in the United States. One of her brilliant insights is that toleration of homosexuality has gone from being a symptom of working-class pathology in the early twentieth century to being a manifestation of middle-class enlightenment by that century’s end, while homophobia has been transformed from an ostensibly reasonable and justified middle-class attitude to an allegedly bigoted working-class one. The result of this analysis of changing social attitudes is a major reconceptualization of the history and politics of sexuality in the U.S." —David Halperin, author of How to be Gay

"Stunning! With this serious and sophisticated examination of musical culture among working class people, Hubbs gives us another myth-busting book about American musicality's entanglement with American gender and sexuality." —Suzanne G Cusick, Professor of Music, New York University

"Rednecks, Queers and Country Music is a persuasive call to hear country music in totally new ways.  Hubbs boldly and baldly identifies what is really at stake when we imagine country as the sound of bigotry, whether racist, sexist, or homophobic. She compels us to listen anew for the genre’s unexpected echoes of distinctively white working-class gender and sexual identities and for its persistent reminders that all sorts of marginalization resonate on related frequencies. Her arguments will upend contemporary orthodoxy about the politics of country music." —Diane Pecknold, author of The Selling Sound: Country Music, Commercialism, and the Politics of Popular Culture