Monday, December 26, 2022

Valerie Padilla Carroll's "Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-Land?"

Valerie Padilla Carroll is an Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Social Transformation Studies at Kansas State University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-Land?: Gender and Race in U.S. Self-Sufficiency Popular Culture, and reported the following:
Even though page 99 of Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-Land? is a full-page image of a letter from gay activist and writer Clear Englebert to back-to-the-land icons Scott and Helen Nearing, it is an excellent representation of my book. Dated August 8, 1981 Englebert’s letter asks the Nearings to intercede on behalf of the gay country living magazine RFD. For much of the 1970s, RFD has been asking the flagship back-to-the-land magazine Mother Earth News to publish paid advertisements for RFD. Mother Earth News editors refused, claiming that because RFD was a gay magazine such ads could offend their readers. Englebert, a contributing writer for RFD, reached out to the Nearings because they were known believers in social justice and promoters of the self-sufficiency of the back-to-the-land movement. In his letter Englebert explains that Mother Earth News carrying ads for RFD would represent inclusion for gay back-to-the-landers as well as offer other gay country folks the knowledge that they were not alone.

The letter itself is given a full page in my book because it represents the promise and problems of those so often left out of the back-to-the-land promise. BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ+ folks have been mostly left out of the back-to-the-land movements, at least in the popular culture products that promote the self-sufficient life. Yet those who have been left out have always sought this promise by writing their own narratives. My book explores these stories in US popular culture—from the Black Press opinion pieces and letters to the editors calling for a “back to the farm” for Black folks during the Great Depression to the alternative presses of the 1970s where women and LGBTQ+ folks self-published to the current day social media accounts of BIPOC back-to-the-land. Those left out of the mainstream back-to-the-land narrative of freedom, autonomy, and self-sufficiency on the land have and continue to write themselves into movement. The image on page 99 shows that Mother Earth News only told the mainstream heteronormative story. Englebert and RFD offered another and more complete story that includes gay and lesbian back-to-the-land and country living folks.
Follow Valerie Padilla Carroll on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue