This chapter takes the popularity of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) as an opportunity to witness the power of tropes that politically and culturally juxtapose urban and regional concerns, and to explore critical regionalist alternatives to rhetorics of disconnection. It examines assumptions about regions that underly Vance’s “hillbilly” and the ethno-national difference between urban and regional spaces. Vance’s Appalachia had unfortunate resonance in a turbulent political season, spawning a subgenre “Trump Country” essays. A critical regionalist uses these characterizations as an occasion to affirm alternative versions of region. Moving quickly and collaboratively, a network of artists and scholars responded in diverse works, landmarked by What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia (2018), the documentary film hillbilly (2018), and the multigenre collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019). These works and the conversations they generated across media create a multivocal portrait of a place that must be understood from a perspective that does not see city and region as antithetical but maps interconnections of urban and rural spaces.

This chapter examines the intersection of regionalisms and queer studies with special attention to US literary studies. It asks what difference, if any, queer critical regionalism as an intellectual approach may make in analyses of literature of the imperial center. Attempting to answer this question, the chapter revisits a short story that depicts queer love – “The Queen’s Twin” (1899) – by Sarah Orne Jewett, a US regionalist writer who has figured prominently in both scholarship on US literary regionalism and queer studies. By analyzing this story, the chapter demonstrates the potential of queer critical regionalism as an approach that both encourages comparative and transnational queer studies research and enables reevaluation of texts like Jewett’s that have hitherto been understood as foundational to a queer Western literary canon.