Fatalism and Flamboyance: Representing Rural Appalachian LGBTQ+ Youth in Young Adult Literature

Fatalism and Flamboyance: Representing Rural Appalachian LGBTQ+ Youth in Young Adult Literature examines the past lack of young adult literature depicting the lives of rural Appalachian LGBTQ+ teens and analyzes how this absence caused the author to become a writer of young adult novels. The dissertation opens with a critical introduction which explains that the study will use autoethnography and the lens of queer theory or its Appalachian cousin, “quare theory,” and also provides a brief literature review of LGBTQ+ young adult novels. The introduction is followed by the main body of the dissertation, which consists of a collection of creative autoethnographic essays exploring growing up as a queer reader and writer in rural Appalachia. The final section is a reflection on the experience of using autoethnography.