This is the third presentation in a series of gallery talks that highlight a collage in its current exhibition, Artists in the Archives: Unseen Neighbors that explores themes with which members of our community have grappled historically, including race, difference, sexuality, and gender.

Carly Thomsen's book Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming both deconstructs the image of the rural as a flat, homogenous, and anachronistic place where LGBTQ people necessarily suffer and questions the commonsensical belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility. To make these interventions, Thomsen focuses on the lives of LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest. In this talk, Thomsen draws from her book to discuss rural queerness past and present, as well as the relationships among cultural representation, activists' calls for "visibility," and the archive. 

Carly Thomsen is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. She is the author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming (2021) and the producer of a related documentary film, In Plain Sight. Her next book, Queering Reproductive Justice, is forthcoming with University of California press. Her work on LGBTQ activism, queer rurality, reproductive justice, and feminist pedagogy is published in various journals including Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Political Geography, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Feminist Studies, Human Geography, Feminist Formations, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice. Thomsen is also increasingly engaging in public feminist work. Her writing has appeared in various media outlets, including The New York Times and Ms. Magazine, she has led Public Feminism Fellowships and co-curated feminist art installations in conjunction with the Center for Public Feminism, and, most recently she co-created a feminist reproductive justice mini golf course. For more information, please visit: https://www.carlythomsen.com/