Cannibal Family Farms: Rural Dysfunction and Grotesque Intimacy in Postwar America

This paper examines the emergence of intertwined imaginaries of rural dysfunction and grotesque intimacy in twentieth century American popular culture. It argues that the consolidation and normalization of the heterosexual/homosexual binary in postwar America reconfigured popular understandings of non-metropolitan family life. This reconfiguration transformed the iconic family farm in popular culture from the wholesome, if perpetually imperiled location of healthy social reproduction to a repository of gendered dysfunction, sexual repression, repellant desires, and grotesque intimacy. The paper focuses, in particular, on the portrayal of rural families in late twentieth century horror films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Children of the Corn (1984), American Gothic (1989), House of 1000 Corpses (2003), and the host of imitators and sequels those films inspired.

In contrast to the lonely monsters that stalked urban and suburban landscapes in other late 20^th century horror films, the monsters of these films uniformly took the form of families. In each film, dysfunctional rural families preyed together to stay together, feasting on urban tourists, lonely wanderers, and then each other in a torturous bid to sate their repressed and abnormal desires. The paper contends that in both film and broader contemporary cultural discourses this monstrous rural family structured an imagined sexual geography that cast rural spaces as intrinsically homophobic and rural people as cannibalizers of queer youth. This cultural logic emerged initially as a part of a New Left critique of conservative, heteronormative families, but it now exists as a crucial idiom of "metronormativity," as queer theorist Jack Halberstam has termed it: a set of cultural assumptions about sexuality that render unintelligible queer bodies that reside beyond the boundaries of America's affluent, cisgendered, white, urban gayborhoods.