From the Editors

I wish to thank Christopher L. Leadingham, Mary K. Thomas, Ann E. Bryant, Carson E. Benn, and Gene Hyde, as well as the JAS editorial board, for their support and hard work on the journal. As I write this, I am looking forward to the Appalachian Studies Association's annual conference in Morgantown, West Virginia, and feeling hopeful for an in-person gathering at last. I would like to welcome our incoming media review editor Matthew Ryan Sparks to the JAS team and to thank departing media review editor Gene Hyde for all his great work with the journal over these past years. I also wish to thank the editors of this special issue on “Speculative Fabulations: Queering Appalachian Futurisms” for putting together this issue. The selections outlined below, including material in the book and media reviews, offer readers a chance to imagine a promising and liberatory future for the region and its people. The editorial staff and I are pleased to help bring this special issue to you. And with that, I turn it over to Z. Zane McNeill and Jessica Cory to tell you more about it.In 2017, Queer Appalachia's ’zine Electric Dirt (Mamone 2017) provided a platform to peoples who have historically been marginalized throughout Appalachia, such as LGBTQIA+, black, Latinx, people with disabilities, and Indigenous communities. These populations have been eclipsed from the Appalachian archive and erased in contemporary metronormative explorations of queerness (Halberstam 2005; Gray, Johnson, and Gilley 2016). In our understanding of “queer,” the term encompasses not only LGBTQIA+ identities, but also a politics that “makes trouble” and “disidentifies,” to borrow from Donna J. Haraway (2016) and José Esteban Muñoz (2009), with normative citizenship and reconfigured paths toward more equitable ecological, economic, and sociocultural futures. Queer Appalachia (on Instagram @queerappalachia), as well as other activist projects like the exhibitions Queering the Mountains (Dobert-Kehn 2018) and Appalachian Futures (2019–2023), and the oral history project and podcast Country Queers (2021) challenge normative generalizations about the culture of the Appalachian region and center marginalized stories to envision an Appalachia where “y'all” really means all.In addition to these amazing projects, several books inform both the articles in this issue and our perspectives in editing it. These publications either queer Appalachia or focus on the experiences of queer Appalachians and include Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies edited by Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley (2016), Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to “Hillbilly Elegy” edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll (2019), Darci McFarland's anthology Bible Belt Queers (2019), Storytelling in Queer Appalachia: Imagining and Writing the Unspeakable Other edited by Hillery Glasby, Sherrie Gradin, and Rachael Ryerson (2020), and Nicholas F. Stump's Remaking Appalachia: Ecosocialism, Ecofeminism, and Law (2021). Similarly, creative collections like Walk Till The Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia edited by Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray (2015), LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia edited by Jeff Mann and Julia Watts (2019), Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene edited by Jessica Cory (2019), and Planted by the Signs by Misty Skaggs (2019) offer ways in which we can “become-with” the non-human world and its nature-cultures and resist the normative configurations of cisheteropatriarchal worlds.Finally, this special issue of the Journal of Appalachian Studies also grew from Z. Zane McNeill's edited essay collection Y'all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia (McNeill 2022), reviewed later in this issue. Many of the voices in that collection are shared here, such as Matthew Ryan Sparks, Maxwell Cloe, and Rebecca-Eli M. Long. However, rather than make this issue an extension of that book, we wanted to expand upon the ideas in Y'all Means All, venturing into how queer Appalachians envision and fabulate our individual and collective futures.Appalachia, despite being perceived as culturally backward and economically isolated, is a place defined by its history of resistance (Fisher and Smith 2012; Fisher 1993). Queer histories are integral to these histories of resistance and can be used as inspiration and a framework on which Appalachian futurities, in particular the futurities of its most marginalized populations, can be imagined. The articles and reviews in this issue build on these experiences of defiance and solidarity and envision an Appalachian futurity of entanglements, assemblages, and reckonings that trouble the colonial, cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist state.These acts of “speculative fabulation,” to borrow a phrase from Haraway (2016), which she describes as creative storytelling and worldmaking, are in and of themselves acts of rebellion. The stories and worlds shared and created in the pages of this special issue dissect and destabilize what it means to be Appalachian, who is perceived as “authentically” Appalachian, which Appalachian voices and bodies matter, and what the implications of “Appalachia” as a construct are for oppressed groups.In imagining these futurities, the speculative also affects temporalities, as the contributors reckon with the past, both personal and collective, as queer Appalachian people. After all, the past constructs the present and informs the future, and thus time is a web, it is not linear. While at times these histories may make some readers uncomfortable, it is by working through and with one's discomfort, and understanding one's positionality and privilege, that reflection and change can take place. These growing pains are essential to creating an Appalachia that is safe for and celebratory of its marginalized people.The fabulations, literally worldings or “fablings,” in this issue not only evidence the futures that queer and marginalized folx in Appalachia want for themselves and their communities, but also represent the futures and worlds they are actively creating for themselves and their kin. We hope that these essays offer a hopeful, idealistic map to what an Appalachian future could look like if we embrace our histories of cultural, geographic, and economic marginalization while also facing our complicity in upholding structures of white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, environmental degradation, and capitalism.

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