Conclusion : sexuality, rurality, and geography

Our concluding themes, articulated in this final chapter, are complementary; they bring together methodologies and conceptual questions that might provide further investigative nuance for understanding the intersections of sexualities with rural spaces and imaginaries. These methodological and conceptual issues share a concern with interpreting the everyday lives of sexual subjects in localized non-metropolitan places, including social, cultural, economic, and political constraints and potentials of sexual identities, practices, and relationships. The spatial imperative of rural sexualities impels both methodological and conceptual development. In wrapping up this concluding chapter and this book, we highlight the third term in its title: geography. Imbricating the themes of this conclusion, we suggest that interrogating the multi-scalar (global, transnational, and translocal) processes and practices that constitute rural localities, and how these recalibrate and realign over time, requires methods that are spatially appropriate. Having multiple methods in our rural researcher's toolkit is important here, providing options that are sensitive to local sexual geographies, and that enable the contextualization of local sites within more-than-local connections. In this way we can begin to grasp and articulate the multiple sexual meanings that link material places, geographical imaginaries, and embodied subjects, and which thus dialogically construct and reconstruct rural sexual geographies.