In Genres of Rurality: Unsettling Affect in Popular Imaginations of the Globalized US Rural I ask what kind of understandings of the 21st-century globalized US rural emerge through popular reiterations of established rural genres like the pastoral idyll, the Western, and the anti-idyll. My study engages these understandings as determinately affective in their function and, as such, I provide an analysis of what kind of divergent feelings dominant genres of US rurality manage, and investigate how such feelings inform political mobilizations of the US rural in a contemporary moment that is marked by a supposed increasing rural-urban divide. This interrogation of imagined US ruralities is not merely important to the national context, as particular desires and anxieties managed by dominant imaginations of the US travel globally. By turning my attention to critical reframings of US rural and non-urbanized space, I ask what happens when, for example, queer, Black, and/or Indigenous subjects, experiences, and histories interrupt dominant historical and contemporary imaginations of US rurality. At the same time, while critical and subversive rearticulations of US rurality can certainly misalign rural-urban binaries and divides, redirect normative feelings that stick to US rural geographies, and potentially inform different political futures, such texts also often fall back on some of the insidious and exclusionary promises dominant genres of rurality exude. This suggests that it will take a great deal of imaginative and affective labor to radically unhinge the popular imagination of the globalized US rural from the good-life promises it has articulated since the early days of settler colonialism and prompts my main question: what kinds of collective and ambiguous attachments, fantasies of belonging and moments of discontent, affective investments and disinvestments, and political stakes do contemporary imaginations of US rurality manage, and for whom?