By
Bookimist
June 5th, 2022
This groundbreaking essay collection, edited by Z. Zane McNeill, a prolific scholar-activist from West Virginia, is an already-acclaimed and impactful contribution to Appalachian, critical, and LGBTQ+ studies. Y’All Means All is particularly notable for its wide range of subject matter coverage, as steeped in a “multitude of methodologies, from quantitative analysis, to oral history and autoethnography.” Interdisciplinary-minded environmental scholars and activists will have particular interest in novel contributions such as Rebecca-Eli Long’s chapter that proposes a “new alliance” of “crip/queer environmental engagement that expands the work of queer and environmental activists to critically consider the ways in which these movements can consider disability in conversations about harm and justice.” Such a framework, among other things, asks “while fighting against extractive capitalist forces that have caused great damage, can we engage with disability as more than just a byproduct of environmental harm?” As McNeill concludes, such crucial contributions “situate ourselves within an Appalachian history of resistance and envision an Appalachian queerness fueled by radical community-making, mutual aid, and solidarity movements for intersecting justices.”