Abstract Search Find and explore abstracts from the RSS Annual Meeting

Gender and Sexualities

One Year Later: Investigations into Challenges for Rural Queer Life in Maine Brianna Dym*, Brianna Dym,

One year into Donald Trump’s second term, minority groups have faced a series of major challenges pertaining to their safety and security in the general public. Additionally, the federal government has repeatedly pushed to remove visible representation and narratives important to the LGBTQ+ community and has weaponized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to punish perceived enemies of the Trump administration.

To this end, the state of Maine has experienced prolonged court challenges against the Trump administration, with Governor Janet Mills spearheading challenges to unlawful federal overreach (Kim, 2025). In January of 2026, the Trump administration increased pressure on Maine by sending a surge of ICE agents to intimidate and arrest lawful Maine residents (Snider, 2026), targeting southern Maine communities known for their large immigrant communities. This research reports on one year of autoethnographic observations, fieldwork, and interviews with local LGBTQ+ people living and working in rural Maine. While the people interviewed are not necessarily under direct threat from ICE, this research explores how rising tensions between the state and federal law enforcement impact daily life for minority groups the Trump administration has demonstrated hostility toward.

Findings so far show increasing worry over a lack of control and awareness of how personal data is accessed and leveraged by federal law enforcement. However, community members also leverage social media and other technologies to share information and fight against perceived threats to their community, with some technologies offering life-saving information sharing features. Participants describe a complex kind of risk analysis to determine what platforms they use, how they share information, and what kinds of consequences they are comfortable enduring because of their actions. In rural Maine, where a lack of public infrastructure means social media is often the first place people host community discourse, these decisions carry immense weight.

References

Kim, Juliana. April 12, 2025. “Federal judge orders USDA to unfreeze funds to Maine.” National Public Radio. Accessed 14 February, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/12/nx-s1-5362976/maine-usda-unfreeze-janet-mills-trump

Snider, Ari. February 13, 2026. “Some Mainers arrested in January ICE surge are back home after mounting successful legal challenges” Maine Public Radio. Accessed 14 February, 2026. https://www.mainepublic.org/immigration/2026-02-13/some-mainers-arrested-in-january-ice-surge-are-back-home-after-mounting-successful-legal-challenges