Just Trash a Dissertation SUBMITTED to the FACULTY of THE
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Just Trash A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Ashley Renee Campbell IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Katherine Scheil May 2020 Copyright © 2020 by Ashley Renee Campbell “Four O’Clocks” was originally published in an earlier version in Newfound Journal, 2015; “Being a Child” was originally published in an earlier version in Salt Hill Journal, 2018. Table of Contents List of Figures ii Acknowledgements iii Author’s Note v Introduction 1 Four O’Clocks 37 Being a Child 55 A House Full of Roaches 74 Through a Glass Darkly 87 Autopsy of a Service 100 Epilogue: Refuse of Things Lost 110 Bibliography 122 i List of Figures Figure 1 20 Figure 2 37 Figure 3 55 Figure 4 74 Figure 5 75 Figure 6 82 Figure 7 86 Figure 8 87 Figure 9 88 Figure 10 102 ii Acknowledgements There are so many people to acknowledge with a project like this. I would first like to thank Garrard Conley for helping me to believe that I could be a writer again after years of me believing I couldn’t, and then helping me develop the tools I needed to embark on this project. Without Garrard, I would not be the writer I am today. Katherine Scheil, my advisor, was so important for helping this project become a dissertation, from her initial suggestion that I pursue this project to being such a huge support through all of this. John Watkins, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Melissa Sellew all were very supportive and helpful throughout this process. Several grants have been important for me to be able to complete my project, including the Edward M. Griffin Fellowship and the Marcella DeBourg Award, the support of which enabled me to develop as a scholar and writer. I could not have made the progress I needed to without my fellow classmates Marc Juberg and Amy Bolis, who read many versions of my chapters and helped me to get a sense of my possible readers. Their comments and feedback were indispensible for this project. Julia Kidwell, my current therapist, has helped me so much over the last few years to be able to process my trauma and find my voice—without her this memoir would not have been possible. Anna Greene Stanley, my first therapist, helped me start on the long road of processing everything I’ve been through—I can never thank her enough. All of my therapists have been important in this journey and have helped me heal. My sister April has been supportive throughout this process and has often read multiple drafts of an essay and gave honest feedback. Along with April, my sister Amber iii has been one of the few family members I could confide in about my sexuality, and I appreciate that immensely. As much as this dissertation has been hard to write, my family has shown their support in the ways they could. A support system is necessary for any artist to complete their work, and I have been supported by numerous friends throughout the years, including Shelby Johnson, Emily Fritze (whose lovely illustrations appear in this book), Erin Holt, Rachel McWhorter, and Heidi Rimpila. From providing support when I was panicking, to helping me make difficult decisions in regards to my project and my life, these friends were there for me. To all the professors who have inspired me, I am immensely grateful, but particularly for Eric Daigre, Jason Tucker, Eloise Whisenhunt, Dan Thornton, Paula Backscheider, and Anna Riehl Bertolet. I also want to thank BECAUSE, the Bisexual Organizing Project, and Camille Holthaus for their role in helping me embrace my sexuality and find my community. Finally I need to thank the queer and feminist icons who have empowered me through this project, particularly Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints), whose fierce artistry continues to inspire me; and the Dixie Chicks, whose music video “Gaslighter” gave me the final push to finish my dissertation. iv Author’s Note Firstly, though I attempt to be as accurate as possible, the chronology of events is not always clear in my memory and therefore the sequence of events may be out of order, even when that was not my intention. Also, the conversations and details of many of the events were reconstructed from memory to the best of my ability, and at times, augmented by the memories of my mother and sisters. However, most often, I have chosen to rely on my own memory as much as possible—and when possible, documents saved from the time, such as photos and letters. Also, many of the names of people and places have been changed to protect those depicted in the memoir, as well as myself— though my name remains the same. v Introduction All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched my lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me—there is no linear sense. Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory—but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.1 —Lydia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water My dissertation, Just Trash, is comprised of four personal essays that take on various questions of identity and empathy that arise when a non-binary bisexual woman grows up in a Southern evangelical, working-class home, an environment that is politically, religiously, regionally, and culturally so different from the one I currently inhabit. This introduction explores the purpose of the memoir as a whole, as well as its origins; the functions and import of each chapter and the place of my memoir within the larger genre through looking at four key types of memoir with which it is in conversation: Southern memoir, trauma memoir, religious memoir, and queer memoir. When I first started conceiving of Just Trash as a memoir, I called it Refuge:Refuse because of the ways in which notions of home were in conflict, and because of the play on words of refuse as noun and verb, suggesting both the refuse in which I grew up and my refusal to accept others’ often harmful understandings of my identity. However, one day when talking about my memoir, I jokingly said it was “just trash,” and immediately I knew that had to be the title. I let go of the original title with little regret, because while some of the wordplay of the original title was lost, there was 1 Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water, (Portland, OR: Hawthorne Books, 2010), 28. 1 plenty in Just Trash to satisfy my punny sense of humor, while retaining enough seriousness to give readers a sense of what they might find in my memoir. As “just” can mean both “only” and “right,” it has the sense that the book might just be sensational or that it might be an assertion of what is morally right. Pairing that with “trash” means that whatever follows deals with perceptions of what might be trash, from the class-based “white trash” in the South, to the literal trash that filled the home I grew up in. It also suggests the ways people minimize others’ trauma when it is not convenient for their own narratives or political aims. Surprisingly it has long been acceptable on national progressive television programs to belittle the South in ways that were harmful for the people in the region, particularly children who internalized these message about Southerners as stupid.2 Just Trash began as a direct response to Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased (2016). Conley’s memoir tracks both the time he spent in a conversion therapy facility in Memphis, Tennessee, and the experience of his childhood in a Missionary Baptist family in Arkansas. Conley’s memoir does the difficult work of humanizing the people in his life who caused his trauma, regardless of their later roles in his life. Through this work, he uses what might be considered a cultural studies lens to construct the “structures of feeling”3 of the evangelical South, interrogating the various aspects of Southern masculinity through the images of his father, the men in his church, and the counselors at 2 For instance, take the segment from the popular kids’ variety show on Nickelodeon, All That! (1994- 2016), called “Hillbilly Moment” in which two characters with ridiculous Southern accents act incredibly stupid. Not only that, some of my favorite pundits have taken shots at the South, for instance Jon Stewart’s segment on The Daily Show called “South Parked,” in which he asks, “Is that what happens when the South is confronted by something not specifically mentioned in Revelations?” While this occurred after I had been living in Minnesota for a little over a year (1/30/2014), I continue to feel the shame and stigma of being from the South. I still love Jon Stewart, but the joke irked me, because it relied on the old trope of Southerners as backwards and ignorant. 3 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 132-134. 2 Love in Action, a conversion therapy program based in Memphis. In Just Trash, I ask similar questions. How much do traditional (as well as less traditional) masculinity and femininity inflect our lives and our traumas? What roles do (and should) religion and faith play in the construction of our ideas of family, connection, and home? And what are the limits of empathy? My particular experience of being a white bisexual Southern non-binary woman who grew up in an evangelical family and later became agnostic can shed light on the way these various intersections play a role in politics, family, relationships, and sexuality.