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Signature: ______________________________________ _______________ Abigail Parsons Date Sapphic Scarletts, Dixie Dykes, and Tomboys: Representing Female-Bodied Queerness in Contemporary Southern Novels and Films By Abigail Parsons Doctor of Philosophy Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies ________________________________________________________ Martine Watson Brownley, Ph.D. Advisor ________________________________________________________ Michele Schreiber, Ph.D. Committee Member ________________________________________________________ Pamela Scully, Ph.D. Committee Member Accepted: _________________________________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies _________________ Date Sapphic Scarletts, Dixie Dykes, and Tomboys: Representing Female-Bodied Queerness in Contemporary Southern Novels and Films By Abigail Parsons M.Res., University of Central Lancashire, 2005 B.A., University of Central Lancashire, 2004 Advisor: Martine Watson Brownley, Ph.D. An abstract of a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 2013 Abstract Sapphic Scarletts, Dixie Dykes, and Tomboys: Representing Female-Bodied Queerness in Contemporary Southern Novels and Films By Abigail Parsons This dissertation examines how representations of female-bodied queerness in contemporary fiction and film challenge dominant cultural narratives about the U.S. South. The events and images that configure prevailing narratives of southern exceptionalism – slavery, segregation, the Civil War, antebellum courtship rituals, evangelism, Southern Baptist doctrine, and redneck culture, for example – present few, if any, possibilities for a visible queer southern history. Queer southerners are all too aware of how hegemonic conceptions of the region erase or obscure their very existence, yet certain fictional texts capitalize on the flaws, contradictions, and ellipses in these conceptions to show that southern queerness is always already a possibility. Through close analyses of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels and films set in the U.S. South, I illuminate how a concept I call female-bodied queerness is represented, and how, where, and when it manifests. I situate textual representations of queer female bodies, identities, and experiences within a distinctly regional context in order to ascertain what cultural and narrative work they perform on dominant narratives of the South. I critique the tendency in scholarship and creative works to reduce queer U.S. history to a series of binaries – urban/rural, North/South, gay/straight – that render the concept of southern queerness untenable or invisible. I examine how racial, class, religious, political, and cultural narratives of the region place limits on representations of queer characters, images, themes, and stories but then explore what strategies particular texts use to render queerness visible in spite of those limits. I draw on scholarship in the fields of history, cultural studies, film and literary theory, queer studies, and southern studies to in order to understand how dominant cultural narratives are produced and how they function as regulatory fictions that govern representations and perceptions of the South and southerners. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that representations of female-bodied queerness in contemporary southern novels and films create counter- narratives about the region that demand we acknowledge and embrace the existence and complexity of queer southern histories. Sapphic Scarletts, Dixie Dykes, and Tomboys: Representing Female-Bodied Queerness in Contemporary Southern Novels and Films By Abigail Parsons M.Res., University of Central Lancashire, 2005 B.A., University of Central Lancashire, 2004 Advisor: Martine Watson Brownley, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 2013 Acknowledgements Thank you to my advisor, Martine Watson Brownley, for not only being an incredible intellectual resource but a fierce advocate and seal trainer par excellence. I can only apologize for making your life more difficult with my maddening comma misuse. Thank you to my committee members, Pamela Scully and Michele Schreiber, for your unwavering support and encouragement throughout this process and your insightful commentary that helped me create a dissertation I could be proud of. Thank you to Berky Abreu for being a constant source of comfort, humor, care, help, light, and inspiration. Thank you to April Biagioni and Cheryl Delaney for not just your willingness to help me when you could just tell me to go read the handbook but your friendship and general awesomeness. Thank you to Aimi, Chanel, and Nikki, the members of Professor Beth Reingold’s Research Design class in the Fall of 2010. Your questions and ideas during the formative stages of this project were essential in helping me find direction and break through critical plateaus. I must extend a huge thank you to Michael Shutt, Director of the Office of LGBT Life, for being an incredible mentor and advocate. Thank you for the opportunities you have given me in the Office and for planting the seed at Creating Change in Minneapolis that maybe, just maybe, I should consider a career in Student Affairs. Thank you to Danielle Steele, Jodi Jackson, and Kate Bulger for being the best neighbors I could ask for. You have made my off-campus life fun and fulfilling. I am so lucky to call you my friends. Thank you to my parents who don’t really understand why I am still in school at the age of 31 but have finally stopped giving me a hard time about it. Thank you to Kelly, Karen, and Simone who remind me there is more to life than reading books and who give me a place to come home to. Thank you to the Helblings for cheering me on from afar. Your support means the world to me. Finally, thank you to Kal Helbling for your unending support, patience, and love. We did it! Table of Contents Page Foreword 1 Chapter One 19 “Behaving Like a Lady:” Crossdressing Women and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Civil War Novels Chapter Two 48 “I just cain’t wait to get to heaven”: Nostalgia and Idealized Queer Community in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and Fried Green Tomatoes Chapter Three 75 Neither Here Nor There: Black Female Sexuality and Queer (Invisibility) in The Color Purple Chapter Four 107 “Share Our Anger and Our Love”: Imagining Queerness in Hostile Spaces in Ann Allen Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me and Dorothy Allison’s Cavedweller Afterword 149 Works Cited 156 1 Foreword Nell Irvin Painter writes “there is seldom a singular ‘the South,’ for simple characterizations eliminate the reality of sharp conflicts over just about everything in Southern culture” (Color Line 111). In so doing, she draws attention to the ways in which denying multiple and often conflicting histories results in a privileging of one history over others. This project is concerned with one particular collection of heretofore marginalized southern histories, those of female-bodied queer people. I aim to explore certain kinds of queerness in representations of the South that scholars in the field of southern studies have thus far critically ignored. The focus on gay southern men, especially white men, has dominated the already narrow field of queer southern studies and much of the gay literature set in the South. Therefore, instead of focusing on queer images and narratives in their most visibly recognizable forms – the figure of the isolated gay white male, or the story of gay migration to urban queer havens, for example – I turn to a set of marginalized images that constitute what I call female-bodied queerness. This project suggests that a collection of interdependent dominant narratives and counter-narratives help define the region, and in particular, it focuses on the ways in which films and novels either conform to dominant cultural narratives about the region or diverge to create counter-narratives of their own. Through close analyses of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels and films set in the U.S. South, I illuminate how a concept I call female-bodied queerness is represented, and how, where, and when it manifests. For the purposes of this project, “female-bodied” refers to characters whose assigned or assumed sex is female but who may not necessarily present or identify as 2 girls or women. For example, the term “female-bodied queerness” might more accurately describe a tomboy who was born female-bodied but