Close
About
FAQ
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
Backward: queer rurality in American popular culture from 1920 to the present
(USC Thesis Other)
Backward: queer rurality in American popular culture from 1920 to the present
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
BACKWARD: QUEER RURALITY IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE FROM 1920 TO THE PRESENT by Christina Renee Belcher ——————————————————————— A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the USC Graduate School UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY University of Southern California ENGLISH August 9, 2016 Copyright 2016 Christina Belcher ii For West Virginia, Wild and Wonderful iii Acknowledgements First and foremost, thank you to my advisor and mentor, Karen Tongson. At another school (Ohio State), in another time (2008), I was assigned to read Karen’s article, “JJ Chinois's Oriental Express, or, How a Suburban Heartthrob Seduced Red America.” Rather than celebrating the stylish urban endpoints and destinations of queer life, Karen’s work focused on the dense, complex, pleasurable textures of the routes that queers take between metropoles. After reading this work, I knew that I wanted to work with Karen. Because of her guidance, I’m proud of this dissertation as both an endpoint and a journey. Although her article on queer (im)migration inspired my early ideas about queer rurality, I could not have known that she would become more to me than a challenging critic and unwavering source of support. When I found myself first in her office—a small town, working-class queer entirely unsure of the academic path on which I was embarking—I could not have known that Karen would welcome me into her LA queer community with open arms. For her friendship, as well as her guidance, I will always be grateful. And thanks to the rest of my incomparable dissertation committee. Thank you to Jack Halberstam, whose commentary on the conceptual framework of my project, from early guidance in coursework through the completion of my degree, has proven invaluable. Nayan Shah has consistently challenged me to focus on the historical nuance of my work, and has helped me envision its ability to speak to a broad community of scholars. Tania Modleski has shown enthusiasm for my work since my first semester at USC, and her writing in film and television studies has been an inspiration since I was an undergraduate, unable to imagine myself finishing the semester’s final projects, much less a dissertation. Kara Keeling has been an invaluable resource in terms of my dissertation’s grounding in film and television studies, and iv her suggestions have shaped not only this dissertation, but will also make an imprint on its future iterations. Other faculty who taught and influenced me during my time at USC include David Lloyd, Viet Nguyen, Emily Anderson, Rebecca Lemon, Joe Boone, Kate Flint, Lisa Bitel, Bruce Smith, Elizabeth Freeman, and Michelle Gordon. Michelle served as a particularly influential source of encouragement, sanity, and challenge. She inspired me as a pedagogue, and mentor, and a scholar, and this project would not have come to fruition without her guidance. The American Studies and Ethnicity Department’s series of talks and seminars proved a reliable source of scholarly excitement when the isolation of writing a dissertation crept up on me. Thank you also to my students in Gender Studies, the USC Writing Program, and Thematic Option, who taught me much about writing and research. Thanks as well to the fierce girl writers of Write Girl, particularly my mentee groups at the juvenile detention Camps Scott and Scudder. From these girls, I learned more about the importance of a writer’s voice than can possibly be measured. My experience as a graduate student in Los Angeles has been fulfilling and exciting because my friends and colleagues never allowed me to feel alone, in what can be a lonely process and an isolating town. I have learned much from Gino Conti, Alex Westcott, Emily Raymundo, Sam Carrick, Gray Fisher, Vanessa Carlisle, Tom Sapsford, Rob Rabiee, Alex Young, Patti Nelson, and Devin Toohey. My gender studies writing group included the brilliant Brittany Farr, Diana Arterian, and Dagmar Van Engen. These three friends and scholars read nearly every word of this dissertation, and I owe part of my ability to finish this project to them. My “work wife” Sarah Kessler sat across tables in Echo Park and Silver Lake coffee shops, writing with me for the final year of this dissertation. Her presence got me out of bed on v mornings when I would have rather slept than write, and I would have been far lonelier at the end of this journey without her. Finally, my beautiful community of friends and chosen family beyond academia, who were the best cheerleaders I could ask for, always interested in my work, yet provided perspective of the world that lies beyond it. I wrote all day because I wanted to spend my nights with them. The English Department’s summer travel grants afforded me the opportunity to travel to Yale, where I accessed the Jean Toomer papers in the Beinecke Rare Book Room, as well as the Library of Congress where I was able to access NBC archives that were central to this project. I also worked extensively with the UCLA Film and Television Archives and the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at USC during my time in LA. I owe thanks to the USC Graduate School for my award of a completion fellowship, which funded a final year to dedicate to my research and writing. Beyond academe, I was sustained by nights at Jumbo’s Clown Room, sweating out my writing woes at Lock Box Fitness Center, queer parties from the rooftop pool of the Standard Hotel to the sweaty dance floor of the Airliner, and so many crazy LA nights barely recalled, yet entirely necessary. I was also kept sane by the best of friends, Greg Stepniak, who reminded me to prioritize fun and aspire to “international playgirl status,” rather than wasting my years in grad school as a “crammer.” My parents provided words of support and encouragement, and their faith in me has never wavered. They brought me up in the rural elsewhere that still fascinates me today, and I owe much of this dissertation to them. Without them and my queer coming of age in West Virginia, this project would not be mine. Rather than originating in the libraries and coffee shops where it was written, many of this project’s ideas were fomenting in West Virginia, when I was vi causing trouble with my sister, Sarah, and making my weekend pilgrimages down country highways to the small town gay bars where I learned to live a queer life. I hope that my tenderness for the queerness of the country remains in these pages, and if it does, I owe that to the country queens and queers who embraced a kid way too young to be in a bar, when I needed my community the most. Last but never least; my partner Elizabeth Richmond is owed more thanks than I can possibly articulate. Beyond providing endless love and support, she quite literally taught me how to survive while getting a PhD. vii Abstract Most Americans are familiar with the mythical “heartland”: the idyllic American countryside where Christian values prevail and rustic customs endure. Yet if you turn on your television any given evening, it would be difficult to avoid surfing past at least one representation of rural degeneracy that departs from the very political rhetoric that asks the nation—including its urban and suburban majority—to adopt rural heartland values. With grounding in both queer and critical ethnic studies, this dissertation argues that these anti-idyllic representations—even as they are created to perpetuate the privilege of middle-class, white, normative American citizens in urban and suburban locations—serve surprisingly to destabilize the logics that determine normative US citizenship. By including populations like the rural poor in a queer political framework that currently overlooks them, this project demonstrates the potential for their representations to threaten the structures that continue to secure unequal distributions of wealth and opportunity in the US. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………. iii Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………….. vii Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1 “Jean Toomer’s Queer Rural South” …………………………..……………………………..... 25 Chapter 2 Erskine Caldwell, the Farm Security Administration, and Visualizing Rural America in the Depression Era ………………..…………………….....………………..……………………… 73 Chapter 3 “Beat the System”: Rurality, Whiteness, and Television in the 1970s ……………………….. 126 Chapter 4 Enduring Neoliberalism and Consuming Rurality: Rural Reality Television and Documentary Film in the Twenty-First Century …………………………………………………………….. 167 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………… 216 Figures ………………………………………………………………………………………... 219 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………. 230 1 Introduction: Backwardness and Queer Rurality Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett—the former meth addict, Christian fundamentalist villain of Netflix Original Orange is the New Black (2013-15)—exemplifies queer rurality in the twenty-first century. 1 While her character does not engage in any form of same-sex eroticism, and rather is seething with homophobia throughout the first two seasons, the show explores Pennsatucky’s sexuality and gender comportment through character flashbacks that cast her as shameful and backward, an illegible element of rural life. This project will argue that rural backwardness like Pennsatucky’s troubles the discourses of unfettered national progress that have left many queers and minoritarian subjects, rural and otherwise, in their violent wake. This characterization of Pennsatucky as queer also stakes claim in the notion that queer is not always already synonymous with progressive modernity. OITNB introduces audiences to Pennsatucky inside Litchfield prison, where she castigates her fellow inmates for their sins against God, chiefly sexual in nature. And yet, when we get a glimpse into her life before incarceration, we see her naked body flanking her boyfriend’s post-coitus, as they discuss her upcoming abortion (Fig. I-1). The procedure is not necessary simply because she lacks the means and desire to raise a child, but it will also keep her out of prison: evidence of her drug use, and thus the endangerment of the fetus, would incriminate Tiffany should she not choose to terminate the pregnancy. Her boyfriend asks her to reconsider her position on the abortion because, “you show 1 There has been a proliferation of studies and media detailing rural drug addiction and poverty in the first decades of the twenty-first century. See Sean Dunne’s documentary Oxyana (2013). Numerous articles on rural methamphetamine and prescription pain pill usage have been featured in major news sources, and the widespread coverage of the issue led the Obama Whitehouse, in 2016, to appoint Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to lead an initiative, funded at $400 million per year, that aims to battle rural America’s drug abuse problem through economic development, health services, and needle exchange. See Juliet Eilperin, “Here’s how the White House plans to address rural America’s struggle with heroin,” 15 Jan. 2016, The Washington Post. In turn, bills and initiatives intended to “curb rural drug use”—which are actually new modes of discipline for the rural poor—have been recently passed in state legislatures such as West Virginia, where SB 6, a law that will allow the state to drug test welfare applicants and recipients when there is a “reasonable suspicion” they may be using drugs, passed with bi- partisan support. Thirteen other states have passed similar legislation. See “Bill to drug test welfare recipients on its way to governor,” WSAZ, 10 March 2016. 2 ‘em a baby, you get good money from the government” (S1 E12). This representation of proliferative downward mobility, and the culture of drug use that attends it, is the portrait of rural pathology in contemporary American culture. While the specific symptoms of rural pathology have shifted across time, this project will trace a consistent circulation of anti-idyllic representations across a variety of cultural forms, from the early twentieth century to our contemporary moment. Pennsatucky has inherited a long history of rural degeneracy, which serves to articulate the normativity of her urban progressive foil on OITNB, protagonist Piper Chapman. Despite her sympathetic character development in the show’s third season, OITNB retains a critique of rural sexual deviance, implying that the history of sexual trauma that led to Tiffany’s series of abortions was incited by a lack of education about consent and pleasure, which the show locates precisely in rural America. 2 Tiffany receives a sex education from her mother, who encourages her to “Go on and let [boys] do their business. If you’re real lucky, most of them will be quick like your daddy. It’s like a bee sting, in and out, over before you knew it was happening” (S3 E10). In a portrayal of sex work as an extension of social security fraud— the show depicts both as social ills of small town life—Tiffany proceeds according to her mother’s advice, becoming a teenager who accepts six-packs of soda in exchange for sex. 3 The first episode of Season 3 portrays Tiffany’s sex work as an extension of her childhood trauma: it flashes back to Tiffany as a child, her mother forcing her to consume a liter of Mountain Dew, hoping to receive sympathy and thus higher welfare benefits by exhibiting a hyperactive child for 2 I have written elsewhere about Pennsatucky, as well as her character’s development on Orange is the New Black. For a discussion of the importance of her shift from villain to sympathetic character, see: Christina Belcher, “There’s no such thing as a post-racial prison: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the White Savior Complex on Orange is the New Black,” Television and New Media (April 2016). 3 While sex work may be associated with urban space and the infamous “street walker,” Colin Johnson tells another story about rural sex work when he writes the history of the “cat wagon,” traveling brothels that would comb the countryside in the summer months, parking at the outskirts of small towns to provide sexual services to rural men (Johnson 57). 3 the family’s social worker. As a teenager, Tiffany experiences a reprieve in her history of trauma (both sexual and parental) when she meets Nathan, a worldly boy from out of town who takes interest in her, teaching her that sex can be about intimacy, exploration, and female pleasure, not just the “bee stings” she endures from the local boys in exchange for her sugary fix. The introduction of out-of-towner Nathan solidifies OITNB’s insistence that healthy sex takes place elsewhere, not in the dystopian merging of Pennsylvania and Kentucky that spawned “Pennsatucky,” the supposed cultural and sexual wasteland of rural Appalachia. Rural reproduction and the development of the healthy national body in the country has been a national concern since the early twentieth century—the period that marks the beginning of this project’s archive—which saw the state building biopolitical projects to centralize and secure that national body in the countryside. Across a field of cultural objects that reflect these national concerns, this project will demonstrate that “backward” representations of rurality, like OITNB’s portrayal of Pennsatucky, are consistently concerns about the queerness of rural sex. Certainly, Progressive era reformers were more concerned with the social ills of the city than the country, and their concerns overwhelm American cultural memories about space and place in the early decades of the twentieth century. 4 However, recent work in queer historiography has taken up state and private initiatives that documented and disciplined the sexual practices of rural life, and country queer responses to them. 5 Behind the notion that the country could be a wellspring of health for the nation was a 4 Steven Conn argues that this philanthropic preoccupation with the city was due not only to the perceived immorality of urban life, but also that “[Progressive reformers] recognized that the United States had become an urban nation, and they insisted that, as an urban nation, the city and the problems of the nation were coterminous. The ‘city,’ in other words, became ‘public’; and they believed that the future of the nation would be won precisely in the city” (Conn 8). The collapse of the city and public life remains present in U.S. political discourse today, as the Right’s suspicions of government often take an anti-urban shape. Conn claims that these suspicions cause citizens to “retreat as far as [they] can into the world of the private,” particularly as more Americans than not live and work in metropolitan regions (7). 5 See Colin Johnson, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America, Temple UP: 2013. 4 racialized idea of rural America’s “potential,” one that was being squandered on poverty and the bad behaviors that attend it. Because of rural America’s perceived isolation from racialized minorities, and resulting “Anglo-Saxon potential” (uncontaminated by contact with immigrants and people of color), the American eugenics movement took interest in rural white Americans as apt subjects for experimentation (Johnson 28). 6 Social and sexual reform efforts aimed to help white, rural Americans embrace that potential. In Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (2013), Colin Johnson finds that “[the countryside] represented a potentially bottomless well from which would flow an unending stream of physically and morally fit youth to replenish American cities and displace the decadent, diminished stock that infested them” (Johnson 79). 7 Thus, in a period when the populations of both spatial categories were shifting, Progressive era concerns about the city were closely related to concerns about the country. The state was directly involved in efforts to preserve the “potential” of country whites, as Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission wrote a report to the US Senate in 1909 that stated, “[the] welfare of the farmer is of vital consequence to the welfare of the whole [American] community. The strengthening of country life, therefore, is the strengthening of the whole nation” (Johnson 51). This statement was made when the welfare of rural America was indeed at risk, “plagued by a laundry list of economic and social maladies,” but considered salvageable, if only the government could introduce new methods of farming, build roads to ameliorate isolation, and, 6 Nina Silber’s “‘What Does America Need So Much As Americans?’ Race and Northern Reconciliation with Southern Appalachia, 1870-1900” provides a history of late nineteenth century, middle and upper class Northern fascination with Appalachia, and the celebration of its inhabitants’ “American characteristics.” Silber argues, “By creating racial and political myths of Anglo-Saxonism and unqualified patriotism of Appalachia, northerners learned to view the white people of the southern mountains as unique among the mass of poor whites throughout the South” (256). Isolation from blackness was key to the “potentials” that middle and upper class Americans saw in rurality, particularly Appalachian rurality. 7 From what Johnson has aptly called “the agrarian origins of American sexuality” in the early twentieth century to the disciplining of properly rugged masculinity in the Civilian Conservation Corps after WWII, the history of state intervention in rural sexual life is tied up with a history of eugenics and “breeding” in America. For a history of eugenics, see Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2005). For specific interventions into the history of eugenics and Southern rurality, see Natalie Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (2012). 5 importantly, if farm families could “lead the right kind of [lives]” (Johnson 52). Most rural reform campaigns interpreted the ambiguity of the CLC's “right kind of life” to mean “an adherence to certain middle-class notions of propriety regarding sex,” which those reformers found to be severely lacking when they spent time with rural youth who had taken to cursing, “vulgar acts,” bestial sex, and frequent sexual encounters between adolescent boys who saw their behavior as a legitimate way to pass the time (Johnson 55). Print materials on proper bodily comportment and sex instruction made their way into rural homes, and itinerant sex educators instructed rural youth on middle-class morals. Because American cities were likewise considered sexually immoral, these reform efforts did not intend to re-make the country in the image of the city; rather, Progressive reformers set out to nationalize middle-class sexual ethics for all (white) Americans. 8 This transformation of rural American gendered comportment and sexuality is an ongoing project, not one that was established in the early twentieth century and carried seamlessly into our present, when rural Americans are more often than not imagined to be fiercely normative, despite the representations of degeneracy that mark their cultural landscape. 9 In his recent work on “hixploitation” cinema—a genre that peaked in the 1970s as social conservatism began to take hold of rural regions—Scott Herring demonstrates the ways that these normalization projects are ongoing. Herring shows how the queerness that attended representations of hillbillies on screen, such as depictions of rural group sex, incest, and bestiality in barns, pigsties, and swamps, had the unexpected effect of “[igniting] reactionary 8 Julian Carter’s The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940 (2007) accounts for this process of nationalizing sexual normativity. 9 Chapter 3 of this project untangles the relationship between normative white masculinity in the 1970s and representations of rural degeneracy. Derek Nystrom’s Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema (2009) also gives an account of the ways that gender and sexual normativity was negotiated in the 1970s, amongst various economic and cultural shifts that changed the functioning of white masculinity. 6 conservative movements” (97). Hixploitation’s regional sexualization of hillbillies explored non- normative sexual acts while practicing what Herring calls “queer conservatism,” representations that “lean toward an antilesbian and gay politics even as they are saturated with a queer sexual content” (101). Through this queer conservatism, the version of queer rurality that the hixploitation genre propagated ultimately abetted heteronormativity, and the protection of it, which eventually crystallized in and through the New Right in the 1970s. Through these types of representations—which are the types that this project pursues—rurality has been sutured to queerness, but disavowed by queers. In order to think through the expansive and often contradictory nature of non-normative sex in the country, this project must consider queerness broadly, beyond the confines of legible gay and lesbian identities. Alongside scholars such as Herring, this project is “In line with theoretical dilations of the keyword, queer” (“Hixploitation” 98). 10 Not only is this dilation of the term queer necessary to capture the ways that non-normative sexualities proliferate in rural America, often amongst homophobic “queers” like Pennsatucky and the hillbillies of the hixploitation genre, but because conceptions of queerness that adhere to gay and lesbian identities, rather than a field of non-normative sexual acts and practices, often displace the “backward” elements of queerness, those elements that gay and lesbian communities would choose to disavow. 11 Backwardness, marked by shame, haunts the margins of a contemporary 10 Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (1997) has also been central to the imperative to read queerness broadly, beyond LGBT identity formations. 11 The desire for those working on and from sex radical positions to disavow rurality is understandable, particularly in terms of the “possessive investment in whiteness,” in which most rural communities are imagined to participate. George Lipsitz writes that “Whiteness is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others. While one can possess one’s investments, one can also be possessed by them. I contend that the artificial construction of whiteness almost always comes to posses white people themselves unless they develop antiracist identities, unless they disinvest and divest themselves of their investment in white supremacy” (viii). Lipsitz also claims, pages later, “our society does not often produce or even imagine genuinely antiracist white people” (xiv). While his theory of whiteness is trans-regional, histories of reactionary politics, white 7 gay and lesbian community. This is because, by insisting upon political and emotional distance from the historical injuries that constituted it, queer modernity leaves much of the so-called “backward” community behind: poor, addicted, ill, rural, disabled, racialized, incarcerated, and trans subjects comprise the community’s backward elements. Yet even as marriage ceremonies increasingly mark middle-class gay and lesbian communities as models of progress toward the ideals of normative U.S. citizenship, scholars have turned toward backwardness as constitutive of queer culture. Heather Love writes, “Resisting the call of gay normalization means refusing to write off the most vulnerable, the least presentable, and all the dead” (30). This project is allied with this refusal to write off the vulnerable, least presentable, and the dead. One must refuse to write off the backward in order to pursue rural America, as it is one of the most anti-modern formations in contemporary U.S. culture, as well as the most maligned formation within queer culture. I identify scholars such as Heather Love, Elizabeth Freeman, and Christopher Nealon as interlocutors with this work. While their theories of queer histories are framed primarily as concerns with temporality, there are geographies ensconced in all practices and experiences of queer time. 12 In Cruising Utopia (2009), José Esteban Muñoz claims that to write meaningful criticism in a present that is “poisonous and insolvent,” we must “pull from the past,” looking beyond the “here and now” (30). I signal to Muñoz to point out that this hermeneutic, so clearly associated with temporality in queer studies, is both temporal and spatial, a critique of the here and now: now, the present moment of consciousness; and here, placed, specifically located. In other words, the present is a presence. Muñoz’s basic tenet of queer utopia—a horizon imbued isolationism, and political actions against people of color mark white rurality as particularly invested in whiteness. Ironically, this is an investment in a whiteness that is not particularly invested in them. 12 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2009); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010); Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall (2001). 8 with potentiality—contains within it a spatial critique: “The transregional or the global as modes of spatial organization potentially displace the hegemony of an unnamed here that is always dominated by the shadow of the nation-state and its mutable and multiple corporate interests” (29). The shadow of the nation-state is cast widely over a vast, transregional rural America—a rural America consistently voting against the interests of its own vulnerability—and that casting plays a significant role in our present impasse. Just as Muñoz looks to the “no-longer-conscious” past to mine for radical, unfinished possibilities therein, I look toward the messy representations of rurality as another reservoir of potential for troubling the logics of the nation-state and its manner of rendering rural populations, alongside queered ones, as disposable. 13 As such, my gesture, toward a queer politics that recognizes backward affiliations with representations of rurality, brings the agency of illegibility to the fore, pushing queer studies toward an embrace of backwardness that even the field’s turn toward shame has yet found unthinkable. I center cultural production as a crucial site at which backward queer resistance foments, and popular culture as a vector for the circulation of discourses that define the ideals of American citizenship. Ultimately, this project engages a range of anti-idyllic or “backward” rural representations in literature, television, film, photography, and new media, in order to show how these representations struggle to forge a national consensus about American citizenship and its cultural values regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. While the rural texts that animate this dissertation’s chapters appear to operate outside the parameters of queer studies’ “good objects,” which are more often than not politically radical and urban, they do the work of disrupting national logics of progress and citizenship, often exceeding or defying the forms through which 13 Keeping rural populations in a constant state of disposability creates a reservoir of white anger in America that, rather than inspiring radical energies, has continued to turn the country to the Right since the 1970s. One need to look no further than the hoards of angry, white, non-urban populations voting for Donald Trump to see the ways that disposable populations are turned toward reactionary politics. See Michael Cooper Jr.’s “A Message from Trump’s America,” US News, 16 March 2016. 9 they have been disseminated or the cultural producers who intended them as modes of anti-queer discipline. While the willful insistence to pursue backwardness and shame is a more recent development in queer studies, space, and particularly rural space, has been central to the field from its foundational texts. When Foucault described the ways that sex became a public issue in The History of Sexuality, he claimed that in the nineteenth century, “It was essential that the state know what was happening with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it,” referring specifically to a rural subject, and the use he was making of his sex (26). 14 Beyond the confines of institutions, the individual’s sex on which Foucault focuses is a “simpleminded” farmhand from the rural French village of Lapcourt, who in 1867 came under medical and judicial scrutiny after he was caught playing “the familiar game called ‘curdled milk’ with a young village girl in a ditch by the side of a country road” (31). While he is certainly flippant about the imbalanced power relations that must have existed between the older male farmhand and the young girl, Foucault dismisses and pastoralizes this sexual act as he calls it “an integral part of village life,” which “[the farmhand] had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about it” (31). In his dissertation that explores the intersections of rural sexuality and disability across the twentieth century, Ryan Cartwright claims, “The rustic sexuality of the simple-minded farmhand 14 This need on the part of the state produced “a new regime of discourses,” proliferating around the sexual subjects of the state (27). Perversions were the business of the state because “it had long been asserted that a country had to be populated if it hoped to be rich and powerful... [and] its future and its fortune were tied not only to the number and the uprightness of its citizens, to their marriage rules and family organization, but to the manner in which each individual made use of his sex” (26). From secondary schools to psychiatric wards, Foucault describes the ways that sex came under surveillance and began to pose a threat. Watching and speaking were the modes through which to combat anxieties about sex that may be excessive, perverse, criminal, or otherwise outside the state’s censure; yet an imposition to speak was, and is, often unavailable. The mechanisms of surveillance that Foucault describes in eighteenth century secondary schools indicate that “one only has to glance over the architectural layout, the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the question of sex was a constant preoccupation” (27). 10 from Lapcourt was messy, bound up with questions of intellectual disability and economic marginality, and inextricable from emerging social norms rooted in gender, race, and age” (1). I would add that the farmhand’s sex is also inextricably bound up with the place itself. The farmhand’s sexuality is not only treated as perverse because of his intellectual disability, but also because of the marginal space in which he and the other “village urchins” conduct their sexualities: “in the ditch by the side of the road leading to Saint-Nicholas” (Foucault 31). The farmhand became an object of medicine after the girl’s parents reported his behavior to the town’s mayor, and Foucault concludes that sex, “be it refined or rustic—had to be put into words” (32). But sex “in the ditch,” on the road between a town (Saint-Nicholas) and nowhere (Lapcourt), requires a different operating procedure to document and disperse, a different mechanism by which to put the farmhand’s sexuality into words. The surveillance mechanisms required to track these kinds of “rustic” rural sex acts are different than tracking the “refined,” and the idea that they occur out of sight, beyond the architectural or regulation-based surveillances of spaces such as boarding schools, hospitals, or family homes in dense neighborhoods, causes anxieties to proliferate about the illegible sexualities of rural denizens. In more recent work on queer time and space, Jack Halberstam turns to Foucault as well, particularly his claim in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” that “To be ‘gay’… is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life” (138). Halberstam understands queer ways of life as practices that create and sustain queer times and spaces—those modes that Foucault claimed to cause the most (productive) “unease” in “sanitized society”—which emerge out of alternative “logics of location, movement, and identification” (1). These logics may be alternative to heteronormativity, but also alternative to homonormativity, which is often synonymous with 11 urbanity. Indeed, the spatial logics of homonormativity led Halberstam to developing the term “metronormativity,” which describes the “conflation of ‘urban’ and ‘visible’ in many normalizing narratives of gay/lesbian subjectivities” (36). Through representations of Brandon Teena’s death in rural Nebraska, Halberstam unpacks metronormativity in order to think about the ways that rurality becomes “a site of horror and degradation in the urban imagination” (27). This work allows Halberstam to consider “staying put” in rural America as a complex site of queer subjectivity, rather than a demeaned proto-gay existence, stunted in its inability to leave and “become queer” in an urban elsewhere. This insistence on allowing for a narrative of queer rural complexity becomes particularly important when certain strands of queer studies, which Halberstam cites mainly through Dennis Altman’s Global Sex, see “‘sexuality [as] an important arena for the production of modernity, with ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ identities acting as the markers for modernity’ (Altman 2001, 91)” (Halberstam 37). 15 Refusals like Halberstam’s, to equate queer sexuality with modernity, are also refusals to see the “modern,” “progressive” space of the city as an uncompromised space, for instance, for queers (of color) to live without (police) harassment. A uni-dimensional vision of rurality allows the problems of urban life to endure, unexamined, while denying the complexity of rural life in general, and the complex attachments some queers have to rurality in particular. While the process of making queer rurality visible has often been a disciplinary practice enacted by the state and/or its institutions, cultural historians such as Scott Herring have built archives of queer rurality that draw our attention to the artists and cultural producers that have been using “rural stylistics” to critique the metronormativity of gay and lesbian communities for 15 This conflation of homosexuality and modernity has been unpacked in other contexts beyond the false rural/urban opposition. See Jasbir Puar’s work on Israeli “pinkwashing” campaigns, particularly “Israel's gay propaganda war,” The Guardian, 1 July 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/01/israels-gay- propaganda-war 12 decades. Herring’s work performs its own type of what he terms “critical rusticity,” which makes visible these rural queer stylistics as it engages in “a dynamic mode of queer critique and a novel structure of feeling, a rhetorical and emotional engagement with U.S.-based metronormativity that critiques any representation of the rural as an ‘empty’ space removed from racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic stress or inequality” (85). Rather than making non-metronormative queerness legible to urban/urbane models of queer life, Herring’s work preserves that which articulates queer rurality as queerness with a difference, a force of resistance in its unique ability to critique neoliberal urban life. 16 By establishing rurality’s power of provocation, cultural histories such as Herring’s make the work of this project possible. However, his archive of rural queer cultural production is not entirely similar to the archive that this project will pursue. 17 Instead, I unpack an accidental archive of queer rurality, one yet illegible to queer studies, even to those who refuse to conflate gay and lesbian identities and modernity, i.e. urbanity. Rather than thinking toward the radical resistance practices of rural queers, this project considers the ways that queer rurality as a concept of trans-regional shame exceeds the popular cultural forms that attempt to contain and discipline it. If the past century has been marked by biopolitical projects intended to preserve the sanctity of country life, and with it the (white) national body, it is also marked by anti-idyllic representations that serve to distinguish the healthy, normal lives of modern, urban and suburban Americans from those who were and are left behind in the country. Mainstream national culture 16 These critiques are made from within the city as well, typically by minoritarian populations such as racialized immigrants or sex workers who must do daily battle for space and resources with upwardly mobile white, gay gentrifiers and the businesses that cater to them. See Martin F. Manalansan, “Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City,” Social Text 23, no. 84-85 (2005): 141-155; Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 17 Other cultural histories that preserve the richness of rurality include John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (1999); E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (2001); De-centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis (2000), ed. Richard Phillips, David Shuttleton, Diane Watt, New York, NY: Routledge. 13 has both produced and managed queer rurality through representations of its backwardness, which have proliferated across genre and form. Oftentimes, the queers represented therein had no agency in their portrayals, and that difference distinguishes the archive I pursue here from other archives of queer rurality that have circulated in recent scholarly discourse. The assertion of an implicit national subject into the localized spaces of rurality is a contradiction that this project seeks to pursue. Ryan Cartwright’s justifications for the study of an anti-idyllic archive resonate with the work that this project hopes to accomplish: “Studying the anti-idyll challenges an implicit assumption that the charmed circle of sexuality, as well as norms of good health and diligent labor, are most perfectly located within the pastoral landscapes of the white U.S. countryside” (7). We might ask, if the anti-idyllic has such a long, rich history, how the implicit assumption of rural normativity has remained intact? Before turning to the anti-idyll and its role in managing both rural and urban populations, I would like to briefly detour toward the enduring idyllic itself, as it was produced through the American pastoral. A predecessor to recent rural cultural studies, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) argues that the American pastoral reached beyond its spatial dimensions and became the ideal of normative American culture broadly, as it originated in the very idea of America itself: an “unspoiled continent,” a “virgin hemisphere” in the European mind. Marx claimed that the idealized spatial dimension was not ultimately the wilderness itself, but a median between the unknowability of the wilderness and the industrial progress of the town. This median between wilderness and industry is central to Marx’s definition of the pastoral, as progress over the unknowable is the impulse of the city, not the country. The median was clearly idealized in early twentieth century American literary cultures, 14 and later mid-century televisual cultures. 18 For instance, Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), takes place in the safe, sleepy community of North Dormer, Massachusetts, which exists in a space separate from the developed, and ultimately dangerous, town of Nettleton. It is also set apart from the mountain, “a bad place” compared to which “North Dormer represented all the blessings of the most refined civilization” (92). And yet, the pastoral’s mediation of developed progress and rural wildness are not simply spatial, but also connected to race, indigeneity, and nation. As an extension of the colonial desire for an “unspoiled” American landscape, the act of romanticizing rurality was and is one mode by which citizens participate in the spirit of settler colonialism. Citizens dramatize manifest destiny as a continued project of conquering the remaining “wild” lifeworlds within a landscape of colonial destruction and development that had been previously completed, and yet is ever renewable. Nearly half a century ago, Raymond Williams opened cultural studies to the structures of feeling that attend this spatial duality of urban/rural, as he documented the meanings that the country and the city historically accrued through the affects that subjects experience around these two spatial poles. The city becomes associated with “civilization,” “learning,” “communication,” and “light,” as well as “noise,” “worldliness,” and “ambition;” the country contrasts these feelings with a “natural way of life,” “peace,” “innocence,” “simple virtue,” and yet “backwardness,” “ignorance,” and “limitation” also attend the imagined countryside (1). As Williams tracks the “escalator” of historical perspective, a renewable turn backward that anticipates an end closing in upon us, he argues that desires to return to a rural order are misdirected dissatisfactions with a capitalist present, hinged on the romanticization of a purportedly pre-capitalist history that seems to still exist in rural elsewheres (35). However, the 18 Primary in this literary trend was the New England pastoral: Robert Frost’s poetry, Sarah Orne Jewett’s short fiction, and Edith Wharton’s rural novels, Summer and Ethan Frome. 15 desire to find a place that is removed from the exploitation of workers and the drive to consume overlooks the fact that “The exploitation of man and of nature, which takes place in the country, is realised and concentrated in the city” (48). We overlook exploitation in the country because “it is also a main source for that last protecting illusion in the crisis of our own time: that it is not capitalism which is injuring us, but the more isolable, more evident system of urban industrialism” (96). In contradistinction to Williams’ claims about the pastoral and the idealization of the country, this project will explore the ways that the “protecting illusion” that capitalism is somehow not “the crisis of our time” produces backward, anti-idyllic representations of rurality in America, rather than an uncomplicated investment in the pastoral. The endurance of the anti- idyll, alongside expressions of American anti-urbanism, suggests a radical ambivalence toward country life, and that U.S.-based dissatisfactions are more complicated than the desire to escape “urban industrialism” (or later, deindustrialization) through the idealization of country life. 19 This project, in its attention to the urban and suburban responses to queer rurality, locates those dissatisfactions across a range of economic and cultural crises. In the realm of culture, rurality becomes a focal point of contention during times of increased precarity (or hypervisible precarity) in the United States. This is because rural realities—such as economic depression, isolation, and frustration with state policies, combined with poor education and healthcare—pull rural communities, and thus the “welfare of the whole American community” backward, as they often fail or refuse to strive toward normative ideals, a condition that is exacerbated during 19 Likewise, for Williams, the rural did not signify unilaterally. He notes a shift in the late eighteenth century when “The golden age and the Garden of Eden, lacking industry and pleasure, were not virtuous but ignorant: the city, and especially London, was the symbol of progress and enlightenment, its social mobility the school of civilisation and liberty” (144). 16 periods of national unrest. 20 However, this project does not claim that the economic and social ills that plague rural communities transgress normativity according to an agential queer ethos, akin to Foucault’s development of a gay way of life that willfully produces unease in a sanitized society. Rather, I gauge the anxious responses that representations of rural backwardness elicit from the national body, which allows us to see rurality as queer, often in spite of itself. The anxieties that attend representations of rural backwardness foment in a threatened normative population, making up the queer archive of precarity that this work uncovers. They signal a potentiality in the affective realm, evidence that urban and suburban America must grapple with rurality as a drag backward upon the logics of a “progressive” nation. In other words, rurality has an enduring power to disrupt. As such, I argue that rural life, caught as it is in the slippage between its representations as quaintly anachronistic and dangerously retrograde, does produce backward logics of place, movement, and identity that are alternative to normativity and, indeed, queer. The “regions” that draw that nation backward are, ironically, vast and diverse. I follow Colin Johnson in pursuing rurality expansively, rather than focusing my inquiries on a specifically problematic region, such as Appalachia, the Ozarks, the rural South, or rural Midwest, as none of these regions is itself representative of the ways that “the rural,” as an expanse rather than a region, has been politicized by the Right, or demonized by majoritarian urban and suburban citizen ideals. 21 For instance, the Right has used a post-Civil Rights 20 Country Life Commission, 1909 Report to the U.S. Senate. 21 Johnson comments on the indisputable regionality of other rural queer studies, such as those by John Howard, Susan Lee Johnson, and Peter Boag. Johnson writes, “regional imaginaries operate centrally in the historical accounts that all three of these scholars have provided,” which he reads as indicative of the trouble that the rural as an analytic category causes scholars. He claims that the reason for this difficulty lies in the false binary of urban/rural, and the “sense of geographical enormity that the ‘rural’ implies,” which “often seems to make whatever ‘it’ is too vague and too demographically diffuse to qualify as legitimately representative of anything in any historical sense” (11-12). However, it is this ambiguity that has made rurality rife for galvanization by the Right, and 17 minoritarian rhetoric of injury to call for the “protection” of rurality as an ideology more so than a place, with “small town” ways of life purportedly under fire. In order to conflate place and politics to galvanize a widespread conservative base, the Right has had to consider rurality trans- regionally. Reading rurality according to the terms of mainstream cultural and political discourse, I also consider rurality as a conceptual expanse, rather than a specific, problematic region. The editors of the 2014 issue of GLQ on “Queering the Middle” likewise consider rurality trans-regionally, as they “[deploy]… sexuality and gender as vantages to reformulate region and regionality” (2). I take a cue from the editors, following lines of “critical regionality” initiated by scholars such as Gayatri Gopinath, whose work opens ways of “showing how the narratives of the region ‘rub against’ the triumphant teleologies of nation making and globalization in general, and the creation of sexual/gender subjects in particular” (GLQ 4). 22 This project thus follows backward narratives of rurality that rub against the progressive teleologies of the nation, tracing them back to an expansive trans-regional idea of the country that exists in these pages from the cane fields of agricultural Georgia to the fictional expanse of “Nowhere, California.” This project is about American rurality, but rurality in the U.S. is fraught with discourses of imperialism. Beyond the colonial treatment of rurality as a wilderness yet to be conquered, Natalie Ring’s work on the colonial status of the rural South as a “problem” region in the early twentieth century emphasizes the transnational elements of American rurality. Ring argues that the South at that time mirrored a colonial economy in the sense that the infusion of northern Johnson demonstrates that its messy ambiguity was also teeming with queer culture before it underwent processes of national normalization with the rest of the country. 22 The editors refer here to Gopinath’s claim that “a regional perspective ‘provides us with an alternative mapping of sexual geographies that link disparate transnational locations and that allow new models of sexual subjectivity to come into focus” (343). See Gayatri Gopinath, “Queer Regions: Locating Lesbians in Sancharram,” A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 18 capital and production of raw materials kept southern regions economically subordinate. Also, “the region became a colossal laboratory for social change and ‘civilizing missions’” as missionaries sought to modernize the South (Ring 30-31). Beyond Ring’s reasoning for categorizing the rural South as “colonial,” I would argue that the protection, preservation, and creation of rural America more broadly as the “heartland” works to justify imperial projects even today. Freedom, the American way of life, the American dream: these vague concepts, tied still to “heartland” ideals, are crucial to the “savior” discourses that permeate mainstream American political thought. In this sense, rurality becomes doubly backward, like the figure of the child (and a stunted one), which must be saved by the political. 23 The anti-idyll, like both the pastoral and the figure of the child, provides that which requires a savior: if it cannot be preserved, perhaps rurality might be rehabilitated. And if neither preservation nor rehabilitation can be achieved, rurality might still be spectacularized and observed, and it is reliably entertaining in the realm of anti-idyllic popular culture. In the early 2000s, the emergent field of “whiteness studies” did the majority of work on observing the anti-idyll, as the field’s enmeshment of “white trash” and rurality led scholars such as Matt Wray to unpack, for instance, the ways that poor whiteness complicated the logics of white supremacy in the Antebellum South, or why rural white families were used in campaigns for “better breeding” in the early twentieth century. And yet, it was the field’s preoccupation with disaffiliating whiteness from white supremacy that prevented it from being able to truly grapple with the shameful articulations of rural whiteness that are indeed backward: racist, xenophobic, homophobic and reactionary. Robyn Wiegman’s critique of the field is central to my disaffiliation with it. Despite the fact that this project does include its fair share of trashiness and representations of rural whiteness, it does not hinge on a proposed radical potentiality of 23 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke UP 2004. 19 “white trash.” 24 Rather than fixing queer rurality as an identity formation, either circumstantial or agential, like white trash, I interpret queer rurality as a structure of feeling, both from within and in response to anti-idyllic representations, that complicates national narratives of progress, but does not necessarily harness the power to upend them. Queer rurality is both the queer’s refusal to leave the rural community and the sense of unease these refusals cause urban and suburban Americans. Thus, while rural backwardness is often racialized, it is not specifically raced. It emerges through rural queer positionalities that range from the stigmatized black migrant at odds with the urban black bourgeoisie in the midst of the Great Migration, to the stars of contemporary rural reality television, who are overwhelmingly white, cast as such because the geographic imagination of rural America today has followed the (falsely all-encompassing) logics of migration toward the conclusion that the countryside is no longer populated by people of color. 25 Finally, this project considers rural queer representations that were immensely influential 24 Wiegman’s critique of whiteness studies is primarily an opposition to the field’s position that working class white people can disaffiliate themselves with whiteness. Articulating full humanity as an achievement that whiteness prevents, whiteness studies makes white people a group of people that have been injured by whiteness itself (176). The modes by which the disaffiliation of whites from whiteness might be achieved differs based on the strand of thought within the field. The “race traitor” strand privileges the ability, ironically, for white people to make a conscious choice to privilege political attachments over the material body, a move a person of color would never be able to make (181). The “white trash” strand positions certain forms of whiteness as injured by class, allowing those people to play the part of still-white anti-racist by participating in the fantasy of white injury (183). And the labor-history strand imagines an ethnically white working-class subject, perverted by the history of racialization, who is still present and nostalgically imagined. Scholars in this strand, such as David Roediger, advocate for a post- white, working-class struggle, an allied movement of workers that transcends racial identification. While this dissertation poses rurality, and oftentimes, clearly, white rurality, as sharing certain affective modes with queerness—shame, humiliation, and backwardness—I am not proposing an allied movement of sexual minorities and rural denizens. Rather, I look at queerness and rurality together, acknowledging the differences that push them politically apart, while also thinking about the manner by which narratives of national progress yoke them awkwardly together. See Wiegman, Object Lessons (2012). 25 Another reason that I wish to distance myself from whiteness studies’ approach to rurality is that it erases non-white rurality, understanding queerness in the country as emerging exclusively from class-based failures at normativity, rather than exploring and exploiting the multiple ways that rurality might trouble the logics of normativity. There are exceptions in the field, particularly in regards to considerations of sexuality and gender, such as Jillian Sandell’s work on Dorothy Allison and Laura Kipnis’s interview with “White Trash Girl,” performance artist Jennifer Reeder, for the collection White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newlitz. 20 at their historical junctures, each of which marks a period of national unrest. Indeed, each chapter considers a different genre or media at a key moment when that particular form carried the most influence in the national consciousness. Through the project’s promiscuity around objects of study, I make explicit the ways that rural America’s place within the national consciousness shifts as it moves across forms. Technological development marks the temporal pace of the progressive nation, and rurality—out of pace with that progress—always already drags backward on the nation. I argue that shifts in genre, media, and form change the relationship of the reader or viewer to the act of return, which an engagement with rurality requires. From the page of the novel to the film negative, each of the forms that this project investigates participates in the othering of rural America, but rurality continues its national regression as its formal representations progress into the twenty-first century. I ultimately find that rurality is unwieldy, exceeding the forms that set out to discipline and contain it. Chapter One demonstrates the manner by which upwardly mobile, urban black communities attempted to integrate into the fabric of the national body through a disavowal of “backward” rural life in the early twentieth century. I propose Jean Toomer as the New Negro Renaissance author who most clearly articulated and resisted black middle class concerns about rural Southern migrant sexual and gender deviance. Toomer’s reparative embrace of rurality in his literary work Cane (1923) counterbalanced popular accounts of African American migrant sexual degeneracy, which were prevalent in black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender. I argue that the black press policed migrants who were “contaminated” by their former lives in the rural South because they threatened the black uplift movement and the state’s surveillance projects, which restricted sexual mores among residents of black urban areas. Through this literary-historical work, I show that Toomer’s embrace of queer rurality was an example of its 21 disruptive political and cultural force. This chapter challenges established narratives of the New Negro Renaissance, in which the city plays the primary role in the development of black queer life. My treatment of Toomer’s utilization of modernist form as the most appropriate tool for the articulation of rural backwardness also works toward a renegotiation of literary modernism’s relation to space and region. Beyond William Faulkner’s Southern gothic novels, modernist experimentation, like black queerness, is more often than not associated with the city: temporalities sped up by urban movement and an industrial pace, the flaneur’s gait, and the worldly urbanity of the avant-garde. Toomer, however, uses the “progressive” forms of modernism to articulate the backward forms of rurality, thus demonstrating the inability of the realist novel to articulate and contain the messiness of rurality in the first place, an inability that becomes clear with Erskine Caldwell’s literary work in Chapter Two. Chapter Two documents the racialized anxieties that gathered around perceived failures of rural whiteness during the rise of the American eugenics movement and the unprecedented national impoverishment of the Great Depression. Progressive moral reformers attempted to manage the effects of rurality’s backward unruliness upon the rest of the nation, but as their efforts receded, eugenicists followed their footsteps deep into America’s “hollers,” transforming anxieties about moral hygiene into anxieties about racial hygiene. If histories of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction U.S. have tended to focus on amalgamation and racial contamination as central public concerns, the eugenics movement’s obsession with the problem of poor rural whiteness reveals the problem of white degeneracy, and queer backwardness, as one of isolation and stasis, in addition to proximity and density. This chapter considers backward rurality as a formation parallel to sites of queer excess that scholars such as Nayan Shah have located around 22 movement, density, contact, and proximity. 26 To accomplish this framing of rurality, Chapter Two considers the literary alongside the visual, pairing Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), a Georgia sharecropper novel that was immensely popular during the years after its publication, with the Farm Security Administration’s photography project, which the US government utilized to portray white poverty as a temporary condition with the potential for rehabilitation, whose subjects’ dignities were not foreclosed by their economic circumstances. I argue that while the photographic was taken up as a mode of governance, the unruliness of documentary-style photography mirrored the unruliness of the novel as eugenicists took it up at this time, often complicating state biopolitical projects in their presentations of American rurality. This comparison demonstrates the inability of both the eugenic novel and the documentary photograph to contain and discipline queer rurality, despite the state’s investment in the photograph’s ability to do so. Chapter Three takes up the 1970s, when the celebration of the “redneck” circulated in political discourse as the New Right began to forge its conservative cultural revolution. In this moment, the task of managing rural backwardness was taken up by broadcast television. This chapter focuses on NBC’s failed attempt at reviving the rural sitcom with The Kallikaks (1977), a show that replaced television’s 1960s hillbillies with a family depicted as deviants committed to living off the system rather than living off the land. I argue that the negative responses to these degenerate rural representations in the late 1970s resulted from the rise of multicultural neoliberalism and the decline of the urban American working class, two interrelated shifts that 26 Shah’s Stranger Intimacy (2012) articulates the range of intimacies that developed between global migrants in the North American West during the first half of the twentieth century. State tactics of exclusion and containment created an environment in which non-normative intimacies and sexual practices proliferated between men. Although these proliferations often occurred in rural spaces, the living conditions of migrant workers paralleled what proponents of urban queer life claim of the city as the space most suited to “stranger” intimacies: movement, density, contact, and proximity. For an account of the city as such, see Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, New York: NYUP, 1999. 23 redefined white citizenship, and with it rural backwardness, in that cultural moment. The relationship between rural television and white audiences is key to theorizing the ways that the precarious white working classes encountered and negotiated their similarities to the white rural poor, given the economic and identitarian crises of the 1970s. In this chapter, the queering effects of rurality are most evident in the disgust that The Kallikaks garnered from mainstream audiences, signaling the ability for rural backwardness to disturb and distress national narratives of place, race, and progress. My final chapter looks at our post-recession present and the consumption of rural America through an onslaught of rural reality television programming that emerged in the past ten years. The chapter compares the authenticity genre of rural reality television to an authenticity genre with a longer, more politically conscious history: documentary film. Specifically, the chapter takes up the queer rurality of Julian Nitzberg’s documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (2010), and the ways that the White family’s queer potentiality—a radical disavowal of the state and insistence on creating ways of living otherwise—is present in, and yet ultimately shut down by, the rural reality television format. The chapter compares Nitzberg’s portrayal of rural disruption to TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012-14), demonstrating the ways that the reality show’s queerness, present in its ability to disrupt hetero-familial narratives of health, happiness, and success, is constrained by the reality TV form. The show loses its palatability for safe consumption when its transmedial elements— particularly its mainstream media presence—overflow the show itself, pushing the rural reality stars beyond the confines of that form. Rural reality itself ultimately pushes the reality show uncomfortably against the realm of documentary, through which viewers are not expected to simply gawk at the spectacle of rural poverty, but rather, intervene. While this chapter considers 24 the popular forms most appropriate to do the work of exploring queer rurality, it also continues the work of Chapter Three, thinking toward our ability to enjoy the spectacle of rural backwardness in an era of unprecedented debt and widespread precarity, in which there is no longer a clear distinction between the poor and working classes. 25 Chapter 1: Jean Toomer’s Queer Rural South “Chicagoans, New Yorkers, Detroiters, people in Cleveland, Los Angeles, and other places can go no further than the people living in the Mississippi Valley will allow them.” —Dan Burley, The Chicago Defender, March 6, 1937 “I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless.” —Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories 1.1 The South in the City As Dan Burley, staff correspondent at The Chicago Defender, makes clear in his 1937 article on “racial maladjustment,” the black middle classes residing in American cities felt they were being dragged backward by the attitudes and affectations of black communities “embedded along the banks of the Mississippi river.” The black middle class, and the black press that represented its interests, were concerned about the effect that rural African American migrants might have upon their own upward mobility. Focusing on the ways that rural migrants change the urban landscape, Burley continues, “Exodus from the South northward, westward and eastward continually goes on. To the populations of metropolitan centers is a constant addition of untutored southern brethren bringing with them the ignorance, the poverty, the inferiority complexes instilled in them by the boot of the ignorant southern white man” (4). In the black press, the depictions of rural migrants as a drag upon the modernity of urban black communities often fomented sexual anxieties, as well as racial ones, and the moral panics that ensued affected black female migrants in particularly degrading ways. 1 In other words, many of the black middle class’s anxieties about sex in the city circulated alongside similar anxieties about sex in the 1 See Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 738-55. 26 country. While scholars have attended to the urban space of Harlem as the locus of queer intimacies in the 1920s and 1930s, a discourse circulated that did not simply find urban spaces perverse, but also specified the rural migrant as a particular threat to the sexual respectability of the black middle classes residing in Harlem and other centers of urban black life. 2 This chapter specifies the ways that the black press, as an “ally” to established black churches and the middle class populations that they served, policed the sexual practices and bodily comportments of rural Southerners who were making their way north during the Great Migration. 3 After establishing the circulation of migration anxieties in the black press, this chapter considers Jean Toomer as the literary figure who most clearly took up these concerns about the intractability of rural blackness. Through Toomer’s literary vision of rurality, I demonstrate the ways that the black middle class and its urban uplift movements drew upon a formulation of rural degeneracy and sexual perversion that already turned the rural South backward, even as thousands were moving ostensibly forward, away from the tenant farms and lynch mobs that haunted Toomer’s Georgia landscapes, and into cities teeming with black life. 4 2 Certainly, the New Negro Renaissance, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, was an urbanist literary movement, with its centers of creative production located in major urban areas. I use the term “New Negro Renaissance” throughout this chapter because with Cane, Toomer was writing neither in nor about Harlem. For an account that re-imagines the Renaissance beyond Harlem, which intersects with my insistence on reading the movement’s queerness beyond the urbanist frame, see Davarian L. Baldwin’s Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2013. For scholarship on the city as the seat of queer practices and desires, see Julie Abraham, Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of City. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2009; Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century, New York: Columbia UP, 1997; Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, Chicago, IL, U of Chicago P, 2009. 3 George Chauncey cites Reverend Adam Clayton Powell’s claim that he “[had] not known a more helpful ally than the Negro press” in his crusades against vice and immorality (particularly sexual immorality) in African American Harlem, when he was pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church from 1908 to 1937 (254). George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, New York: Basic Books, 1994. 4 In the two moves that the chapter makes—to document the ways that the black middle class cast migrants from the South as a drag backward on the burgeoning movement toward black uplift, and Toomer as the poet who celebrated them—I am working with and in two different forms of what I call “queer.” Rural migrants were “queered” by the black middle class in the sense that their practices—from bodily comportment to labor to play— were cast as perverse, in both the sexual and wayward uses of that term. Toomer embraced these queered migrants 27 As part of this project’s broader focus on significant eruptions of backward rurality into national culture, this chapter frames Toomer’s Cane (1923) as one such crucial instance whereby a representation of rurality elicits attention from normative suburban and urban America. Toomer’s book—a hybrid, modernist text containing poetry, short fiction, and drama—theorizes the ways in which the black middle class, trying desperately to hold onto the social capital it had accumulated, attempted to suppress black queer rurality for the good of the community. This particular instance of a community negotiating its relationship to rurality is not isolated, and rural America has played a role in the struggle to define US identity more broadly. Because the city and the country can both be valued and devalued depending on a particular community’s characterizations of the ideal citizen, it is crucial to examine what media scholar Victoria Johnson points to as key moments in which these myths about place and identity “[have] been significantly taken up and revalued… in popular discourse” (4). While scholars have tackled the cultural battle that took place in Harlem between the conservative sectors of the established black middle class and the black community’s younger writers and artists over the contours of legitimate black citizenship in relation to sexual propriety, the rural migrant also played in these debates. 5 I read Jean Toomer’s literary work, as well as his personal correspondence and autobiographical writings (located in the Beinecke Rare Book Room of the Yale University Library), as a queer provocation toward reconsidering the role of rurality in the New Negro Renaissance. Toomer’s Cane was not only the most rural of the celebrated Renaissance texts, and it was also celebrated because it was considered to be the authentic account of the black in his reparative writing about their “perversions,” thus using the black middle class’s own queer rural formations against them. As such, I characterize his writing as queer. 5 While Jean Toomer was a member of the black intelligentsia in Harlem for a time, he was not close to the more radical, self-baptized “Niggerati” who challenged the conservative sector with efforts such as the sex-radical publication Fire!!! (1926). This familiar group included Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others. See Robert Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977. 28 experience in the South, and subsequent migration north. Reading Toomer as central to a rural queer archive not only challenges the previously conceived function of the urban scene as the center of queer life in the context of the New Negro Renaissance, but it also allows us to see rural migration for the threat it posed to the black middle class’s biopolitical projects. 6 Backward threats and resistances may have been tamped down after they arose in the New Negro Renaissance canon, just as they were policed on city streets, but in their irruptions they offer alternative narratives to the metronormative stories scholars have told about the city as the radical force of black queer life in the 1920s and 1930s. 7 In Cane, I argue that Toomer queers the rural/urban divide such that a perverse rurality acts as a defense against a sterilized urban landscape that he saw encroaching upon rural America. 8 Rather than exhibiting paranoia about rurality’s sexual perversity (which many—both black and white—argued would lead America to degeneracy), Cane embraces the queer intimacies that rurality in particular makes available. 9 This chapter will argue that Toomer’s reparative approach 6 Most of the literary criticism that considers the role of Southern rurality in the works of the New Negro Renaissance focuses on questions of folk culture. See Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001; Hazel Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston,” In New Essays on ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God, ed. Michael Awkward, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 7 See Kevin J. Mumford, “Homosex Changes: Race, Cultural Geography, and the Emergence of the Gay,” American Quarterly 48.3 (1996) 395-414. 8 Toomer explains the intrigue of the South and even its oppressive race relations in a letter to Waldo Frank in 19 July 1922: “Life here [in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia] has not the vividity and distinction of that of middle Georgia. Racial attitudes, on both sides, are ever so much more tolerant, even friendly. Oppression and ugly emotions seem nowhere in evidence. And there are no folk-songs. A more stringent grip, I guess, is necessary to force them through. But southern life is surely here. Stringy; ruddy whites, worn; fullblooded blacks. [….] The opportunity for a vivid symbolism is wonderful” [sic]. This chapter will consider how Toomer constructs the South as affectively oppressive in a manner that inspires a literary response. All of the letters cited in this chapter are cataloged in the Jean Toomer collection at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, unless otherwise specified. 9 See Colin R. Johnson, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America, Philadelphia, PA, Temple UP, 2013. In his book’s second chapter, Johnson focuses on the work of the Country Life Commission, whose 1909 report to the US Senate contended that "[the] welfare of the farmer is of vital consequence to the welfare of the whole [American] community. The strengthening of country life, therefore, is the strengthening of the whole nation" (51). In the logic of this initiative, degenerative rurality was seen as a threat to the entire nation. Rural America was considered salvageable, if only the government could introduce new methods of farming, build roads to ameliorate isolation, and, importantly, if farm families "lead the right kind of [lives]" (52). Most rural reform 29 toward rural perversity stood in contradistinction to a broader cultural campaign against abnormality and queerness, supposedly running rampant in rural areas: spaces thought to be without surveillance and regulation, and thought to exist outside the forward march of progress that defined the black middle class and its relationship to the city in the early twentieth century. Harnessing and perhaps exploiting these middle class anxieties, Toomer contends that sexuality—as the mode by which a new, hybrid American race will be realized—is free and excessive in rural settings, and shut down, sterile, and burdened in cities. 1.2 Rural Migration as an Interruption of Black Progress Before it is possible to understand statements like Dan Burley’s—that urban African Americans “[could] go no further than the people living in the Mississippi Valley [would] allow them”—it is critical to understand the black uplift movement that he invokes. Particularly, the black middle class must be understood in relation to what queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman has called “chrononormativity,” or “state-sponsored narratives of belonging and becoming” that are marked by temporal rhythms that punctuate and propel dominant formations of varied scales, from the heteronormative family unit to modernity itself (xv). At a moment when African Americans were literally seen and felt to be entering US modernity, the black middle class’s relation to space was dictated by its relation to time, or its ability to keep up a chrononormative pace in the city. Ideas about modernity, progress, and the heterofamiliar mark chrononormativity—birth, education, marriage, work, and family—and they determined the ways that urban black communities dealt with an influx of migrants from the rural South. In campaigns interpreted the ambiguity of the CLC's "right kind of life" to mean "an adherence to certain middle-class notions of propriety regarding sex," which those reformers found to be severely lacking when they spent time with rural youth who had taken to cursing, "vulgar acts," bestial sex, and frequent sexual encounters between adolescent boys who saw their behavior as a legitimate way to pass the time. 30 theory, the temporal rhythms of migration were marked by teleology: the backward Southerner moves forward to a progressive North. However, in reality, migration was more often than not marked by long periods of waiting, deferral, stasis, and urgency. 10 Out of place black bodies that appeared on the urban scene as out of pace with black modernity became objects of derision, and the tools of uplift, such as the black press, were deployed against those bodies to such an intense degree that those who deviated from the progressive course became objects of anxiety for the uplift movement. I will consider a number of flashpoints in which migrants were policed by the black press before turning to the ways that Toomer champions their backwardness as a queer act of resistance. During a progressive reform era in which white America conducted rural sex education campaigns under the contention that “the United States depended on the countryside to continuously reinvigorate its vice-ridden, degenerate urban centers with physical and moral fortitude,” the black middle class had no such intentions for the supposed moral power of rural blackness (Johnson 53). 11 As President Theodore Roosevelt and his Country Life Commission attempted to nationalize middle-class sexual ethics for all (white) Americans, the urban black middle class was threatened, not reinvigorated, by a rural black contingent they felt could 10 Published on a monthly basis, the National Urban League’s publication, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, frequently documented the conditions that prevented many migrants from conducting chrononormative lives. These conditions include a dearth of housing, unsanitary living conditions, educational deficiencies stemming from neglect in rural districts, and unemployment upon reaching Northern and Midwestern cities. See Mary McLeod Bethune, “The Problems of the City Dweller,” Opportunity 3.26 (1925): 54-55; Monroe Work, “Research with respect to cooperation between urban and rural communities,” Opportunity 1.2 (1923): 7-9. 11 In his book that documents these rural morality campaigns, Colin Johnson justifies his focus on white rurality as “the polar opposite of queer culture” because he has “met very few people over the years who would characterize the rural America that is inhabited primarily by migrant laborers of color in this way. In fact, as Nayan Shah has recently demonstrated, historically speaking, denizens of this rural America have been far more likely than not to end up being characterized as queer themselves” (Johnson 23). The historical analysis that I provide in this section also situates African American districts of the rural South as queer, rather than as normative and revitalizing for urban black America. See Nayan Shah, Stanger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West, U of California P, 2012. 31 disintegrate the urbane conditions they struggled to establish. Middle class anxieties about black rurality are apparent in the ways that the black press policed migrant perversion, drawing upon the assumption that perversion was proliferate in the rural South, and would travel with migrants into urban locales. As such, the black middle class deployed a considerable amount of rhetoric in the service of maintaining distinctions between rural and urban black communities, particularly in order to frame their differing relations to vice and perversion. For instance, Charles S. Johnson’s essay in The New Negro, “The New Frontage on American Life” (1925), goes so far as to claim that “the Negroes who make up the present population of New York City would be declared to represent different races, for the differences between South and North by actual measurement are greater than the difference between whites and Negroes” (285). These perceived differences between the newly migrated and the urban, acclimated black denizens of Harlem were brought to bear on questions of morality and vice. In a discussion of Harlem’s nightlife and its effect on rural migrants, Johnson claims that because the jobs that black men held during the workday, such as porters and elevator attendants, were often dull, nightlife thrived as a way to burn off excess energies. Because migrants came to the vibrant city from dull small towns, and moved directly into jobs that were also lacking in stimulation, they would not “be content with the same dullness in the new environment, when a supply of garish excitements is so richly available” (290). According to Johnson, one of those excitements was prostitution, because “surplus women bring on other problems, as the social agencies will testify. ‘Where women preponderate in large numbers there is proportionate increase in immorality because women are cheap’” (290). Thus, we see in The New Negro an attempt to chart differences between urban black workers and their recently migrated counterparts, particularly in terms of sex. This discourse positioned the migrant as arbiter of vice and immorality: his dull 32 Southern disposition—bred of economic hardship and racial oppression in Southern economies—clashes with the “garish excitement” of fast-paced city life, causing sexual excesses such as prostitution to proliferate. Because it was the definitive text claiming a place for black writers and artists in American cultural production, The New Negro provides a particularly rich source of insight into the ways that black rurality registered as queerly backward on the national scene. With an even wider audience, the Chicago Defender played the most significant role in drawing rural African Americans into urban locales during the Great Migration, and it was the newspaper to most intensely police their presence once they arrived. Writing about the role that the Defender played in early twentieth century black migration, James Grossman explains that the Defender, seemingly local to Chicago but actually operating as the organ of the entire black press, was the most widely read black newspaper in the South, as it was often covertly distributed by Pullman porters. The Defender endorsed migration with “vivid North-South contrasts, advertisements for newly available jobs, exciting images of city life, and reports of ‘migration fever’” (Grossman 90). At the same time, these bright depictions of Chicago as an ideal place for blacks to work and play were partially falsified, failing to include the fact that the black politicians who they paraded on the newspaper’s profiles held little real power, and that the YMCA that demonstrated the city’s entertainment outlets was a segregated facility. Even so, the paper ultimately transformed the Great Migration, interpreting it as a racial crusade to save African Americans from violence in the South, and subsequently to fill industrial positions in Chicago. Defender Editor Robert Sengstacke Abbott and others on the paper wished to grow Chicago’s black community to bring in more money, decrease prejudice by increasing racial contact, and gain increased political clout through population. That said, Sengstacke Abbot believed that poor blacks should remain in the 33 South because he shared “the reluctance with which… middle-class black Chicagoans greeted poor, ‘slow-thinking,’ unemployable migrants to their city” (Grossman 92). This middle class reluctance, which was expressed through idea that the city itself needs to be defended from the sexual and social disgraces of rural migrants, makes clear that urban perversion was not seen to be bred within its vice districts, but rather imported from rural elsewheres. Complaints against migrants often settled on surfaces, such that the historian of sexuality George Chauncey explains, “black newspapers regularly exhorted Southern newcomers to assimilate into Northern society by leaving their ‘uneducated’ rural ways behind,” which amounted to carrying themselves “properly” on buses, wearing appropriate clothing, and behaving respectably in public “all for fear that disreputable behavior would bring disgrace to the whole community” (256). Yet these complaints about migrant behavior were not simply stylistic: they were aggregates of Northern perceptions of an amalgamated and dangerously queer rural South. 12 It is worth noting here that 1920 was the year that “mullato” became a category of self- classification on the U.S. Census, 1925 the year that the Rhinelander marriage/divorce shocked the nation, and a period in which both black and white Americans, although certainly for different reasons, became more insistent on “racial integrity.” 13 White Defender contributor Marie Gossett Harlow reveals the logic behind this type of thinking that was pervasive in the newspaper. Speaking to perversions carried from the South to the North, Harlow claims that the 12 Tavia Nyong’o defines amalgamation: “Amalgamation… should not simply be taken as the name for a love across color lines that was repressed and punished by the sovereign power of white supremacy. Amalgamation… was a political deployment of sexuality through which American subjects were gendered and racialized” (75-76). I take up this formation throughout this chapter because amalgamation is one of the central gendered and racialized formations through which Toomer explores in Cane. 13 1924 saw legislation such as Virginia’s Racial Purity Act, but the work of racial codification was also done in the cultural and literary realms. See George Hutchinson, “Jean Toomer and the ‘New Negroes’ of Washington,” American Literature 63.4 (1991): 683-92; Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000: 164-65. 34 rural migrant’s criminal element amounts to “a legacy of servitude” bequeathed by white masters who made black men, and their wives and daughters, into “instruments of pleasure.” Importantly, Harlow connects these perversions of “pleasure” specifically to amalgamation in the South: “Racial characteristics are very closely connected with environments. Inter-mixture of blood has caused great confusion among racial types, which requires the slow growth of years to eradicate.” 14 Siobhan Somerville’s work documents these anxieties about sexual and racial ambiguity as they grew out of eugenic discourses: “two kinds of mixed bodies—the racial ‘hybrid’ and the invert,” were yoked together as the rhetoric of the field lent itself to describing “‘shades’ of gender and sexual ‘half-breeds,’” thus establishing an analogy between sexual “inversion” and the mixed racial body (33). It follows that the stigma of a queer sexual and gendered history in the South, presented by columnists like Harlow as an outcome of miscegenation, rape, and mixed-race ancestry, would follow migrant bodies to the North. A June 1922 edition of the Defender that links discourses of rural migration and amalgamation to gender deviance more explicitly polices those formations, comparing migrants from the rural South to “monkeys,” and describing them as “Loud mouthed, filthy talking, dirty garbed, ragged nondescripts of both sexes” who are encountered so frequently in Chicago so as to cause concern for the respectable of “the Race.” “Nondescript” locates the migrants as hybrid, or unable to categorize according to the taxonomies of bodily comportment recognizable in the city. The migrants’ clothing contributes to this gender trouble, descriptions of which ranged from unsanitary to sexually distasteful, like the “certain class of white women who twist daylight into 14 Marie Gossett Harlow, “Our Race in the South: Views of a White Writer After an Extensive Tour Through the South,” The Chicago Defender, 7 Feb. 1925, A1. I will return to the discourses in Harlow’s article, such as the overlap between amalgamation and sexual perversion, as it concerns Jean Toomer and Cane in the subsequent section. For now I simply want to draw attention to the discourse of danger that circulated around Southern “perversion” in general, and its relation to amalgamation in particular, and Harlow’s Defender article makes those connections clear. 35 night hours” (2). After comparing both black male and female migrants to white prostitutes, which feminizes rural black men, denigrates rural black women, and hybridizes both sexes, the article attaches other perversions to the “disgraceful” females of the migrant class: these queered women wore “fully equipped men’s outfits with the exception of the trousers, and it is safe to say that they would wear them also if they thought they could get by with it” (2). Disregarding whether migrant women wore male garb out of necessity or for entertainment (sexual or otherwise), the Defender endorsed the idea that “the welfare and safety of the city are at stake” (2 emphasis mine). 15 For the black middle class, uplift was not only a politics of respectability in the sense that certain behaviors were policed and discouraged, but also a politics of representation: the black press, and the Defender as its most popular and far-reaching instrument, served the uplift movement on both fronts, representing proper comportment and punishing transgression. In his study of the role of the Harlem cabarets in forging an alternative to respectability, Shane Vogel contends that “Normative uplift was premised on the example and the exception: positive representations of the best educated and most successful of the race would counteract racist stereotypes and provide a standard to which the working class could aspire in the constant struggle to keep from sinking further down into poverty and immorality” (Vogel 8). Black newspapers played a significant role in making visible the most successful individuals of black communities, as well as policing the least. As I have shown, rural migrants carried with them— on their bodies through amalgamation, in their sexual experiences (including rape at the hands of Southern white men), and through their rural stylistics—the very conditions that uplift sought to destroy. 15 “Alley Dwellers from South do North Injury: Chicago Infested with Undesirables who attempt to Destroy Morals,” The Chicago Defender, 17 June 1925, 2. 36 But the politics of representation extended beyond the realm of the black press. Critic Mary Ann Calo reminds us of the gravity that literary representations in particular were thought to have in a cultural moment when distinctiveness in art created a demand for African American cultural production, but the reality of segregation continued to marginalize the artists and writers who were producing it. Calo writes, “In its headier moments, the leaders of this so-called Negro or Harlem Renaissance believed in the capacity of artistic expression to alter deeply ingrained assumptions of black inferiority and eliminate prejudice” (581). Indeed, while reading the black press for the ways that rural migrant bodies were subject to surveillance can provide insight into the form and function of rurality to the formation of the New Negro movement, literature remains the chief mode by which black self-definition and representation was achieved in the early twentieth century. 1.3 Jean Toomer and the Anxiety of Amalgamation As the black middle class strove for participation in normative American narratives of progress, Jean Toomer embraced amalgamation, perversion, and queer intimacies, each pulling backward on an ethos of uplift through an embrace of shame. 16 Wallowing in the backwardness of the rural South, Toomer embraced what performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o calls a “mongrel past,” one that is “overly burdened [with] racial identities bequeathed us by slavery” (7). Toomer utilized the backward drag of rurality as an important pathway to what he 16 Tavia Nyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz theorizes the intersection of amalgamation and affect as “a technology of the racial self”: “Affects like shame, embarrassment, and outrage were routinely deployed to accentuate and refract the bourgeois semiotics of sexuality and morality, particularly when it came to the issue of amalgamation” (76). Expressing shame around amalgamation signaled proper deployment of selfhood, and a lack of shame signaled than personhood would not be bequeathed onto such a shameless subject. Toomer and his work are an embrace of the latter. 37 considered the reparative potential of amalgamation. 17 He believed that amalgamation was the solution to racial tension in America; but, rather than writing amalgamation as a formation that simply occurs in rural settings, Toomer wrote about the South in such a way that rurality itself signals anxiety on the same register as amalgamation. 18 In my emphasis on the role of rurality in Toomer’s investment in the reparative power of amalgamated rurality, I follow Siobhan Somerville’s adjacent inquiries into the ways he “[romanticized] the figure who blurs racial and gender boundaries” (164). By revealing the history of Toomer’s celebratory attitude toward amalgamation, “one would not have to applaud Toomer’s disidentification [with blackness] to see how it exposes the normalizing discourses of race and sexuality that came to circumscribe his authorship” (165). Through his position within the New Negro Renaissance canon, Toomer’s adjacent disidentification with the black middle class and its urbanity—he was raised amongst the black bourgeoisie in Washington, D.C.—helped to define and compel the ideal, progressive, and urban black citizen-subject in the early twentieth century. Although the New Negro movement embraced Toomer’s early work, complete with endorsements from its architects such as Alain Lock and W.E.B. DuBois, Toomer disidentified with blackness shortly after writing Cane. 19 Because he was invested in disidentificatory logics, Toomer's queering of the rural South was about following the racial and sexual ambiguities that 17 While I agree with Nyong’o’s central claim—“Racial mixing and hybridity are neither problems for, nor solutions to, the long history of ‘race’ and racism, but part of its genealogy”—Toomer would have certainly disagreed (Nyong’o 174). Toomer believed that a mixed-race sensibility had the power to dismantle the color line and thus racial violence in America. This philosophy is most clearly laid out in his long poem, “The Blue Meridian.” 18 In this way, Cane implements what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls a “switchpoint” between the anxiety caused by amalgamation and the anxiety caused by degenerate rurality. According to Bond Stockton, a switchpoint is a point of connection between two signs (or two rather separate connotative fields) where something from one flows toward (is diverted in the direction of) the other, lending its connotative spread and signifying force to the other, illuminating it and intensifying it, but also sometimes shifting it or adulterating it” (5). While rurality is a switchpoint for amalgamation in Toomer’s work, both of these formations “switch” at some “points” to the queer. 19 See Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity ,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 Feb. 2011 < http://chronicle.com/article/Jean-Toomers-Conflicted/126184/> 38 were always already present in the rural South, just as they were present in his self. 20 In his unpublished autobiographical writings, Toomer describes his experiences of being perceived as an ambiguous object of anxiety, not because he was a rural migrant, but because he was of mixed racial ancestry. During the years that Toomer would also write Cane, he collected notes toward an autobiography tentatively titled “Incredible Journey;” these notes include his own description of his racial composition: “I was neither white nor black, but a new result, from a blending of many stock.” 21 His description of the ways that his peers reacted to him being “neither white nor black” suggests that his lack of discrete categorization signaled anxiety: “Racial prejudice is… an unfavorable and often hostile pre-judgment of race. […] It is seldom that I have experienced this type of prejudice. I have encountered fear. People have feared me. They have feared that I would do something that they did not want me to do.” 22 Anxiety surrounding what Toomer might “do” as a mixed-race individual suggests what Nyong’o refers to as “hybridity’s agency.” Nyong’o suggests that anxiety, like the fear Toomer describes himself inciting in others, is a signal that can help us think through the social effects of hybridity’s agency: we imagine what amalgamation might do (Nyong’o 14). 23 20 José Esteban Muñoz describes the act of performing disidentifications as one in which we “imagine a world where queer lives, politics, and possibilities are representable in their complexity” (1). Like Toomer, Munoz predicted that “the hybrid self cannot be undervalued in relation to the formation of counterpublics that contest the hegemonic supremacy of the majoritarian public sphere” (1). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1999. 21 Many scholars have written about Toomer’s approach toward his own racial composition and feeling before and after writing Cane. Siobhan Somerville sums up the controversy: "Despite Toomer's resistance to identifying his writing or authorship as unambiguously African American, Cane has been claimed unequivocally as a key modernist text firmly situated in the 'Harlem Renaissance' canon, and Toomer himself is often portrayed as naive, at best, or a race traitor, at worst. Whether sympathetic or critical, discussions of Toomer often point out the irony that the author of Cane, a book invested so thoroughly in a lyrical evocation of southern African American culture, could divest himself of claims to authenticity as a 'Negro' writer," preferring, rather, to embrace his mixed racial identity (131-132). 22 Box 17, Folder 482, Autobiographical Writings "Incredible Journey" Notes Ch VI The Book of Searching and Finding, 1919-1924. Beinecke Rare Book Room of the Yale University Library. 23 Nyong’o clarifies that amalgamation is not simply a synonym for miscegenation, which is why it is the term I use throughout this chapter. While it carries connotations similar to mestizaje and blanqueamiento today, amalgamation did not originate as a racially-inflected term. Rather it was one of “alchemical discourses,” and 39 Like the rural migrants policed on the pages of The Defender, Toomer was burdened by the racial and sexualized anxieties that were signaled by the thought of what his mixed-race body “might do.” Despite his personal embrace of being “neither white nor black,” others’ anxieties plagued him, particularly in regards to his marriage to white writer Margery Latimer. Regardless of the fact that both Toomer and Latimer declared themselves white on their 1931 marriage license in Portage, Wisconsin, and that Latimer “shared Toomer’s vision of a new race in America,” they were unprepared for the national press covering their marriage with the headline, “Negro Who Wed White Writer Sees New Race’ (Byrd and Gates lxvii). 24 The press coverage took a toll on their relationship, and Toomer documents that hardship in his unpublished 1932 novel, Caromb. 25 Regardless of the fear he and his marriage inspired in others, rather than claim blackness or pass as white, Toomer embraced hybridity and amalgamation, both in his interpersonal life and his writing. If on one hand the architects of the New Negro Renaissance claimed Toomer as one of their own, on the other Toomer identified with his white friends and literary correspondents of the Lost Generation: Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Gorham Munson. These mixed literary associations led one reviewer from the Minneapolis, Minnesota Journal to describe Cane in a particularly sexualized manner: “The author has evidentially fallen under the influence of certain innovators who consider language to be little more than a series of ejaculatory spasms.” 26 Because amalgamation, even of association, signaled perversion, Toomer's mixed literary identification, like his ambiguous racial identification, primed him for a critical reception “practical amalgamationists, like medieval alchemists, were accused of meddling in the ordained and regulated order of things” (75). 24 Washington Telegram, 18 Mar. 1932. (Schomberg Collection, New York Public Library) 25 Box 26, Folder 613, Caromb First Draft, Apr-June 1932. Most critics of Toomer’s work contend that he abandoned writing about race after Cane, but Caromb is evidence to the contrary. 26 Review of Cane, Minneapolis-Minnesota Journal. 14 Oct. 1923. 40 that would make much of his willingness to address rural sexuality and migration in Cane. While other Renaissance writers and artists turned to the South as a means by which to access a “black authenticity” that had more to do with folk forms than sex, Toomer tapped into the South to preserve in art the backwardness of rural sexuality that made the black middle class anxious, and which he felt they were stamping out in an otherwise sterile urban black America. 27 Both through his literary aesthetic and his lived hybridity, Toomer portrayed himself as an exception, as avant, and as anticipatory of a coming tide that carried with it the “mongrel past.” I argue that this position—one imagined as avant in its reach backward into the past—carries within it a particularly queer relation to time, one that exists in opposition to the black middle class. Toomer as modernist writer and rurality as subject sit at opposing ends of a queer spectrum: avant and backward, each pulling on a centrist and in some ways normative New Negro Renaissance, offering bodies and subjects that did not line up with the racial ideal. 1.4 Queer Cane Cane is a “hauntological” text. 28 Its innovative form, bound to the past, emerges to “counter the chrononormative and chronobiopolitical” aspects of the New Negro Renaissance within which it was produced (Freeman 9). The book’s critical reception, its afterlife as the most modernist of the Renaissance works, and Toomer’s literary aesthetic suggest that he expressed his interest “in the tail end of things”—the dead and/or dying form of blackness that marked 27 Toomer speaks to this point when he describes the reasons that he wrote Cane, and the reasons why he did not follow it with another, similar reflection on rural blackness: “With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city—and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. […] And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end. And why no one has seen and felt that, why people have expected me to write a second and a third and a fourth book like Cane, is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life” (130). “The Cane Years,” collected in the second Norton Critical edition of Cane, ed. Byrd and Gates (2011). 28 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, (1993) New York: Routledge, 2002. 41 Southern rural folk cultures—by capturing them in future possibility, or the experimental, modernist text. 29 In other words, Toomer was the most avant of the New Negro Renaissance writers, while his work’s subject matter lagged behind. 30 The shape of Cane itself transgresses the laws of narrative and genre, and the New Negro canon’s particular conception of those laws. Beyond the eschewal of discrete literary genres that marks Cane as a hybrid text, it also skirts migration’s established, generic, progressive narrative form. In a letter to Waldo Frank, on 12 December 1922, Toomer describes the book’s design: My brother! Cane is on its way to you! […] From three angles, Cane’s design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex ones, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South up into the North, and back into the South again. Or, from the North down into the South, and then a return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work, the curve really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha etc. swings upward into Theatre and Box Seat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song. Whew! You will understand the inscriptions, brother mine: the book to grandma; Kabnis, the spirit and the soil, to you. […] Between each of the three sections, a curve. These, to vaguely indicate the design. I’m wide open to you for criticism and suggestion. […] [sic] 31 29 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds, p. xiii. 30 William Stanley Braithwaite’s survey of “The Negro in American Literature” (1925) indicates ways that Toomer’s work was received as a departure, even from the other young writers of his milieu. Braithwaite moves methodically through the genres of poetry, fiction, essay, and drama, citing the contemporary writers of distinction in each, and then ends the essay with Cane, which defies these generic categories by encompassing them all. Referring to Toomer as “a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature,” Braithwaite claims that Toomer is the first author able to write about race without “surrendering” the “artist’s vision” (44). This comment carries within it the controversial tension between “race literature” or “protest literature” and the purely “artistic” that would circulate within discussions of African American literature from Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) to James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1955). It also suggests that Toomer’s contemporaries understood him to be doing something exceptional—something that defied genre and the logic of categorization from which genre is born—in contrast to the celebrated young writers beside whom he was being canonized. The parameters of modernism have expanded spatially and temporally in recent decades, but I would argue that Toomer as the Renaissance writer most associated with modernism is yet uncontested. See Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737-48. 31 Kathleen Pfeiffer has collected and edited all correspondence between Waldo Frank and Jean Toomer. “Toomer to Frank” 12 Dec. 1922. Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, ed. Kathleen Pfeiffer, Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2010, p. 85-86. 42 Disregarding the established narrative progression of migration—South to North, simple to complex—Toomer defies progress itself by returning to the South and to simplicity in a circular movement. From Toomer’s description of these movements, it seems as if he participates in the binary convention: South/simple, North/complex. However, the formal elements of Cane—non- linearity, unreliability, repetition, and a failed triptych structure—remain static despite the contextual moves between North and South. His description is accurate to Cane’s design as Boni and Liveright published it the following year: section one is a collection of ten poems and six prose pieces centering on life in rural Georgia; section two is a collection of five poems and seven prose pieces concerning urban life—yet, importantly, the poem “Harvest Song,” which Toomer refers to as a “pause,” actually breaks the section’s urban focus and concerns rural, agricultural experiences; and the book’s third section is a long dramatic text, originally written as a closet drama (a play for voices, not staging) set in fictional Sempter, Georgia. Regardless of the fact that it begins in Georgia, shoots up to the North into Washington, D.C. and Chicago, and then plunges back into the depths of the South with the concluding drama, Toomer claims that the book travels on an alternative “North – South – North trajectory” as well. Yet this is his idiosyncratic reading practice, and the text of Cane itself bears little resemblance to the ways that Toomer describes it. Temporally askew, Toomer experiences entire poems as no more than “(pauses)” (“Harvest Song”), and takes exasperated pleasure in his queer reading of the text’s trajectory (“Whew!”). If he wants to use the three curved section breaks to “vaguely indicate the design” to his readers, he wants to obscure and queer it in this letter to Frank. Toomer’s feeling of being “wide open” to criticism mirrors his openness beyond the dominant forms of migration, genre, and narrative that he inherits from black literary history, such as the traditional migration narrative that Paul Lawrence Dunbar established in Sport of the 43 Gods (1902). Circling back to my earlier claim about Toomer’s bifurcation—at once avant and backward—it becomes clear that Cane takes on the queer characteristics that also attend its author. Toomer’s unwillingness to identify himself along the lines of a stable, Lockean model of race, or to write his work according to the narrative requirements—both material and literary—of the Great Migration, puts him in the company of those writers who are regarded as the Renaissance’s most queer literary figures. 32 1.5 Queer Irruptions on the Urban Scene While I have thus far only gestured toward the amorphousness of queerness in Cane— the urban prostitute, the sexualized country youth, and utopian mixed-race desires that collapse the color line—Toomer relates each of these queer formations to alternative uses of time that circulate in or through the rural South. This is not to imply that Cane’s queerness only surfaces in rural settings, but that when queerness does emerge on Cane’s city streets, it always gets there by taking the rural route: the “soil-soaked” fragrance of a southern black woman calls forth an otherworldly meeting between a young black man and Walt Whitman, or a slave spiritual brings lovers together in a metropolitan park. These queer eruptions in Cane take on the formal quality of a haunting: figures from a place that is supposed to be past re-emerge, bringing with them queer contacts and sensations that put the present urban presence into relief. Toomer recognized that rural migration was often experienced this way, as an unwelcome irruption upon Northern city streets. Thus, when Cane moves from South to North, readers emerge onto “Seventh Street” in Washington, D.C., where “nigger life” is “breathing” and “thrusting” itself “into” what is otherwise a “white and whitewashed” town (41). After establishing rurality as a spectral presence 32 Michael Cobb, “Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance’s Impolite Queers,” Callaloo 23.1 (2000): 328-51. 44 on the black bourgeois scene, “Avey,” the first piece of longer fiction in Cane’s urban section, pits the city, commerce, and civility representative of the New Negro ideal against backwardness and stunted growth, always signaled by irruptions of rurality into the city. 33 “Avey” follows an unnamed male protagonist through his sexual and romantic coming of age in his birth city, Washington, D.C. In the 1920s, Washington was hardly considered “Northern” as an archetype of liberation in the ways that Harlem or Chicago were, but Howard University was the center of black intellectual life, and Langston Hughes wrote about the city’s reputation as “the richest, the most cultured, the most worthy” center of black middle class life. 34 Also in some sense writing against uplift, Hughes, preferring less bourgeois black communities, derisively reported on Washington. He despised Washington’s “polite” society and found the conversations he had on his visits there to lack substance. Like Hughes, the story’s narrator expresses disappointment in Washington, particularly around issues of propriety. Introducing readers to his sexual coming of age, the narrator explains that when was young, he and the other neighborhood boys would whittle trees planted along the street while they waiting for a young girl, Avey, to emerge from her older boyfriend’s flat. He recalls a day when he passively stood with the other boys, waiting for Avey to emerge, when “something like a fuse burned up inside of [him]” (44). As for Avey, “She never noticed [them], but swung along lazy and easy as anything” (44). Thus, two temporalities emerge at the outset: the narrator is young, awakened, impatient, and moving forward toward the “burning” passion of his adolescence; Avey is young 33 Werner Sollors discusses Toomer’s critique of urbanization and modernity, but also his lack of faith in the ability to return to “nature” or a shared past, which would have caused his work to slide into the nostalgic, rather than open up into the modern: Toomer’s answer to this problem could not lie in a return to traditional values… for ‘those who sought to cure themselves by a return to more primitive conditions were either romantics or escapists.’ No, going on, going on to create, searching for aesthetic wholeness and a new vision in a fragmented modern world, that was the only viable answer. The critique of modernity impelled Toomer to move forward the project of modernism (360). 34 Langston Hughes, “Our Wonderful Society: Washington,” Opportunity (Aug. 1927): 226-27. 45 as well, but “lazy” and “easy,” indicating a deferral of progress, or denial of productivity and forward movement. 35 In other words, the narrator is ready to take on “progress,” and a normative, healthy sexuality; Avey is queer, deferred, refusing to “grow up,” her development arrested, even though she has found the sex that the boys await. 36 The narrator directs his desire toward her, even in her laziness, but he initially mistakes the attraction: he wants a progression, to mature like her college-aged boyfriend, but she is stalled, and indolent. Toomer uses these two narrative temporalities—progressive and stalled—to critique progress in the city. After years of watching her, the narrator finally wins Avey’s affections on “the deck of the Jane Mosely that night as [they] puffed up the Potomac” (45). In the urban space of the D.C. street where he waited with other boys, Avey “never noticed” them. But on the Potomac, Avey takes the young narrator into her arms. However, “[he] could feel by the touch of it that it wasn’t a man-to-woman love” (45). The narrator remains passive through all of these scenes, and in this exchange of power, the narrator feels slighted: what he thought would be an experience of growth, progression, and maturity on this excursion beyond the city becomes a moment of regression. Avey takes him into her arms and makes him into a child. And yet Toomer indicates the eroticism of the rural from the outset: Avey will consider the narrator as a potential object of 35 Other “lazy” queers would eventually mirror Avey’s “laziness.” Without the stability of a home, Paul, the protagonist of Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932), constantly wanders. His wandering is urban, moving through Harlem, mixing with the lower classes rather than the talented tenth, and exhibiting a bohemian “laziness” that critic Michael Cobb connects to “race betrayal” (340). Paul’s queerness is a temporal frame (laziness) that stems from an inability to exist as both queer (openly bisexual) and black. The backwardness that circulates in “Avey”—a temporal frame that relates to the “laziness” in Thurman’s work—calls the progressive, chrononormativity of the Lockean New Negro model into question. For Cobb, Paul’s unfortunate end, like queer character Clare in Nella Larsen’s passing, serves as a warning: if one chooses to get out of time with laziness that is rooted in a lack of feeling for one’s racial community, or becomes queer, one puts oneself in grave danger. While Toomer’s narrator fails in his attempt to awaken Avey’s sexuality from her “laziness,” they at least remain alive by the end of the story. They have not been killed by their mutually exclusive but equally queer desires, even if they are not entirely redeemed by queer rurality either. 36 In my thinking about the temporality of normative childhood and adolescence, as well as its queer interruptions, I am influenced by Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. 46 affection only when they are outside the city. But the narrator misreads Avey’s intentions, and what she provides him is not a progressive “man-to-woman,” heterofamiliar love, but rather a queer, regressive, childlike love in the rural scene on the Potomac. Even still, this first experience of Avey, when the narrator gave in and “let her love [him], silently, in her own way,” serves as one of the story’s elliptical stutters. Toomer’s use of ellipses indicates a moment of a slow, queer interruption, and here, the narrator recalls the childlike love in natural, idyllic terms: “The air was sweet like clover, and every now and then, a salt tang, a stale drift of sea-weed . . .” (46). Thus, he unites the spatio-temporality of queerness: slow, backward, rural space. Later, when the narrator encounters Avey for the last time, he will take the reader back to this moment of sweet air and sea smells, and in this first instance, Toomer slows the reader down with his ellipses, asks us to a linger a moment, to slow down for this backward occasion of a girl queerly loving a boy like a child. The narrator does not come close to Avey again until “the following summer at Harpers Ferry,” another rural retreat from the city, where the train engines echoed off the mountain in such a way that it sounded “like iterated gasps and sobs…. Crude music from the soul of Avey” (46). Avey reverberates from the mountains, and is also in control of all sexual contact with the narrator, as she will not let their fingers be tight in their hand-holding. Somehow, the narrator is convinced that he is in charge of their relationship: as they held hands, he “had that notion that if [he] really wanted to, [he] could do with her just what [he] pleased” (46). In reality, he wanted to talk, and Avey was silent. Ultimately, they figure two different temporalities, just as they did when they floated down the Potomac on the Jane Mosely: he was leaving for college, and felt indifferent toward her “sloppy indolence,” “her downright laziness” (46). Thus, while she does open herself up to him at Harpers Ferry, they are working out of time: Avey remains queer, 47 silent, backward, and the narrator wants to progress, to talk, and to move beyond his childhood and on to college. Here, he comes to figure chrononormativity, and she represents the out of time queer: lazy, unwilling to progress, and thus dangerous. 1.6 Salvific Black Female Sexuality and the Dangers of Temporal Lag Avey threatens the narrator’s unimpeded progress, as he had to put up “a bluff… about forgetting her” while he was away at college (46). He explains that “The girls up that way… havent got the stuff: they don’t know how to love. Giving themselves completely was tame beside just the holding of Avey’s hand” [sic] (46). At this point, the narrator comes to the realization that his adherence to maturity and progression is sterile, and that Avey’s slowness, her backwardness in deferral, is more erotically charged than the girls he finds at college. The differences that the narrator notes between Avey and the girls he meets at college are indicative of the management of black female sexuality by the uplift movement. Candice Jenkins theorizes sexual uplift through what she calls the “salvific wish”: “One not-so-surprising response to such narratives of black sexual and domestic deviance is the attempt by blacks, particularly black women, to regulate black behavior in the service of creating an inviolable respectability” (12). This move to sanitize the public face of black desire was intended as a protection from sexual violence imposed from outside black communities, which Jenkins theorizes as a protection, a discouragement of emotional and corporeal vulnerability (17). The narrator reacts against this salvific formation when he claims, “they don’t know how to love.” Perhaps they do know how, but suppress their desires, making themselves “inviolable” to attacks on their moral character, and consequently to the narrator’s advances. Salvific black women appear in most of Cane’s urban stories. For instance, in “Box Seat” 48 Toomer enacts his protest against uplift in its most violent iteration, and makes clear the role that rurality plays in the ability to reject the mechanisms of shame, born of middle class logics, that plague the city. The story follows Dan Moore and his desire for a girl, Muriel, who allows uplift standards—represented by her landlady Mrs. Pribby—to shut down her romantic and sexual relationships. If “Avey” demonstrates the ways that uplift is inflected with standards of maturity, “Box Seat” considers its relationship to shame. Tavia Nyong’o claims race in its modern form emerges only when it becomes possible to be ashamed of it, that “the difference of the races [was founded] upon an insidious demarcation between those whose susceptibility to shame and embarrassment rendered them governable because they were self-governable” and those who were not (88). As such, Nyong’o “[considers] this transformation of shame as part and parcel of the politics of respectability,” a performance of meaning that conferred personhood onto some subjects and denied it to others, which carried over into the twentieth century standards of uplift that I have outlined. Toomer relates this formation of racial shame to the black South in its turn toward modernity: As they left the southern agrarian way of life for modernity in the cities, some also sought to distance themselves from their slave past and its cultural traditions, which they regarded with a mixture of contempt, shame, and obsolescence. Regarding the ‘folk-songs’ and ‘spirituals,’ Toomer lamented, ‘I learned that the Negroes of the town [Sparta] objected to them. They called them ‘shouting.’ They had victrolas and player pianos. So, I realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend towards the small town and then towards the city—and industry and commerce and machines. They folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit 49 was so beautiful. Its death so tragic.’ (lii) 37 Toomer reacted with disappointment to the performative shame of blackness and its relationship to uplift and urbanization as a requirement of modernity. Likewise, to his young lover, Mae Wright, whom Toomer met on one of his sojourns to rural Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, Toomer writes: “Paradoxical as it may seem, we who have Negro blood in our veins, who are culturally and emotionally the most removed from Puritan tradition, are its most tenacious supporters. […] We are suspicious and often ashamed of our emotions. We hold them, we hold their expression sinful” [sic] (18). It is precisely this modern formation of shamed blackness that Toomer protests against when he draws connections between shame and urbanization in “Box Seat.” Dan, the story’s protagonist, refuses to perform the affect that will grant him entrance into the acceptable realm of respectable, governable subjects under the Law of whiteness. Because Toomer’s work emphasizes the ways that black women, especially, were expected to take on the work of uplift and racial salvation, it uncovers important questions about gendered relations to shame and thus, personhood. “Box Seat,” like “Avey,” features a male protagonist who simply cannot comprehend the weight of uplift under which his female love interest struggles in black Washington. Dan, in turn, attempts to sexualize Muriel’s urban environment. Here, black male sexuality is the street, and the urban streets “[woo]” “virginal houses”: “Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street. Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger” (57). The narrator calls upon these black streets, encouraging them to “Stir the root-life of a withered people. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream” (57). While the idea that urban black life might be invigorated by contact with the “root-life” of rural folk culture is 37 Toomer quoted in Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates’ introduction to the Norton Critical edition of Cane. Jean Toomer, Cane, ed. Byrd and Gates, New York: Norton, 2011. 50 not an unfamiliar or original one, the dreams that Toomer imagines coming to those who would be stirred from their houses are not those of an ancestral bond, but rather are sexual: they are violent and erotic fantasies of life beyond the sterility of an urban black uplift ethos. When Dan first approaches the “virginal houses” on Muriel’s street, he wants to “Break in. Get an ax and smash in” (57). This rage that Dan feels is sexual, as he aims his rage at houses personified as “shy girls” who are “reticent” and “virginal.” When the police respond to Dan’s attack upon these houses, he will give them the excuse that he is “a poor man out of work,” harkening back to Avey’s indolence and laziness, but also that he “was born in a canefield” and has since “come to a sick world to heal it” (57). This sexual violence, which Dan imagines is both liberating and healing, arises from his lack of economic productivity and, most importantly, his birthright in the rural South. When the reader breaks free from Dan’s perspective and is privy to her thoughts, Muriel makes the connection between the sterility and reticence of women like herself and the city, Washington, D.C.: “[Mrs. Pribby] is me, somehow. No she’s not. Yes she is. She is the town, and the town wont let me love you, Dan” (59). This association of the landlady’s private surveillance becomes public and representative of “the town,” which recalls the black press and its role in policing black women’s sexual practices. Black society pages threatened to uncover the secrets of those who were not careful to go unseen. 38 Every time Dan and Muriel come close to one another they hear Mrs. Pribby rustle her newspaper in the next room: the institutions of the city keep them apart. 38 For example, see Edna Reynolds’ 1917 Chicago Defender exposé on her surveillance of young “Race women” who have been caught with cabaret entertainers in their rented rooms. These types of articles were prevalent in publications like the Defender. Edna Reynolds, “Whither Are We Drifting and At What Port Will We Land?” The Chicago Defender, 3 Nov. 1917, p. 11. 51 1.7 Temporal Flow and Black (Sexual) Labor If the city represents the salvific aspects of black female sexuality, particularly in regards to urban mechanisms of control, rurality represents freedom for sexual exploration not only because rural space is more difficult to police, but because it is freer from commodity capitalism, the essence of forward-moving progress. 39 Flows of capital and migratory workers into and through urban spaces combine with bourgeois ideologies about cultural maturity to form fast, bourgeois time. In the face of these transitions, rural time seems backward and slow, moving at an agricultural pace. The fast pace of the market shows in the sense that the “Avey” narrator “felt old” and was bruised by “the business of finding a job” after college: in other words, he has tired of his own quest for maturity, particularly according to capitalist logics. He realizes that chrononormativity, and the sexual mores it requires, has not “got the stuff” that Avey’s queer temporality does. The narrator makes his strongest argument against sexual propriety after he reconnects with Avey, and he sits with her in an urban park. Where he was once perplexed by her ability to make him into a child, the narrator has come to desire Avey’s queer temporality. However, what he does not realize is that she has transformed over the years as well. From a young, sexually excessive girl, Avey has “progressed” into the representative figure of capitalist degeneracy: the black prostitute. Indeed, when he first spotted her upon his return, she was “indolent as ever, leaning on the arm of a man,” in a “dress of some fine, costly stuff” (47). Not yet understanding 39 Paul Allen Anderson makes a widely cited claim about Toomer’s relationship to capitalist modernity, one that I agree with but refine in my reading of Cane: “Toomer’s regard for Cane as a swan song may be approached in the context of widely-shared modernist concerns. […] The familiar narrative of entropic modernity may be characterized in terms of a perceived decline of socially and spiritually integrated local and regional cultures in the face of the globally homogenizing impact of highly mobile and fragmented, indeed rootless, industrial culture” (94). For Anderson, this feeling of an encroaching industrial culture is what prompts Toomer to delve into the South. I read the encroaching industrial culture as part of a broader bourgeois imposition, which also includes sexual norms and proscribed ideals of bodily comportment. 52 the ways sex work has changed Avey from a precocious girl to an exhausted woman, the narrator explains that Washington is inadequate for her “expression,” which the reader understands as her sexual expression, which the narrator hopes will match his “immediate and urgent passion” growing in the park. He tells her “How incapable Washington was of understanding that need. How it could not meet it” (48). The narrator recalls the queer excess that he experienced with Avey in their youth, and he attributes her turn toward sex work to the lack of “proper channels” causing “her emotions [to] overflow into paths that dissipated them” (48). But here in the park, as they progress into adulthood and Avey into sexual labor, their passion for one another dies, and he realizes that she has fallen asleep, listening to his explanation of her own position in Washington’s sexual economy. At this moment, the narrator wishes that he could revert back to childhood himself, to access the queer temporality that Avey seems to have lost. He “wanted to get up and whittle at the boxes of young trees,” taking the reader back to the moment of his sexual awakening. But now, the sea breezes that once enchanted him and opened his intimate relationship with Avey have been overrun by the urban: “The Capitol dome looked like a gray ghost ship drifting in from sea” (48). The city is dead, ghostly, and gray, like Avey who no longer had “the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn” (48). The story ends in this moment of disappointment and failed sexual conquest, as the narrator fails to evoke the “fertile” rurality that would allow him to seduce the girl who requires a rural interlude to access her sexual desire. Avey’s newfound sterility was not despite, but rather symptomatic of, her work as a prostitute. Roderick Ferguson claims that capital’s demands for black laborers in the North occasioned the migration of African American workers from the South. This migration “gave birth to vice districts that in turn transformed gender and sexual ideals and practices in northern cities,” revealing a circumstance in which the state cannot contain the excesses produced by 53 capital (Ferguson 13). Yet Avey, a product of Washington and a character who represents both the constraints of the urban and the erotic excesses of the rural (depending on the narrative setting), hardly seems to be a vice-driven woman distorting sexual ideals, even as she performs sex work. While she shamelessly visits older boys’ flats and disregards the potential embarrassments of her family through the first half of the story, she ultimately falls asleep on the arm of a suitor, making his passion die rather than stoking the flames. Thus in Toomer’s formulation, the prostitute is figured as sterile because she is more associated with commodity capital—and the urban landscape—than is any other woman that the narrator might imagine. She falls asleep during the narrator’s beautiful speeches, at the height of his passion, and thus, paradoxically, demonstrates the ultimate expression of urban sterility in the face of his constructed rural idyll in the urban park. Avey becomes not only the repressed woman, but also the sterile prostitute, to the narrator’s formerly youthful investment in the sexual expression they would achieve beyond the surveillance of the urban black middle class. Ferguson theorizes the figure of the prostitute, and in so doing allows us to think further about the ways that temporality, normativity, and sexuality intersect to construct the chrononormativity of the black middle class. Ferguson shows that “normative heterosexuality [is] the emblem of order, nature, and universality, making that which [deviates] from heteropatriarchal ideals the sign of disorder” (6). How, then, might Avey as prostitute come to figure not disorder, but the opposite: sterility and the death of passion? The city—and migration from rural to urban—is progressive, following the needs of capital and flows of labor. Ferguson shows that for Marx, and I would add for the narrator in “Avey,” the expression of heteropatriarchy is the “essence of Man and the standard of sociality and agency” (7). Humanization and feeling, “[finding] the truth that people bury in their hearts,” in Ferguson’s 54 account of Marx, is the natural relation between Man and Woman (Toomer 47). The commodity disrupts all of this, and “the symbol of that dehumanization could be found in none other than the prostitute” (7). While the prostitute is the symbol that stands in for all laborers here, we can see that the sterility of the urban is actually a sterility of commodity capitalism, and this formation becomes that which Toomer’s narrator pushes back against. The narrator’s push back hinges on his understanding of “mature love” in Marxist terms, rather than the terms of the black middle class: “This direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species relationship, man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is his relation to nature—his own natural destination” (Ferguson 7). 40 Avey’s queerness contradicts the logics of maturity set forth by the black middle class, and they simultaneously frustrate the narrator, who is tempted by her ability to get “stuck” in immaturity. His desire ultimately adheres to a logic that is decidedly heteronormative, even in its rejection of urban commodity capitalism. While the narrator’s “mature love” is outside those bounds set by a black middle class set on participating in a white bourgeois culture, Avey is more queer even than the narrator, particularly in her refusal of masculine desire. As an adolescent, Avey was able to access her sexual feelings toward the narrator as queer and transitional, emerging in the “stuckness” of rurality, just as rurality seems stuck in a phase of childhood when compared to the discourses of development that mark the city. As an adult, her “love” takes a different road to “maturity,” shirking the “natural destination” of the narrator; instead, sex is work. 1.8 Black Time and Rhythmic Pace 40 Ferguson quotes Marx here from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J Struik, trans. Martin Milligan, New York: International Publishers, 1964, 134. 55 Mourning the loss of Avey to what he figures as an urban zietgesist, Toomer aligns song and sex. At Soldier’s Home, the narrator wishes to hear the spiritual “Deep River,” thinking that might be the way to finally actualize his desire for the girl. Focusing on Cane’s “Song of the Son,” Charles Davis discusses Toomer’s concern with the loss of song as a condition of modern black society. Davis claims “We are not told what the hostile forces are that oppose song, though we are led inevitably to speculate about them—perhaps, freedom from suffering, or the city, or education, or modern society. The poet has returned in time to secure possession of one vestige of the old culture…” (255). Thus, the narrator’s inclination toward folk tunes and rural Southern breezes is not only a spatial one, but also a move back in time, or a return to a place where time operates differently than it does in the city. To the narrator, the city becomes a space of sexual modernity that is cleansed of queer excess, even as the black middle class rails against the city’s immorality. To them, the forward march of progress, both sexual and artistic, is born out of urban temporality, not the slow folk rhythm of rural America. Avey’s excessive sexuality fascinates the narrator, even in her indolence: she is not only out of place in urban Washington, but as such also out of time. The narrator wants her to be more sexually open, to operate on the temporal rhythm of rurality and to hear “Deep River.” Toward the end of the story, the narrator describes the scene in which he and Avey lay in the park: A band in one of the buildings a fair distance off was playing a march. I wished they would stop. Their playing was like a tin spoon in one’s mouth. I wanted the Howard Glee Club to sing “Deep River,” from the road. To sing “Deep River, Deep River,” from the road… Other than the first comments, Avey had been silent. I started to hum a folk-tune. She slipped her hand in mine. (48) The sound of “a march” disgusts the narrator, with its associations of progress, militarism, and 56 modernity. Instead, he wants to hear a Negro spiritual, which might sweep over them like “the wind… from the South,” “a fertile shower upon the lean streets of the city” (47). The narrator punctuates this thought of the spiritual and Southern folk culture with ellipses, and repeats himself, creating a narrative stutter that does not occur elsewhere in the story except when he is talking about splitting trees and awakening his sexuality in the beginning, the sea breezes that accompanied the opening of Avey’s sexuality, and when he refers to Avey as an “Orphan- woman” at the end. These four ellipses, or narrative stoppages that indicate an omission and also cause the reader to slow and pause, signal a critique of the chrononormative city. A boy’s sexual awakening, the desire for the spiritual, and Avey as developmental anomaly, “Orphan-woman,” all combine in these narrative stutters, signaling the slow, rural, Southern time as circulating in this critique of black chrononormativity. The narrator interjects his own sound over the modern, urban progression of the march: he hums a folk tune, and then Avey slips her hand into his. He tries to create a scene of the rural South where it has been banished. In 1937, Toomer wrote a piece on the effects of music in which he claims, “Add music, and you can instantly transport yourself, through inner-experience, into a different world” (276). 41 However, music cannot keep you there. He goes on, “Once it is over for the time being, you slide back into this world” (276). Indeed, the narrator was able to transport himself to the rural South, and perhaps even take Avey with him for the brief moment that she slid her hand into his. However, he slides just as quickly back into the world of urban Washington, where Avey falls asleep and his passion for her dies. However, in those brief moments on the Potomac, in Harper’s Ferry, and while he hums a folk tune over the imposing 41 Toomer’s theory of musical transport intersects with Josh Kun’s concept of “audiotopias,” or the idea that “music functions like a possible utopia for the listener; that music is experienced not only as sound that goes into our ears and vibrates through our bones but as a space that we can enter into, encounter, move around in, inhabit, be safe in, learn from” (Kun 3). 57 presence of the military march in the urban park, the narrator is able to briefly escape from the sanitizing norms of sexual conduct in the modern city. The narrator’s imagined rural havens are the places where he can get out of place and out of time with Avey. This temporal rhythm of rurality in “Avey” becomes formally important around the wish for “Deep River,” and it intersects with the issues of female sexuality and capitalism that I have raised thus far. The restrictive New Negro rubric emerges in this section as an indicator of prescriptive, atonal, metallic speech, and the narrator’s “rural stylistics” surface in the story’s form as a protest against restriction. 42 The slowness of backward, rural time comes to punctuate or “pause” the story, such as the way that rural poem “Harvest Song” punctuates/pauses Cane’s urban section. The rural stylistics are most effective in the “Deep River” scene when the narrator experiences the sound of a march as metallic: “a tin spoon in one’s mouth” (48). 43 The narrator stutters and repeats himself—“I wanted the Howard Glee Club to sing ‘Deep River,’ from the road. To sing ‘Deep River, Deep River,’ from the road…” (48). Disregarding decorum in desire and in articulation, the narrator prefers a Negro spiritual to a military march. Like Bruce Nugent’s queer use of ellipses in “Smoke Lilies and Jade,” Toomer’s ellipses in “Avey” present a “grammatical roughness” that breaks with “Locke’s smooth racial veneer” 42 Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism, New York: NYUP, 2010. 43 In an article addressing the queerness particular to those Renaissance literary figures whose intersecting racial and sexual expressions were at odds with dominant culture, Michael Cobb attends to Irene Redfield’s “patterns of speaking and expressing desire” that “start to reinvigorate and characterize the anxious, queer feelings Irene would prefer to repress” in Nella Larsen’s Passing (336). Larsen’s protagonist speaks with restraint, fearing that a loss of vocal control might unhinge her middle-class existence. Clare, conversely, expresses herself dangerously, using repetitions and allowing her stories to charm men and women alike (335). As shown earlier, Alain Locke’s New Negro Renaissance demanded respectability: clear speech and queer articulations threatened the “collective feeling of safety and coherence in race,” which was actually neither safe nor coherent for those queer, excessive subjects who existed outside its normative articulations. Cobb claims that once the threat of Clare is gone in the novel, “Irene begins to speak in such a way that undermines her need for precise, metallic speech” (337). Clare’s absence is not enough: Irene needs to secure her place in the black middle class, and “the articulation of a stable, sophisticated feeling of race and queerness is impossible under the racialized aesthetics of the New Negro rubric” (337). Irene cannot articulate her own queerness—her desire for Clare—but it threatens to break through her “metallic speech,” spilling over into the sanitized world she maintains for her middle-class family. 58 (Cobb 345). Indeed, rather than allowing the narrative to progress flawlessly from boyhood to adulthood, sexual awakening to proper sexual conduct, Toomer stops the narrative in a few key moments, indicating a pause or stutter that hinders the free flow of a progressive narrative temporality and points the reader back toward the rural queerness that he uses to critique the black middle class. Nugent’s Alex—another lazy, bohemian queer in the Renaissance repertoire—lives on, while queer characters such as Nella Larsen’s Clare (Passing) and Wallace Thurman’s Paul (Infants of the Spring) had to die. Toomer’s backward form, elliptical stutters, and critiques of the New Negro rhetoric align him with some of the Harlem Renaissance’s queer figures, but notably, Toomer’s queers live on. By invoking rurality as a queer intervention into the New Negro rhetoric, rather than trying to resist it on its own urban/urbane terms, Toomer enacts a drag backward on black middle class formation that lives on and succeeds in ways that other queer interventions ultimately fail, with the queer characters of the Renaissance making up many of its dead. 44 1.9 Turning Backward and Queer Contact with the Past Music is not the only formal mechanism by which queer contact, particularly with the literary dead, is initiated in Cane’s Washington, D.C. “Box Seat” gets its title from the theater where Dan follows Muriel in Toomer’s penultimate urban story. The theaters and cabarets that appear in Cane do not exhibit the queer proliferations and subversion of uplift that characterize other works written during the Renaissance, but rather the black theater is as distasteful to Dan as 44 As a counter to chrononormativity, Elizabeth Freeman poses the concept of temporal drag, “a productive obstacle to progress, a usefully distorting pull backward, and a necessary pressure on the present tense” (64). In any forward-march of “progress” we might ask what is lost in casting away the regressive, because these losses are often queer. 59 the street of impenetrable, heterofamiliar houses. 45 Yet Dan does find a place to critique the city’s sterility from within the theater: “He shrivels close beside a portly Negress who… [has] A soil-soaked fragrance [coming] from her. Through the cement floor her strong roots sink down. They spread under the asphalt streets” (63). Beneath the city streets, which we know as the “gleaming limbs” and “asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger,” this woman’s “strong roots sink down and spread under the river and disappear in blood-lines that waver south” (63). These southern blood-lines invigorate the streets, as “Dreaming, the streets roll over on their bellies and suck their glossy health from [her roots]” (63). Toomer does not present a clear dichotomy, where Dan rages against the sterility of the city streets and dreams nostalgically of the “throb” that rises from “southern blood-lines” (63). Instead, the relationship is one of caregiving, and nurturance: the “nigger streets” suck “health” out of those southern blood-lines, and are thus “gleaming” and “dreaming” against the “bolted houses.” Likewise, Dan sees himself as a savior from the rural South, one who can also act in the manner of this “portly Negress” with roots that invigorate the otherwise sterile urban environment. In a queer interruption of Dan’s quest for Muriel, he spots a man who has “Been sitting there for years. Born a slave, Slavery not so long ago. […] Saw the first horse-cars. The first Oldsmobile. And he was born in slavery” (65.) Drawing on ideas similar to Ann McClintock’s “anachronistic space,” Toomer critic Tace Hendrick notes that “it seemed clear, at least to the public mind informed… by popularized evolution theory and popularized anthropology, that there were groups of people whose bodies (and cultures) were not commensurate with each other in terms of what time they occupied” (43). 46 Certainly this was the case of the black middle class 45 Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret. 46 McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995. 60 collective feeling toward rural migrants who have irrupted into their space but have not made themselves commensurate to their time. Dan, likewise, spots this man who is “out of time” in the theater, and seconds later spots Walt Whitman: “He saw Walt—old man, did you see Walt Whitman? Did you see Walt Whitman! Strange force that drew me to him. And I went up to see. The woman thought I was crazy” (65). Dan’s voice and the old man’s voice are grafted upon one another so that it’s unclear if questions are being posed, statements made, or who is being drawn to the queer figure of Whitman, interacting with both former slaves and young men like Dan, but turning women away from both of them. Indeed, after all Dan’s advances, in the apartment and in the theater, Muriel claims that she does not want to see Dan again because “He makes [her] feel queer” (62). 47 Queer, crazy, driving off women yet incessantly chasing them, Dan finally gives up his quest for Muriel: “Eyes of houses, soft girl-eyes, glow reticently upon the hubbub and blink out. The man stops” (67). Speaking to the “queer” feelings that Dan incites in Muriel, causing her to finally turn away from her desire for him in shame, Siobhan Somerville writes that “the vocabulary of ‘queer’ emerged in Toomer’s texts as a way to mark figures who disrupted or scrambled the boundary logics of race and gender, figures who indirectly included Toomer himself” (140). I would add that it was not just his racial and gendered disruptions through which Toomer understood himself as queer, but also when he began seeing himself as a writer, after traveling to Georgia for the first time on the trip that inspired parts of Cane. He recalled that after beginning to work on his poetry, stories, and drama, “I got the reputation of being a very queer fellow. Those, even those who once upon a time had said what a fine dancer and what a sweet lover I 47 From The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, ed. Darwin T. Turner, Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1980. Collected as “The Cane Years” in Cane, ed. Byrd and Gates (2011). 61 was, gave me a sufficiently wide berth. […] …it was as though.. all the other people existed in another world. They could not enter mine. I did not want to enter theirs” (124-25). The shamelessness that Toomer describes in relation to his writing, and the effects it rendered on his ability to be a “fine dancer” and “sweet lover,” both important components of compulsory heterosexuality, intersect with Dan’s shameless pursuit of Muriel in “Box Seat.” Dan embraces the rural parts of himself that skew time and place, drawing him into contact with the queer dead. Writing “Kabnis” and Cane’s Southern portraits, which he began on the train ride North from his first trip to Georgia, Toomer also felt himself queerly communing with the dead. In a July 1922 letter to Waldo Frank, Toomer described Cane’s relation to the South as a preservation of the dead and dying, a cultural “swansong”: There is one thing about the Negro in America which most thoughtful persons seem to ignore: the Negro is in solution, in the process of solution. As an entity, the race is losing its body, and its soul is approaching a common soul. If one holds his eyes to individuals and sections, race is starkly evident, and racial continuity seems assured. One is even led to believe that the thing we call Negro beauty will always be attributable to a clearly defined physical source. But the fact is, that if anything comes up now, pure Negro, it will be a swansong. Don’t let us fool ourselves, brother: the Negro of the folk-song has all but passed away: the Negro of the emotional church is fading. A hundred years from now these Negroes, if they exist at all will live in art. […] America needs these elements. They are passing. Let us grab and hold them while there still is time. Turning now from Toomer’s portrayal of queer transport to the wounded, amalgamated, backward, and stagnant rural South to his rural portraits of three very different Georgia women 62 —Karintha, Esther, and Becky—I argue that Toomer contours the South as the negative potential of the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century. 1.10 Cotton Tenancy and the Queer Rural South Toomer’s rural Georgia is a place rife with the backward perversions that the black middle class found within the migrant populations populating their streets and neighborhoods. I have theorized the diagnosis of these perversions as related to discourses of queerness that attended amalgamation and followed migrants from South to North, and I begin these last sections on Toomer’s queer rural South by invoking one final discourse that attended not only the black community’s disdain for Southern rurality, but also the larger national attitude in the early twentieth century. Just as the urban landscape is ordered by the fast time of industrial labor, the economic circumstances that define the Deep South and determine its lag: slower agricultural time and the backwardness of cotton tenancy. Understanding cotton tenancy and the South’s economic failures during this era is crucial to understanding the ways that the Southern migrant signaled “backward” as a queer pull back on the black middle class. The labor system of cotton tenancy—giving way to a broad spectrum of economic, cultural, and health-related issues that journalists, philanthropists, and social scientists broadly called the “Southern Problem”—was most indicative of the rural South’s inability or unwillingness to embrace the ideals of American progress in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet it was only after the collapse of King Cotton that its place in the national imaginary became a backward one. Strictly backward imaginaries fail to account for the “civilizing mission” of cotton through the end of the nineteenth century. Historian Natalie Ring writes about the series of expositions and publications ranging from the 1880s to the 1910s that celebrated the South’s ability to 63 embrace a “philosophy of progress” through its cotton production (101). The spirit of colonialism animated these expositions, and titles such as “Cotton as a World Power” influenced conversations about the South’s position in global economics. 48 The US saw its cotton as an economic power that it needed to defend against an increasingly global economy. 49 But the spirit of colonialism animated cotton in more immediate ways than the threat of encroachment from a globalizing marketplace. Ring explains, “Americans and Europeans viewed cotton, itself, as an agent of civilization. Almost every commentator writing on the significance of cotton addressed one of the unique characteristics of this agricultural product: its ability to clothe and thereby civilize the world” (103). When cotton failed, the entire South failed with it, losing its reputation as a great civilizing force. Ring locates the beginning of cotton’s collapse in the 1890s, when an economic depression hit Southern farmers especially hard, forcing them to mortgage their future crops. When exorbitant interest rates combined with declining cotton prices, farmers lost land, and the South developed “ ‘a vast credit system,’ that [many considered] ‘a system of indolence,’ [that] ruined farmers’ ‘credit and self respect,’ and… led to the destruction of natural resources” (110- 11). The class of tenant farmers that the crop lien system created at the end of the nineteenth century would no longer be able to achieve the ideal of the independent farmer that animated fantasies of rural America up until that time. Reformers in the South, northern liberals and philanthropists, as well as opponents of the South whose post-War regionalisms persisted well into the twentieth century, published widely on the decline of this American rural fantasy. The rural Southern farmer shifted from being the figure of progress to being America’s child, stunted 48 James A.B. Scherer, Cotton as World Power: A Study in the Economic Interpretation of History, New York: Frederick A Stokes, 1916. 49 The English were particularly threatening to the dominance of the South’s monopoly on cotton production (at the turn of the twentieth century, the South supplied 50% of the world’s cotton) as they explored the possibility of growing cotton in their colonial outposts (Ring 103). 64 in his development. This idea—that the Southerner lacks maturity—is doubled in regards to African American Southerners, who in this moment of reform were certainly considered central to “the white man’s burden.” Ring captures the ways that the rural South itself was often considered and treated as a colonial site separate from the dominant, industrial U.S. economy and culture. After Reconstruction, the “southern problem” was perceived as a colonial problem. Some areas functioned as colonial economies in the sense that “the infusion of northern capital, the production of raw materials for the market, and low wages kept these southern areas in an economically subordinate position” to the rest of the nation (Ring 10). The array of problems bred of economic subordination attracted “missionaries” to the South, wishing to modernize and uplift rural whites and blacks. Ring describes the South as a colonial site, claiming that “At the turn of the century, the South was viewed as both foreign and American, emblematic of backwardness and progress” (11). 50 And yet, before cotton's collapse, the South played a significant role in the “moral imperative” of American imperial missions. But after the collapse of the cotton industry, and its take-over by the tenant system, cotton stood front and center as Southern rurality began to drag the nation back and down: to the violent conditions of black slavery and to the economic destitution that gripped most of the country during the financial crisis of the Great Depression. This is the South that Toomer encountered first-hand when he began writing Cane in Sparta, Georgia, and the discourses of Southern backwardness inform each of his Southern portraits, as well as the irruptions of rurality onto the urban scenes that I sketched in regards to “Avey” and “Box Seat.” 50 The reason that the South embodied both backwardness and progress is because it was expected to someday catch up to the rest of America, which distinguishes it from colonial possessions. Additionally, the South practiced its own form of imperialism, with wealthy white landowners wishing to expand the slave empire. Ring notes these complications to using the language of colonial/post-colonial in regards to the South, though the comparisons were often made in the early twentieth century. 65 In the biopolitical realm, the cotton economy also determined the spatial taxonomies of the Southern family. Speaking to household composition in their sociological study, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (1935), Charles S. Johnson, et.al. explain, “Family size and size of the house have no relationship” under the logics of cotton tenancy (15). Despite the fact that overcrowding was seen as a social ill particular to the city in the early twentieth century, “Whatever the number in the family it must occupy the customary three rooms. In fact a family of any size may live in a two-room house; as many as thirteen have been found living in a single bedroom and kitchen” (15). I begin this section with this queered family formation because Toomer introduces Karintha, in Cane’s opening portrait, as a child who has been exposed to the “interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon” (5). This “ripening” assumes that there is an accepted pace of maturity, but that Karintha has been exposed to a faster one, which “could mean no good” (5). 51 And yet Karintha grew up “too fast,” or subverted her period of childish delay, not because the adults around her maliciously forced her into maturity, but because “Homes in Georgia are most often built on the two-room plan. In one, you cook and eat, in the other you sleep, and there loves goes on” (5). In their two-room home, “Karintha had seen or heard, perhaps she had felt her parents loving” (5). The narrator considers that she had “seen” or “heard,” or otherwise experienced her parents’ sex as an outsider, but the placement of the comma after these two possibilities, leaving the reader with the full clause—“perhaps she had felt her parents loving”—places Karintha as an early example amongst other female characters in an African American literary canon that protests the living conditions of poor African Americans 51 Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on childhood provides a justification for why Karintha’s narrator senses a transgression in her fast maturation: according to normative maturation, “Children grow sideways as well as up… in part because they cannot… advance to adulthood until we say it’s time” (6). I argue that the system of cotton tenancy occasioned the impossibility of black tenant children to adhere to normative maturation. 66 in the South by implying that young female sexuality becomes perversely enmeshed with their “parents’ loving” because of the particular taxonomies of space demanded by cotton tenancy. 52 The narrator does not pass judgment on the fact that Karintha “was a growing thing ripened too soon.” Instead, he claims that it was to be expected: “One could but imitate one’s parents, for to follow them was the way of God. [Karintha] played ‘home’ with a small boy who was not afraid to do her bidding” (6). Karintha queers “home” as a space in which a girl may cow a boy into doing “her bidding,” which “started the whole thing,” meaning her womanhood (6). The spatial taxonomies of the tenant home queers Karintha, and initiates her maturity as a sexual subject “too soon,” which she continues by overpowering a neighbor boy. This boy is the first of many who will “do her bidding”: “Young men run stills to make her money. Young men go to the big cities and run on the road. Young men go away to college. They all want to bring her money” (6). Education, prosperity, and migration—all of these offers fail to pique Karintha’s interest, and “[the young men] will die not having found it out” (6). But the narrator celebrates Karintha’s empowered disinterest in heteronormative adult sexuality as much as he claims that her queer childhood was “the way of God.” He describes Karintha using the same four lines of verse at the end of the story in her womanhood as she when she was a child: Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, O cant you see it, O cant you see it, Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, … When the sun goes down. 52 Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) are two well-known novels that explore the idea that living conditions might affect the sexual development of African American female characters who become sexually involved with the adult males in their household. This is not an exclusively African American literary trend, however: Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road features a white tenant family whose members become sexually implicated with one another due to their living conditions as well, and I explore this dynamic in the next chapter. 67 Going down “like a dusk on the eastern horizon,” Toomer collapses Karintha’s queered maturation alongside the collapse of cotton that served as its condition of possibility. 53 If “Karintha” narrates the perversions conjured from rural spatial taxonomies that cotton tenancy produced, Toomer’s utopian impulse takes hold in “Esther,” when those black feminine perversions are unleashed upon the failed cotton economy itself. The story begins with the prophesy of King Barlo, a black man who sees a “visioned African” rising from the history of American slavery to initiate an era of queered, mixed race contact. When Barlo speaks, “People are hushed. One can hear weevils work.” (25). The town fails to operate while boll weevils, an insect that was catastrophic for Southern cotton in the early twentieth century, can be heard destroying crops in the fields. 54 After listening to Barlo and the roaring collapse of cotton, “old Limp Underwood, who hated [Negroes], woke up next morning to find that he held a black man in his arms” (25). Like the poor-whites who found themselves no longer economically distinguished from black tenant farmers post-Emancipation, white, racist Underwood now finds himself in intimate contact with blackness. 55 1.11 Sensuous Cane, Amalgamation, and Toomer’s Queer Rural South 53 In “Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Erotics of Mourning,” Jennifer Williams argues that black female sexuality in Cane is marked by a history of trauma, which disallows Toomer from writing these Southern portraits of women in a straightforwardly pastoral mode. While the men in Toomer’s stories, as well as the narrator at times, want to have sex with these women, Toomer’s position is not simply nostalgic. His female characters represent Southern sexual and racial trauma, so engagement with femininity is embroiled in the history of slavery. Also see Warner Sollors, “Four Types of Writing Under Modernist Conditions,” Race and the Modern Artist, ed. Heather Hathaway, Josef Jarab, and Jeffry Melnick, New York: Oxford UP, 2003: 42-53. 54 See Natalie Ring, The Problem South, pgs 113-20. The boll weevil’s utter destruction of cotton crops contributed to the national discourse on the diseased and contagious nature of the South. Of particular interest in regards to Toomer’s mention of the boll weevil and King Barlo in “Esther” is the accusation, on the part of white agriculturalists, that black laborers were to blame for weevil infestations because they carried them in their belongings when they left farms in search of better jobs. Coincidentally, there were no reports of white laborers spreading the insect (Ring 117). 55 By the 1930s, white families made up nearly two-thirds of the tenant population. See The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy. 68 Despite Toomer’s consistent return to cotton—which, alongside lumber in Georgia, was central to the Southern economy—he titled his text “cane” after a crop that was grown for use- value, but was not central to the lives of rural Georgians. As critic Barbara Foley claims, “What Toomer’s unremitting emphasis upon cane suggests, then, is not a profound grasp of the actual role played by cane in the lives of the central Georgia peasantry, but a lyricist’s and a mystic’s reaction to the sensuous feature of its harvest and conversion into syrup” (186). I transition here between cotton and cane in order to begin finalizing my argument about Toomer’s role in documenting rural Southern queerness in the New Negro canon. Zora Neale Hurston certainly figures as the other Renaissance author most clearly associated with rurality. However, her approach to writing the South hinged on authenticity, and she wrote with the anthropologist’s eye for accurate representation. 56 However, Toomer’s inaccuracies, his superficial understanding of the Southern economy, his position as “lyricist” and “mystic” of the South, rather than anthropologist or folklorist, are what allow him to capture the imagined queer alternatives that were always already fomenting in rural Georgia, rather than capturing simply the ways that they were shut down, sterilized, or as he writes, “walking in to die on the modern desert.” Sensuous, sweet cane, then, figures into the utopian queer intimacy that ultimately collapses the color line—if only in the space of a story—in Cane. “Becky” is about a poor-white woman who had two black sons and thus was driven from the segregated Georgia community where she lived. While we know from the story’s beginning that she died and her sons left town, we also come to find that both black and white townspeople had paid her visits, bringing food, tobacco, sugar cane, and general care, after she was exiled (9). The narrator describes Becky’s alienation from the town spatially: “The railroad boss said not to say he said it, but she could 56 Hurston studied with "Father of American Anthropology" Franz Boas, who oversaw the construction and publication of her Mules and Men, Philadelphia: Lippincott Publishers, 1935. 69 live, if she wanted to, on the narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road” (9). Because the proof of her racial and sexual transgression lived in her sons, the town confined Becky to “ground islandized” (9). This “islandized” space leads to Becky’s death: “...the ground trembled as a ghost train rumbled by. The chimney fell into the cabin.... Becky, if she was there, lay under [the bricks]” (11). In her sexual relations with black men, Becky undergoes a forced departure from her white citizenship and the movements across space that it affords her. The fear of amalgamation produced the conditions for Becky’s quarantine, and later her death. Toomer’s Georgia, then, is not a utopia in which the anxieties and violence of the city are bereft; in fact, if Toomer takes great liberties in his portrayal of the Georgia economy, the one manifestation of Southern reality that he captured clearly was Jim Crow racism, and namely, lynching (Foley 187). Yet neither Becky’s casting out nor her continued care is exclusive to the white or black communities that share the town. The narrator asks about her first black son: “Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks’ mouths. She wouldnt tell. Common, Godforsaken, insane white shameless wench, said the white folks’ mouths” (9). This line of inquiry on the part of the townspeople into Becky’s sexual propriety intersects with Zora Neale Hurston’s story “Spunk,” in which a town gathers to gossip about a young woman, Lena, who cheats on her husband with a more virile and outspoken man. For a period of time before their ultimately deadly altercation, Lena’s husband Joe would spend his time “‘swallowin’ an’ workin’ his lips like he wants to say somethin’ an’ can’t’” (107). A character who “can’t” speak is paradoxical in Hurston’s archive of vernacular verbosity, but the topic of sexual impropriety sticks in Joe’s mouth, starts “workin’” but will not escape. Toomer’s Becky, comparatively, is subject to the same relentless barrage of questions and insults about her sexual propriety as Joe is about his 70 wife’s, but she “wouldnt” tell. The white folks’ first impulse is to place blame, and one can surmise, to lynch. Knowing that providing the answer would result in the father’s death, Becky refuses to name the man who impregnated her. While the white folks call Becky “common,” “Godforsaken,” and “insane” because of her perverse sexuality and her refusal to allow the lynch mob to seek “justice” for her, she is still named as “white.” “Shameless,” but still white. The questioning does not halt, however, and again, the narrator echoes the town, asking “Who gave it to her?” The black community blames the man who did it as well: “Low down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks’ mouths. She wouldnt tell. Poor Catholic poor- white crazy woman, said the black folks’ mouths” (9). With this response, Becky shifts from “white” to “poor-white,” an indication that her economic circumstance and sexual transgression intersects with her whiteness in such a way as to injure its status, to bring Becky down to a level that for a black man to give her a child, he must have “no self-respect.” While neither white nor black wanted anything to do with her publicly, “White folks and black folks built her cabin, fed her and her growing baby, prayed secretly to God who’d put His cross upon her and cast her out” (9). And after accepting that “she wouldnt tell,” the white folks gave up the lynch rope and placed the blame for Becky’s transgressions not on a specter of uncontrollable black masculinity, but rather turned it over to the hands of God. Becky’s two sons, who grew into “sullen and cunning” men, “Answered [their outcast status] by shooting up two men, cursing both white and black townspeople, and leaving. The town’s simultaneous alienation of poor-white Becky, and their care for her, transcends racial barriers while evincing the decaying logics of the color line that Toomer tracks throughout Cane. Through her refusal to place the blame for her pregnancy on her black lover, Becky’s own racial status moves from “white” to “poor-white,” establishing the fluidity of racial status, and her 71 mixed-race children leave town on moral grounds, dissociating themselves from the disciplinary powers that would see them banished for the sexual “crimes” of their parents. Yet in the end, Toomer re-figures racial delineation along black and white lines: “Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She’s dead: they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus” (11). Their story speaks to the fragility of the color line, as well as its tenacity. Importantly, it is not the act of miscegenation that initiates the story's small collapse of the color line, with white and black alike participating in her banishment, and paradoxically, her survival. The queer intimacies that collapse the color line happen after the transgression of miscegenation: they are the white and black acts of care, compassion, and survival that surround Becky until her death. 1.12 Conclusions In this chapter, I have framed Jean Toomer as a writer of queer possibility in the Jim Crow 1920s, at the birth of the New Negro Renaissance. In closing, I follow José Esteban Muñoz’s insistence on being pulled simultaneously into the future and the past as the central structure of feeling that attends queer utopian impulses—or possibilities—and consider Toomer’s dual investments in form and place—avant and backward—to indicate his agreement: “A resource that cannot be discounted to know the future is indeed the no-longer-conscious, that thing or place that may be extinguished but not yet discharged in its utopian potentiality” (Muñoz 30). At a moment when rurality was slowly being extinguished from the black bourgeois lexicon, Toomer wrote it flourishing, disturbing, haunting, encountering, and queering the urban landscape. He saw something in Georgia that was “not yet discharged,” and he discharged it. Toomer’s queer rural South is instructive of the ways that reaching into the past to disturb or resist pre-determined, inherited narratives of progress might entail reaching also into what is out of place, not simply what is out of time. 72 By writing a catalogue of rural queer characters that are quite different from the urban bohemian queer aesthetics that defined the work of Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman, Toomer’s Cane shifts the landscape of productive impropriety in and around the New Negro Renaissance. The black middle class reactions to Toomer’s rural backwardness demonstrates the ways that blackness operated outside the logics of Progressive era reform in the 1920s, and particularly the ways that reformers dealt with rurality and its presumed ability to “save” the rest of the nation from a host of social ills. Chapter Two will delve further into reform efforts that made their way into rural America, but its emphasis on white rural poverty will put the black bourgeoisie’s disavowal of rural queer migrants into stark relief. Rather than continuing to think about the ironic appropriateness of modernist literary form to participate in the queer disturbance of rurality, Chapter Two takes up the social realist “hovel novel,” and the documentary photograph, as two “authenticity” genres that are not as successful as Toomer’s sensuous, imaginative work in expressing the backwardness of queer rurality as it comes into contact with different types of reform efforts. 73 Chapter 2: Erskine Caldwell, the Farm Security Administration, and Visualizing Rural America in the Depression Era 2.1 Georgia Boys: Visuality and the Hovel Novel In 1995, The University of Georgia Press published an edition of Erskine Caldwell’s 1943 collection of Southern sketches, Georgia Boy, and used Walker Evans’s image of two young country boys as the cover image for the book (fig. 2-1). 1 The subjects of Evans’s image, one boy looking quizzically into the camera’s lens and the other looking down—perhaps saving face, as his is shielded from the sun, the camera, and the gaze of the viewer—were not Georgia boys at all, but rather two children growing up in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, a coal mining region with little connection to the agricultural life led by Caldwell’s Georgia narrator. Commercially successful, if lacking the literary quality of Caldwell’s earlier works, i.e. Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), Georgia Boy thickens the style that Caldwell initiated in his “hovel novels.” 2 Following the form and content of eugenic family studies that were immensely popular in the early twentieth century, Georgia Boy and Caldwell’s earlier novels feature character sketches of poor, rural white folks who are well beyond hope, charity, or reform, fit rather for isolation or sterilization until their bloodlines dry up. To attract readers in the 1930s, these depictions of white poverty harnessed national fears about the depravity of sex in the country, and the regulation of rural gender and sexual deviance resulted in a cultural fascination with rural “perversion” like that detailed in Caldwell’s novels. Many of Georgia Boy’s earlier editions, and most of Caldwell’s novels, were published as paperbacks, with 1 UGA Press used Evans’s photography as cover images for many of their 1995 Brown Thrasher Books editions of Caldwell’s novels (BTB is an imprint dedicated to publishing literary texts about Georgia or written by Georgia authors), including Deep South, Georgia Boy, In Search of Bisco, God’s Little Acre, Tobacco Road, Call it Experience, and The Stories of Erskine Caldwell. 2 I use the term “hovel novel” throughout this chapter to describe Caldwell’s translation of the rural white “hovel family,” the object of many eugenic family studies in the early twentieth century, into works of fiction. 74 tantalizing covers that situated them in a pulp tradition: young men embracing busty blondes, with the farm looming in the background (fig. 2-2), or barefoot country girls luring boys toward them, backs pressed firmly into filthy tables, with that familiar tenant shack shading the lurid scene (fig. 2-3). The Farm Security Administration employed Walker Evans at the time he created the photo that would become the cover of Georgia Boy in 1995, and it would be an understatement to claim that the University of Georgia Press’s use of the bureau’s photography is a departure from the novel’s established pulp aesthetic. 3 And yet the choice of Evans’s photograph as illustrative of Georgia Boy brings the “hovel novel” and the FSA’s documentary-style photography into contact in a manner that heightens rather than diminishes their ideological and aesthetic similarities. 4 This chapter will likewise participate in this idiosyncratic pairing, drawing attention to the ways that Caldwell’s writing process aligned him with the documentary photographers who gained notoriety for their work with government agencies and pictorial magazines in the 1930s, as well as those social scientists writing within a eugenic idiom. From the early years of the twentieth century, eugenic field workers, both hobbyists and those working for the notorious Eugenics Records Office, played a crucial role in defining the problem of white Southern poverty, which novelists like Caldwell and photographers like Evans took up in the 3 Iconic FSA images such as Dorothea Lange’s 1936 Migrant Mother and Walker Evans’s 1936 Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama became part of the national consciousness almost at the moment of their first printing. Glossy, pictorial magazines gained popularity in America contemporaneously with the development of the FSA. Survey Graphic published many of the agency’s photographs, and various book projects were inspired by the agency’s photography. Roy Stryker was efficient at placing the photographs with publishers, despite the country’s overwhelming resistance to any media deemed “propagandistic.” See F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (1972): 123. 4 Walker Evans favored this term, “documentary style,” rather than simply “documentary.” According to Eric Rosenberg, “[Documentary style] implies a tool wielded and brought to bear, a bending of document to individuation and a bending of aesthetic to fact, or at least more violently, the clashing of two sets of expectations normally content to hold their opposite corners in the wrestling ring of representation” (63). See Trauma and the Documentary Photography of the FSA. “With Trauma: Walker Evans and the Failure to Document.” Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2012. 75 Depression era. 5 In search of poverty and vice to provide support for eugenic measures taken up by the State, these “social scientists” traversed the rural South, and the eugenic family studies that they produced gained widespread popularity in the early twentieth century, when panic about “race suicide” spread amongst those concerned with the degeneration of white racial stock. 6 These three modes—documentary photography, the hovel novel, and eugenics— converged around the figure of the rural white family during the 1930s, complicating rurality’s role in the national mythos of the Great Depression. This chapter will argue that Erskine Caldwell’s popular and acclaimed novel Tobacco Road documents the racial anxieties that gathered around perceived failures of rural whiteness during the rise of the American eugenics movement. 7 In this moment, the visuality of rural whiteness shifted, as the nation’s “poor white problem” contributed to the South’s disintegrating logics of segregation. 8 This shift was contemporaneous to the documentary era, when the FSA’s photography unit overwhelmed the public consciousness with images of country life from the 5 It is crucial to note that most eugenic fieldwork was conducted by large institutions such as the Eugenics Record Office, which was financed primarily through private donations (such as the Harriman and Rockefeller families), or by larger private funders such as the Carnegie Institution. The ERO advocated laws based in eugenics research. However, many amateur investigators also participated in the proliferation of family studies, and one of those amateur sociologists was Erskine Caldwell’s father, who I will turn toward in a later section of this chapter. 6 As Ryan Cartwright notes on the genre’s popularity, “The most notorious of these studies, Henry H. Goddard’s eugenic monograph The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness, was named Hearst’s Magazine’s book of the month in 1913” (23). A host of studies followed Goddard’s: “The Jukes and the Kallikaks were quickly joined by other rural paragons of infamy like the Pineys, the Nams, the Hill Folks of Massachusetts, the Zeros, the Rufers and the Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem” (Cartwright 23). Cartwright’s dissertation chapter, “‘Harlots from the Hollow’: Eugenics and the Construction of the Poor White Hovel Family,” argues for the importance of gender and sexual deviance to understandings of the eugenics movement in America. 7 Caldwell was not the only writer whose work, perhaps despite his intentions, exhibited eugenic discourses around Southern rurality. Stephen Fender’s “Poor Whites and the Federal Writers’ Project: The Rhetoric of Eugenics in the Southern Life Histories” argues that the FWP was likewise influenced by eugenic claims to biological inferiority’s role in the plight of Southern sharecroppers, despite the Project’s insistence on environmental causes as a detriment to impoverished families. 8 Nicholas Mirzoeff’s theorization of visuality is useful to thinking about the ways that rurality was visualized (i.e. made perceptible to authority, both public and State) during the 1930s. Mirzoeff claims that “Visuality supplemented the violence of authority and its separations, forming a complex that came to seem natural by virtue of its investment in ‘history’” (loc 444). The functioning of visuality as a mode of racial policing in the Jim Crow South is, for the most part, clear, but this chapter will highlight the ways that white poverty in particular complicated the visual schema of Jim Crow. I make this argument alongside other scholars of the South as the nation’s problematic region during the rise of the Liberal state. See Natalie Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930, Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2012. 76 perspective of New Deal bureaucracy. 9 The program made spectacular the faces of rural poverty, from black sharecroppers to poor white tenants and immigrant farm laborers. Far afield in purpose from Caldwell’s eugenicist novels, the US government utilized the photographic to portray rural poverty as a temporary condition with the potential for rehabilitation, whose subjects’ dignities were not foreclosed by their economic circumstances. In other words, and according to accepted histories of these two forms, the novel occupied the realm of the necropolitical during the economic and cultural crises of the 1930s, while photography operated through state-mandated approaches to life, sustainability, and reform. 10 Although the state favored the visual for its propaganda, 11 Caldwell’s hovel novels were part of the same documentary impulse that called forth the photograph as the medium of choice for effecting change in the 1930s. 12 To thicken an established history of the forms that most forcefully took up rurality during the Depression, I argue that given its rural subject matter, and despite its 9 Historians of photography, such as William Stott in his Documentary Expression in 1930s America, note the documentary era as a moment in which the visual form took precedence in public civil life. I would distinguish the historical import of the photographic form and the impulse toward documentation in the 1930s from the rise of visuality itself. My thinking is closer to Mirzoeff’s, that visuality’s “first domain” was “the slave plantation, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, operating as the surrogate of the sovereign” (loc 435). The right to look in this visual schema, to find the other and in so doing find oneself, is absolutely foreclosed to the enslaved. This chapter will position the documentary impulse in the 1930s as an operation of visuality, but I will not argue that the era’s proliferation of the photographic functions beyond or outside visuality’s operations. 10 For Mbembe, in a necropolitical framework, “sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (27). The necropolitical, then, is not opposite to the biopolitical, but rather operates in its negative spaces, particularly in regards to states of exception or siege. Mbembe asks if the Foucauldian notion of biopower can account for “contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective?” (12). I use both Foucault’s and Mbembe’s frameworks to describe different means by which the state, as well as cultural workers like Caldwell, attempted to preserve and destroy different forms of whiteness in the 1930s through the categorization of lives worth living and those deemed disposable. 11 While I use the term “propaganda” to describe the FSA’s photography work, the American public in the thirties rarely made the distinction between good and bad propaganda, tending rather to react aggressively to any attempt to sway public opinion in a non-objective manner. William Stott explains, “An accusation of propaganda [in the thirties] was deadly censure…” (22). 12 Stott, historicizing the preference for photography in the thirties, compares this moment to the emergence of Progressive era photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who were before their time in their insistence that photography was more effective than the pen in swaying public opinion: “Riis and Hine were a generation ahead of time. Despite their example, the most influential journalism of the Progressive era, the work of the Muckrakers, relied on the written word. The Progressives were, as Warren Susman says, people of the book. People in the 1930s—‘people of the picture and the radio,’ Susman calls them—approached experience more as Riis and Hine did, and as we do now” (30-31). 77 investment in objectivity, the proximity of FSA documentary-style photography to the eugenic mirrored that of the hovel novel, complicating the state’s surveillance and management of American rurality. Like Caldwell and the eugenicists who inspired his work, the FSA ultimately captured rural spaces and subjects as shamefully backward, and thus unwieldy in regards to reform. 13 In other words, while the development of the documentary form in America was progressive in nature, its content—particularly rural whiteness—slanted the form in unexpected directions, toward the hovel novel and its eugenic aesthetic. 14 2.2 A National Search for Authenticity: Rural America in the Early Twentieth Century Since the 1980s, when Reagan let us know that “It’s Morning in America”—but the morning sun shone brightest on small, tight-knit communities where family values and public values were one and the same—campaigns to normalize sexuality and gender have been 13 While this chapter’s objects are regional (i.e. its cultural texts center mainly on the agricultural South), rurality itself is trans-regional. In a 2014 special issue of GLQ on “Queering the Middle,” the editors cite Gayatri Gopinath’s theory of critical regionality to think through the ways that rurality complicates national teleologies: “Reading cultural texts as unruly cartographies, [Gopinath] points to the creative potentials of deploying a critical regionality that unravels and defuses the power of the national and the global, by showing how the narratives of the region “rub against” the triumphant teleologies of nation making and globalization in general, and the creation of sexual/gender subjects in particular” (3). While this project characterizes rurality as trans-regional, attending to ruralities that move across the country, embed themselves in urban centers, and exist in expansive sections across the US, I also characterize rurality as that which “rubs against” narratives of unfettered national progress. 14 While I am using the term “progressive” to describe the efforts of moral reformers who were invested in rural behavior, Scott Herring makes important distinctions between the Progressive movement and populism: “One of the more influential U.S. social movements of the late nineteenth century, Progressivism emerged as a middle- class response to the perceived mysteries and miseries of the metropolis—immigrant migrations from locales other than Northern Europe; rampant industrialization; and the development of cosmopolitan neighborhoods removed from the watchful eye of developing suburbs. […] Somewhat akin to populism, a working-class rural reform movement aimed at stifling emergent corporate capitalism and aiding impoverished Midwestern communities, Progressivism attempted to clean up, control, and categorize these spaces in a classic Foucauldian act of social management. Some male and female reformers even went so far as to inhabit working-class immigrant neighborhoods as self-styled philanthropic slummers and to publicly detail accounts of their interclass activities in U.S. literary public spheres” (Underworld 26-27). However, it is important to note that some Progressive reformers blurred these lines between country and city as they intended to manage the country in the interest of the city: these are the reformers that Colin Johnson references in his argument about the preservation of rurality for the benefit of the city, which will become important to my argument here. 78 overwhelmingly associated with rural America, with its small-town values. 15 From the spread of fundamentalist Christianity across the largely rural “Bible Belt,” to the attack on women’s health that has succeeded in impeding the abortion rights of many rural women, the late twentieth century affiliation of rurality with social conservatism is difficult to ignore. However, this export of family values from the country into the city is not ahistorical. 16 In the decades that opened the twentieth century, the (white) rural countryside was looked upon as a potential curative for the social ills that plagued burgeoning American cities. And yet, for rurality to function as the wellspring of strength for a transforming nation, country life itself had to first be properly maintained and regulated. Colin Johnson positions rurality amongst the hopes and challenges of Progressive reformers working toward a more just society at the time: [For] early-twentieth-century moral reformers… the countryside represented both an opportunity and a challenge. On one hand, it represented a potentially bottomless well from which would flow an unending stream of physically and morally fit youth to replenish American cities and displace the decadent, 15 Alex Wescott, in his dissertation “Arrested development: Neoliberalism and the rise of the slacker in the 20th and 21st century United States,” argues that Reagan’s nostalgia campaign was effective in the sense the American public yearned for a time when the good life seemed more attainable. I would extend this nostalgia for a past to nostalgia for place, specifically the small town or country, which were purportedly immune to the economic and moral downturns plaguing the American public. For instance, during his remarks at the National Association of Towns and Townships, Reagan recognized an American shift from the urban to the small town since the 1970s (failing to mention the ways the deindustrialization was gutting cities), instead, focusing on the desire for small town life: “The influx of people into small towns and rural areas reflects not just the material well-being or desire of that, but the desire for a better, different quality of life. During the 1960's, there were those who scoffed at small town values -- at family, the talk of family and God and neighborhood. And they said those things in which we believe are old-fashioned and corny. Well, there's been some growing up in this country in the last few years, and people are discovering that those basic values we hold so dear are stronger than the fads that make a big splash one day and evaporate the next.” See Ronald Reagan. Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Towns and Townships. 12 September 1983. <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/search/speeches/speech_srch.html> 16 Colin Johnson’s chapter on “Country Life and the Nationalization of Middle-Class Morality” provides a history of country/city relations in the realm of morality, gender comportment, and sexual hygiene (and by extension, race). Johnson theorizes the manner in which normativity was distributed across rural America by Progressive reformers, particularly during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, at the behest of his Country Life Commission: “early twentieth-century rural sex education campaigns… were prompted in part by the findings of organizations such as the Country Life Commission… [demonstrating] how an emerging discourse of sexual normativity was circulated back to rural Americas, often by other rural Americans, as both a national and nationalizing imperative” (53). 79 diminished stock that infested them. On the other hand, protecting the purity of the source from which that stream would flow would require great diligence on the part of the reformers. Unless rural youth were regularly reminded that they lived in a state of constant moral and physical peril where the matter of sex was concerned, there existed a very real possibility that the open countryside could fall victim to the same kind of degenerative forces that were slowly sapping urban populations of their strength, virility, and moral rectitude. (Johnson 79) From our twenty-first-century vantage point, it is difficult to imagine a historical juncture at which the moral force of urban America (itself associated with vice and perversion) was called upon to manage the sexual perversion of the country. This chapter begins with this early twentieth century perverse rurality as its object, and contends that those elements of rural sexuality deemed degenerate by Progressive moral reformers dovetailed with anxieties that gathered around perceived failures of rural whiteness during the collapse of the color line in the rural South. 17 Indeed, the eugenic branch of the era’s “racial science” existed to prevent the spread of white degeneracy, an enterprise that was inextricable from a concern with rural sexual practices. Progressive moral reformers attempted to manage the effects of rurality’s “unruliness” upon the nation, but as their efforts receded, eugenicists followed their footsteps deep into America’s “hollers,” transforming their anxieties about moral hygiene into anxieties about racial hygiene. If histories of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction U.S. have tended to focus on amalgamation and racial contamination as 17 This chapter, concerned as it is with the ways that the American eugenics movement functioned in and through the novel form in the early twentieth century, is as such primarily concerned with rural whiteness. According to historian Matt Wray, “If, in 1850, professional scientists in this rising class were obsessed with inventing and classifying the nature and meanings of boundaries of racial difference, by 1880 they had shifted focus. Cutting-edge research no longer focused on differences between races, but instead on recognizing and delineating differences within races” (76). Wray argues that this is because by the late nineteenth century, racial science had “proven” the superiority of whiteness and thus turned its energies toward the preservation of that superiority. 80 central public concerns related to the rise of American urbanism, the eugenics movement’s obsession with the problem of poor rural whiteness reveals the problem of white degeneracy as one of isolation, rather than proximity and density. This impetus to think through the queerness that early twentieth century racial science thrust upon isolation and stasis, rather than movement, density, and proximity, allows this chapter to consider queer rurality as a formation parallel to sites of queer excess that are typically located around the former (movement, density, contact, proximity) rather than the latter (isolation, stasis). 18 Despite Progressive concerns about rurality’s perceived racial and sexual perversions, the rural idyll retained its place in the national imaginary as the Progressive era gave way to the New Deal. Colin Johnson locates the precedent for the era’s idyllic vision of rurality in the late nineteenth century: “a nationwide fascination with the perceived atavism of rural life… emerged during the late nineteenth century…. [when] national interest in rural life soared… [as] ‘local color’ accounts of Appalachia—that ‘strange land’ populated by ‘peculiar people’—began to appear regularly in the pages of genteel literary magazines…” (61). The idyll manifested in two different directions, each poised toward the management and preservation of this “strange” but essentially American rural life: the nostalgia for the “folk” and the drive toward “race betterment.” Documentarians, ethnographers, and photographers—purveyors of folk—searched for a “useable past” for an “uncertain present” (Retman 1). Because the present was uncertain precisely at the intersection of racial and economic precarity that defined 1930s America, that useable past was necessarily white. 18 For instance, in regards to South Asian migrants in port cities of the Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century, Nayan Shah has claimed that transience (the shifting, unstable orientation that required discipline by the US state) was the condition that allowed for the development of stranger intimacies: “As an ever-changing assortment of men and boys moved through the city, their social behaviors flourished in ways that appeared anonymous in police and elite surveillance, but the frequency of encounters produced familiarity among the working men and boys” (53). While this work on proximity, contact, and conditional availability is crucial to understanding the functioning of working class queer spaces in the early twentieth century, much is yet to be said about sites of isolation and stasis as queerly proliferative. 81 Oppositional to the perverse and degenerate portrayals of whiteness that this chapter will read through Caldwell’s novels and certain FSA photographers, Sonnet Retman claims that vulnerability and dignity collided in the figure of the rural white for those “purveyors of folk”: “As these [folk] professionals took up the project of many progressive reformers before them, investigating the assimilation process and ‘living lore’ of recent immigrants, they redoubled their efforts to record the vulnerable dignity of ‘native-born’ workers and ‘traditional’ populations,” i.e. whiteness (Retman 13). African Americans and Native Americans played a large role in the folklore projects of the 1930s (most notably the WPA American Guide Series), but they were denied “the material prerogatives of proper citizenships,” as those were reserved for the standard, white, citizen-consumer (i.e. the tourist), who encountered this mythical, pre-capitalist, folk ancestor in the form of the white rural folk hero (14). 19 Before turning to this chapter’s primary objects—the representations of rural whiteness taken up by Erskine Caldwell and the FSA in the 1930s—it is crucial to understand how both the novel and photography were influenced by discourses circulating around the establishment and preservation of an authentic (white) national identity through an engagement with, and regulation of, rurality and its perverse practices. 2.3 The American Eugenics Movement, Authentic Whiteness, and the Anxiety of Rurality In a 1905 speech that declared the farmer to be the “foundation” of American society—a foundation under siege—President Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the possibility of “race-suicide” 19 Exactly who counted as “the folk” differed according to political bent: “Indeed, in right-wing diatribes, the folk were made to be representatives of rural, small-town values, the Protestant work ethic, and the great White Way, a group threatened by the recent influx of immigrants, African Americans, and women in the wage-labor workforce. From a liberal angle, the folk stood for the legions of dispossessed agricultural workers who had fallen victim to mechanized farming practices, greedy lenders, and a series of catastrophic natural disasters, a group cast white or ‘without race or ethnicity’” (Retman 12). 82 to the National Congress of Mothers. 20 While contemporary racial anxieties about the contamination and elimination of whiteness (i.e. racial minorities becoming majorities) typically circulates around the issue of mixed-race offspring and immigration, Roosevelt’s speech mentions nothing about amalgamation. 21 Rather, these concerns about “race-suicide” were about the degeneration of whiteness from the inside, a self-destruction that would occur without American motherhood working toward three objectives, which the President outlined: moral training—“Some children will go wrong in spite of the best training; and some will go right even when their surroundings are most unfortunate; nevertheless an immense amount depends upon the family training”—breeding—“the average woman is a good wife, a good mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest duty of womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to bring up as they should be brought up, healthy children… numerous enough so that the race shall increase and not decrease”—and, interestingly, secure rurality—“the men of the soil… have hitherto made the foundation of lasting national life in every State; and, if the foundation becomes either too weak or too narrow, the superstructure, no matter how attractive, is in imminent danger of falling.” 22 It should come as no surprise then, that reform efforts aimed at the preservation and betterment of “the race” took place primarily in rural America during the first years of the twentieth century. 23 Various scholars associated with the short-lived theoretical trend of whiteness studies in the early 2000s have argued that whiteness considered intersectionally— 20 Theodore Roosevelt, “On Motherhood,” 13 March 1905. http://www.nationalcenter.org/TRooseveltMotherhood.html 21 Brittany Farr’s dissertation at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication theorizes and historicizes the racial panics that continually warn the public about white racial decline in a supposedly “post-racial” America. 22 Roosevelt, “On Motherhood.” 23 According to agricultural historians Scott J. Peters and Paul A. Morgan, Roosevelt’s 1908 establishment of the Commission on Country Life, which was meant to curb the migration of rural populations into urban centers, was an acknowledgement of “the importance to the nation of the material and moral welfare and character of the ‘great farmer class.’ While the president judged that farmers were better off than they had ever been, he worried that the social and economic institutions of country life were not keeping pace with the development of the nation as a whole” (293). See Scott J. Peters and Paul A. Morgan, “The Country Life Commission: Reconsidering a Milestone in American Agricultural History.” Agricultural History, 78.3 (2004): 289-316. 83 such as poor whiteness, white trash, or rural whiteness—diminishes its authenticity as the whiteness of white supremacy. However, Roosevelt’s statement suggests that the desire to preserve an “authentic” whiteness and the desire to preserve an “authentic” rurality were interconnected, or even equivalent desires. As a departure from the directions taken by those scholars associated with whiteness studies, I read the era’s emphasis on the preservation of rurality and rural folk-ways to be related to a preservation of whiteness and its order of things. 24 Roosevelt’s speech serves as an early example of concern about rural whiteness that would become the focus on the eugenics movement as it developed in America at the turn of the twentieth century. 25 Eugenicists were concerned with white populations that exhibited a combination of the following traits, which were considered inheritable: criminality, poverty (a refusal to participate fully in a wage economy), intellectual disability, and a rejection of proper gender norms and/or heteronormativity. 26 While biological science in the nineteenth century was concerned with racial taxonomy and differences between races, 27 eugenics research—as it 24 I agree with Robin Wiegman’s critique of whiteness studies in Object Lessons, in which she describes that project’s objective as “a rearticulation of class struggle as an antiracist project… [which might] enable contemporary white people to imagine a political (as opposed to biological or cultural) identity beyond the conflation of power and privilege with white skin” (159). Problems arise in this project when one considers that “Whiteness Studies was founded on the inescapable contradiction: its project to particularize whiteness was indebted to the very structure of the universal that particularization sought to undo” (159). In other words, who has the power to decide between claims to universality or particularity but those imbued with white privilege, or self-authorized subjects? The scholars whose work participates in this framework include David Roediger and Matt Wray (both of whom historicize the development of whiteness as a way to dismantle it), and those invested in the radical potentialities of white trash, such as Annalee Newitz. 25 Colin Johnson’s Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (2013) provides a comprehensive history of the ways that queer rurality was managed by the state in the early twentieth century, most notably through FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Johnson argues that this program instantiated more than it regulated queer practices amongst men. His book also touches on the FSA in its turn toward “hard women” who were photographed by the unit, acting as precedents for hard femininity as a queer comportment later in the twentieth century. I take up his call to see these government programs as unruly, but my reading of the state’s rural management projects is more concerned with their overlap with negative eugenics than their potential for queer practice and comportment. 26 Cartwright p. 25-26. 27 Stephen Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) is most instructive for a history of nineteenth century racial biology and classification. Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (2000) has also been crucial to my thinking about the ways that racial science 84 developed from British scientist Francis Galton’s claim that human characteristics are inheritable—was focused almost entirely on whiteness. 28 While the wide acceptance of eugenic science, and its influence through the 1940s, suggests that the paradigm did much to quell white anxieties about urbanization, industrialization, and the waves of immigration that attended these cultural-economic shifts, eugenic science, and the eugenic family studies that made up its archive of evidence, centered on white “degenerates,” rather than immigrants and/or people of color who also contributed to white racial panic at the time (Wray 72). 29 According to Matt Wray, “One reason for this lack of concern was undoubtedly the fact that eugenicists were unified around a common ideology of racial supremacy: the racial inferiority of people of color was seldom in doubt for eugenicists—or the educated populace as a whole, for that matter” (73). This is not to say that eugenics practices, most notably involuntary sterilization, did not affect people of color. 30 Yet, according to Wray, “What united many eugenicists was a primary concern with ‘race betterment’; they feared the threat posed by poor rural white ‘degenerates’ as much or more than they feared the presence of other races and ethnicities, miscegenation, or intermarriage among immigrants and ‘native’ whites” (73). Certainly, eugenic science’s focus on “degenerative germ plasms” and their effects on sexual morality, rather than beginning with sexual morality itself (as did the Progressive reformers before them), suggests that eugenic developed in tandem with shifting ideas about gender, and particularly rural femininity, in the early twentieth century. 28 The two eugenic family studies that do focus primarily on miscegenation are Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport, The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics, Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Eugenics Record Office, 1912; and Arthur Estabrook and Ivan McDougale, The Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe, Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkens, 1926. See Matt Wray p. 81-83. 29 Eugenics research did have a great effect on immigration restriction, particularly the 1924 Immigration Act, as well as the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act, which forbade interracial marriage. See Wray, 73. 30 Dorothy Roberts, in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1998), contends, “It was a common belief among Blacks in the South that Black women were routinely sterilized without their informed consent and for no valid medical reason. Teaching hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on poor Black women as practice for their medical residents. This sort of abuse was so widespread in the South that these operations came to be known as ‘Mississippi appendectomies.’” See also Alexandra Stern’s account of Madrigal v. Quilligan (1978), 199-210. 85 concerns with the degeneration of whiteness were in some ways separate from anxieties about miscegenation that also ran rampant in the post-Reconstruction U.S. I would argue, however, that the spectacle of racial terror posed by decades of lynching in the South, as well as the visual landscape of Jim Crow, played more of a part in regulating racial contact than Wray considers. 31 It was not simply that eugenicists felt the best defense of white supremacy a strong offense (i.e. a strong gene pool), but rather that racial integrity was being managed on various registers and through various means, including but not limited to eugenics. Regardless of eugenics’ scope, its focus was on the management of poor, “feebleminded” whites, who were targeted for sterilization in order to prevent the spread of their undesirable characteristics amongst the majority of the white population. Despite my contention with Wray’s characterization of eugenic thought as an exclusively white racial project, there were crucial differences between the management of white degeneracy through eugenics and the scientific racisms that conscribed and violated people of color in the post-Reconstruction U.S.: namely, the white “hovel family” was not a synecdoche for the entire white race. Certainly, eugenics existed to prevent the spread of white degeneracy, but eugenicists did not categorically extend the problems of the hovel family to the entire race. 32 Following the wave of Progressive era reformers who were concerned with the social ills of cities, eugenics field workers took to rural districts across the South to document and develop 31 See Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Goldsby argues that lynching in its time of peak frequency in the U.S. (1886 – 1922) was not an aberration in an otherwise progressive American movement toward modernism, but rather operated in tandem with other modes of vigilantism and “backward” violence in the early twentieth century, which was marked most clearly by western expansion. Lynching, by Goldsby’s account, was part of a broader logic of American culture, and this logic, I argue, did much to discipline rural blackness in ways that affected the eugenics movement’s concern with its ability to further “contaminate” the backward elements of rural whiteness. 32 Another crucial difference relates specifically to the ways that rurality was seen to function in the black and white national imaginations. As I argued in my previous chapter on the rural migrant as a specter on the scene of the New Negro Renaissance and emergence of the black middle class in the 1920s, rurality was a source of shame for respectable blackness in the period in which eugenics gained popularity. 86 plans for reform and relief for tenant farmers in the 1920s. Many of these researchers—mostly young women who trained in the Eugenic Records Office at Cold Springs Harbor, Long Island— hoped to start careers in the sciences after graduating from prestigious east coast colleges, and thus descended upon rural districts across the eastern and southern states in order to solve the problem of white poverty through eugenics rather than social welfare reforms. These field experts were “highly trained in identifying phenotypical differences through direct contact with and observation of families,” a skill considered best suited for women, who would ostensibly be more comfortable inside these families’ homes (70). Working for the ERO, which acted as the center for eugenics research and popular knowledge regarding heredity disease in the U.S., they went into “the field” to document white degeneracy and “amass data for the ERO’s strategic purposes, which fell under the rubric of ‘negative eugenics’ (i.e., preventing the proliferation of ‘bad stock’ and minimizing the contamination of ‘good stock’ by bad)” (Wray 70-71). Like female field workers considered suited to the work, Ira Caldwell’s experience as an itinerant minister certainly prepared him for work inside the homes of rural families. Ira, novelist Erskine Caldwell’s father, was a eugenics field worker, self-trained in the identification of phenotypical difference and management of undesirable social and personal habits. This chapter will return to the question of Erskine Caldwell’s father and his contribution to the rise of the hovel novel, but at this juncture I would like to simply hold these two positions in comparison: the eugenic field worker and the Southern hovel novelist. 2.4 Erskine Caldwell and the Visuality of the Novel Caldwell was connected to the world of photography by association: he married photographer Margaret Bourke-White in 1939, and they collaborated on the first rural 87 documentary book that was published during the New Deal era, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). 33 While Caldwell recognized the ways that the photographic related to the literary, when explaining his writing process, he distanced himself from photography in order to preserve space for his imaginative work: “To me, realism is something that is photographic, we’ll say, something that’s fixed, something unchangeable, something that exists like a rock or a tree. What I try to do in my writing is to create something that does not exist and make it real. To me, that’s the ultimate aim of fiction: to create something that has never existed before” (Kehl 234). Caldwell, like most Americans invested in the power of the photograph during the documentary era, regarded photography as “fixed,” “unchangeable,” and “real.” Fiction for Caldwell, on the other hand, allows the imaginative to function as the “real,” like the photograph, but at a remove. However, Bourke-White’s approach to documentary style collapses the difference that Caldwell describes between the photograph (with a referent that exists beyond/outside the negative) and fiction (made real only by its author). Despite Caldwell’s making distinct the two forms, his collaboration with Bourke-White on You Have Seen Their Faces exhibits an approach to documentary photography that is quite similar to the ways that Caldwell describes the craft of writing fiction: She and Caldwell would come upon a sharecropper family with likely faces. He would talk to them and while he did she ‘lurked in the background with a small camera, not stealing pictures exactly, which I seldom do,’ but inconspicuously taking them. If the people proved friendly, Caldwell and Bourke-White would sit down for a chat. After a time, while he continued the talk, she set up a large 33 Bourke-White (1904-1971) was a photojournalist, the first female in her field hired as a staff photographer by Life magazine in 1937. You Have Seen Their Faces, which Bourke-White photographed and Caldwell narrated, was the first published “documentary book” (as William Stott terms the genre) of the era, which would be followed by many others, including the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by Walker Evans and James Agee and Archibald MacLeish’s The Land of the Free (1937). 88 camera, on tripod, with flashes; she framed the picture, focused, then went back to her chair, a remote control in her hand. Now she waited and ‘watched our people while Mr. Caldwell talked. It might take an hour before their faces or gestures gave us what we were trying to express, but the instant it occurred the scene was imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened.’ (Stott 60) 34 This description of the coerced documentary-style photograph is precisely the approach to photography that induced anxiety in a national culture vigilantly guarding itself against “propaganda” of all sorts. 35 Like his description of writing fiction, here Caldwell imagines an expression—the proper face of the dignified poor, the exploited tenant, or the rural degenerate, dragging the nation backward—and he “[makes] it real” through speech, real enough that Bourke-White can capture it “before they knew what happened.” Bourke-White’s description of “imprisoning” “[their] people” on a sheet of film evokes the image of the actual imprisonment that many rural subjects faced after being determined “feeble-minded” by the state or local mental health professionals, who were institutionalized and photographed for the legitimation of the eugenics movement. Caldwell’s hovel novels, while formally set apart from his work with Bourke-White, also took part in the documentary impulse of the 1930s. They became part of a visual schema that concerned itself with spectacle, evaluation, and authority, one similar to You Have Seen Their Faces and the state’s photography projects. Thus, the remainder of this chapter will simultaneously place the novel back into the state’s management of rurality in the 1930s (when the visual is thought to have trumped narrative in the realm of propaganda), and 34 Stott quotes Bourke-White from Portrait of Myself, p. 137, 126. 35 The controversy surrounding Arthur Rothstein’s Steer Skull, Badlands, South Dakota (1936) is illustrative of the national attitude toward propaganda and photography. Rothstein physically altered the scene of the photograph, intending to capture the parched earth (his assignment was the drought). To the FSA’s critics, the movement of the steer skull was evidence of socialistic propaganda: the state distorting reality in order to convince the public to support its programming. 89 complicate a history of New Deal photography, which is overwhelmingly considered to have been clearly progressive and reformist. 2.5 The Eugenics Movement Walks Down the Tobacco Road Is there any way out of the sociological morass in which society is being more and more engulfed? Wise eugenic laws rigidly enforced would postpone the evil day. – Ira Caldwell Ira Caldwell, Erskine Caldwell’s father, was a minister and social scientist, and in 1930, his eugenic family study was published as a five-part series in the American Eugenics Society’s journal, Eugenics: a journal of race betterment. Ira Caldwell’s experiment in eugenic studies involved bringing a tenant family (the “Bunglers”) plagued by poverty, hookworm, and illiteracy from the outskirts of Burke County, Georgia into the town of Wrens where they might be rehabilitated and integrated into normative small town life. Embarking upon the project as a welfare worker rather than eugenicist, Caldwell believed that he could “prove the power of environment over breeding and… demonstrate that even the most destitute and desperate people could be lifted to socially acceptable levels by changing the total environment, that is, providing a complete network of support (school, work, church, and community) rather than sporadic and ineffective charitable donations” (Keely 34). When Caldwell’s experiment “failed”—meaning that the Bungler father quit the job that Caldwell secured for him, the children showed little interest in school, and the family moved back into the isolated outskirts of the county—Caldwell shifted his investments from social welfare to the biological “solutions” of the eugenics movement. His hypothesis—that movement from isolated rurality into a small town could solve the problems of “poor white trash”—failed. Thus, Caldwell came to believe that rurality and degeneracy were suited to one another, leaving negative eugenic methods as a more appropriate 90 solution to these social ills than migration and integration. 36 Like his father, Erskine Caldwell was drawn toward the eugenics movement, and particularly the work of the field worker; however, he did not utilize the popularity of eugenics to springboard a career in the research sciences like many of his peers. Rather, Caldwell harnessed the eugenic impulse toward his fiction writing. 37 Eugenic discourses permeated rural cultural production in the 1930s, and they are present in Tobacco Road, a novel that garnered much attention for Erskine Caldwell and remains his most acclaimed. 38 The novel introduces readers to the Lesters, an impoverished sharecropper family who has lived for generations in rural Georgia. It begins with a scene of abject hunger, and we learn that the family has been on the edge of starvation for years. As readers find their way inside the Lester home, we learn that most of the Lester children have moved away from the dilapidated shack and few acres of land alongside the tobacco road. Jeeter, the family patriarch, remains on the barren land he has been unable to cultivate for years, because an “inherited” magnetism to agriculture proves too powerful for him to bear separation: “There was an inherited love of the land in Jeeter that all his disastrous experiences with farming had failed to take away. 36 Ira Caldwell, p. 203. 37 Caldwell acknowledged his father’s influence on his work, particularly in the areas of “sociology” and “the bottom lines of existence,” which accurately characterizes the areas covered by his hovel novels. In a 1982 interview, Richard Kelly and Marcia Pankake asked if his father, a minister, was shocked by the criticisms of religion in his novels. Caldwell responded, “He was more of a sociologist than he was anything else, and he was very familiar with the bottom lines of existence, so that I could have learned from him, and I did learn from him, very much” (224). Critic Karen Keely claims that Caldwell based Tobacco Road on his father’s study of “the Bunglers.” While I do not agree with the entirety of Keely’s reading, the ways that Caldwell speaks of his craft are in line with her theory about his adaptation of his father’s eugenic study. In an interview with Jac Tharpe in 1971, Caldwell claims, “What interests me as a writer is having an idea that based on some solid, factual incident, but has no suggestions how it’s going to end, what it’s going to do in the middle, or anything of the sort” (143). He goes on to talk about the ways that he mined material from his life in small Southern towns, suggesting that the “factual incidents” about which he wrote were being drawn from those experiences. See Jac Tharpe, Interview with Erskine Caldwell, The Southern Quarterly, XX (Fall 1981): 64-74. 38 Writing social realism during the documentary era, Erskine Caldwell was one of the most prolific and popular writers of his time, and one of the most profitable Southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s. With twenty-six novels, a hundred and fifty short stories, and many works of nonfiction, his books have sold over eighty million copies worldwide and have been translated into fifty languages. See “Portrait of an American Primitive: A Conversation with Erskine Caldwell.” Interview with D.G. Kehl. South Atlantic Quarterly (1984) 83: 396-404. 91 He had lived his whole life there on a small remnant of the Lester plantation, and while he realized it was not his legally, he felt that he would die if he had to move away from it” (66). This idea, that failure and poverty are “inherited,” was the eugenics movement’s animating force in the 1930s. Because poverty was considered inheritable, Jeeter’s wife Ada, their physically “deformed” daughter Ellie-May, and “feeble-minded” son Dude also remain on the “small remnant of the Lester plantation,” unable to secure the financial or marital means to vacate. 39 Itinerant preacher Bessie, another woman with a physical deformity who marries the Lester son, joins the clan in their small home toward the novel’s conclusion. Critic Karen Keely considers that the novel, finding its second printing during the “paperback revolution,” 40 may seem “a bold step on [Caldwell’s] part to create a new reading audience that is aligned with the Lesters rather than the townspeople who disdain them” (33). However, Caldwell went on to write a host of other exploitative poor white novels throughout his career, capitalizing on his readership’s interest in rural “slumming” as a reading practice, suggesting that he was, in fact, “creating a distorted and condemning narrative of the families whose lives he narrates” (Keely 33). 41 As I argue here, the visual narration of the hovel novel, and Tobacco Road in particular, participates in the logics of the eugenic field study, which Caldwell ironically “inherited” from his father. Eugenic logics contaminated adjacent genres that also concerned rurality: both the hovel novel and state-sponsored rural photography. Tobacco Road’s first scene establishes a visual order that subordinates the poor white Lesters to such an extent that the reader becomes 39 I am using the term “feeble-minded” to describe the Lester son Dude because that was the terminology that most frequently circulated in eugenic literature and family studies of the era. Caldwell describes Dude’s mental capacity: “Dude did not have very much sense, and neither did one or two of the other children…” (31). 40 See Kenneth Davis and Joann Giusto-Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America. New York: Mariner Books, 1984. 41 For more on “slumming” as a reading and writing practice related to the categorization and management of urban life in the early twentieth century, see Scott Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. 92 audience to their lasciviousness through a (strange) alliance with a group of African American tenant farmers: “Negroes passing the house were in the habit of looking at the Lesters, but very few of them ever had anything to say. Among themselves they talked about the Lesters, and laughed about them…” (28). On the afternoon that opens the novel, the men pause to take in the scene of a starving Jeeter Lester trying desperately to steal a bag of turnips from his son-in-law Lov Bensey, while his daughter Ellie May distracts her brother-in-law with aggressive sexual advances. As the group of black men passes the Lester shack, so does the reader, gaining a first view of the story’s poor white family from the same vantage point on the tobacco road. 42 While positioning a white reading public alongside black tenants moving along the tobacco road may seem like a radical departure from the segregationist logics of 1930s Georgia, Caldwell’s establishment of this visual order, wherein both black tenants and his reading public gawk at the Lester spectacle in titillation and horror, signals the crisis of degenerate white rurality far more readily than it does an embrace of the color line’s dissolve. As visual studies scholar, Nicholas Mirzoeff claims, “The very emergence of all the modalities of visuality at once suggests an emergency, as both the condition of a critique of visuality and the possibility of the right to look. The symptom of that emergency is precisely the ability to detect the crisis of visuality, such that the visibility of visuality is paradoxically the index of that crisis” (loc 507). In other words, a crisis of visuality, and thus the established order of things, becomes apparent when one can see the order itself being seen, or “the visibility of visuality,” to echo Mirzoeff’s words. The novel’s 42 According to Karen Keely, this visual field would have caused a great amount of anxiety to Caldwell’s contemporary readers: “Although modern readers probably feel positioned with the black observers during this scene—on the periphery, amused, disgusted, titillated, and above all fascinated by the goings-on of these grotesque characters—these three [black] men would not have been a desirable space for reader identification in the 1930s. Indeed, to Caldwell’s contemporary, predominantly white audience, the sight of black characters laughing at the Lesters would have been a sign of just how debased the family had become to create such a scene of social inversion” (29). While I agree with Keely on the proximity of the reader and the black men on the tobacco road, a hierarchy is swiftly re-established as the white reading public would have been permitted to keep watching the Lesters throughout the narrative, entering their homes and even gazing intimately into their bedrooms and gaping body parts. The black onlookers remain on the road. 93 opening scene, in which both the reader and the black passersby gaze upon the Lesters, hungry, perverse, and shameless in their front yard, is precisely the moment when visuality emerges as a crisis of beholding. The reader simultaneously sees a map of the novel’s visual order (one that suggests a eugenic solution for the scene at hand), and participates in it, a practice that persists until the Lesters’ deaths at the novel’s close. This visual act and alignment represents a fissure in the order of authority—represented here by the black male’s right to look at poor whiteness— and likewise indexes the crisis of visuality that Caldwell made spectacular as a crisis of white rurality. 43 Like “The three negroes [who] were straining their necks to see everything,” “[the reader watches] Ellie May and Lov with growing enthusiasm until Jeeter suddenly [descends] upon the sack…” (Caldwell 33). At this moment of temptation, Jeeter’s desire for food prompts him to verbally collapse the color line, which the novel itself has already done by aligning the white reading public with the black men likewise watching from the tobacco road. As Jeeter describes the physical manifestation of his hunger, he bemoans, “I got a powerful gnawing in my belly for turnips. I reckon I like winter turnips just about as bad as a nigger likes watermelons. I can’t see no difference between the two ways” (24). Perhaps not surprisingly, given that the novel’s visual schema places the Lesters below the black voyeurs of their perverse scene, hunger becomes the 43 Providing examples that range from slaves in Jamaica being legally forbidden to imagine the death of a white person to the policing of the black gaze in the American South (which was imagined to be always already violent or sexual), Mirzoeff proposes slavery as the removal of the right to look (loc 538). However, the black right to look was not re-established when slavery was abolished in the U.S., but rather continued to be managed by a visual order that denied the legitimacy of the black gaze. We see this order at work in the novel as Dude, watching himself being watched by the black men on the road, worries that the right to look, which the men were claiming, could lead to further contact: “‘Them niggers look like they is going to come in the yard…’ Dude said. ‘If they come in here, I’ll bust them with a rock’” (34). His mother Ada, failing to understand that her debasement has sunk her below the black onlookers, reassures Dude: “‘They ain’t thinking of coming in here,’ Ada said. ‘Niggers has got more sense than trying to interfere with white-folks’ business’” (34). 94 switchpoint between abject poverty and racial stigma, marking the Lesters not simply as white, but as poor white trash. 44 2.6 The Queerness of Heredity and Hunger If hunger (poverty) skews the functioning of the color line in Caldwell’s novel, hunger also coalesces poverty and sexual perversion, as Caldwell consistently writes hunger as the condition that prompts a proliferation of queer sex and desire, an act that unequivocally connects poverty and queerness. This libidinal dissonance, since the starved body cannot properly compartmentalize its desires, poses interesting questions for thinking through queerness and shame. 45 The novel’s leveling of hunger and sexual perversion suggests proximity between rurality, as it existed in an overwhelmingly impoverished state in the 1930s, and queerness. If we have categorized queerness as an excess rather than scarcity of desire, or a movement rather than stasis (even if that movement is backward and shameful), Caldwell’s novel gives us pause. Not excess but deprivation—of food, of speech, and even at times of sex—becomes what is depicted as queer in the novel. For instance, Ellie-May expresses her hunger for nourishment as a hunger for sexual contact, as she crosses the yard to seduce Lov, instead of attempting to steal his bag of turnips like the rest of the Lesters: “‘Ellie May’s going to get herself full of sand if she don’t stop doing that,’ Dude said. ‘Your old hound used never to keep it up that long at a time. He didn’t squeal all the time neither, like she’s doing’” (19). Jeeter, watching the scene of seduction, cannot respond to his son’s concern about Ellie-May’s sexual advance. While Dude compares 44 Kathryn Bond Stockton describes a switchpoint as a “point at which we intellectually sense how one sign… lends its force to another” (32-33). Her primary example concerns the ways that blackness lends its force to “queer.” In this chapter I consider Caldwell’s signifying field, on which certain signs signal to other, related signs, and through which white poverty signifies queer, perverse sexual practices signify poverty, etc. 45 In recent years, queer studies has embraced shame as a foundation of queer lifeworlds, but has yet to imagine a full spectrum of shamefulness that is open to queer interpretations, including the shamefulness of rural poverty. Part of the aim of this project is to challenge those “backward” shame-orientated queer studies of the past decade to open beyond the familiar objects of queer subcultural practice and performance. 95 Ellie-May’s sexual expression to that of a dog, inviting Jeeter’s comment, Jeeter responds with a desire for turnips, and poses this comment toward Lov rather than his interlocutor, Dude: “‘By God and by Jesus, Lov,’ Jeeter said, ‘I’m wanting turnips. I could come near about chewing up a whole croker sack full between now and bedtime to-night’” (19). Hunger mediates between libidinal desires for Ellie-May, and it skews Jeeter’s ability to differentiate between sex and food. What emerges is an incestuous and degrading scene in which a father stands to watch his daughter initiate sex with his son-in-law, a sexualized voyeur and yet thinking of nothing but hunger: not for sexual satiation, but for physical nourishment. Jeeter participates in the triangulated sex act, not because he is sexually interested, but because he is starving. 46 Like his father and other eugenics field workers, Caldwell documents the physical and mental traits that lead to such licentiousness in Lesters, taking particular interest in those that were passed from parent to child in a perverse manner. As Jeeter tries to reason with Lov about Pearl’s refusal to consummate their marriage, the narrator notes Pearl’s conception through Ada’s brief affair with a migrant farm laborer: “The man who was [Pearl’s] father had passed through the country one day, and had never been since. He had told Ada that he came from Carolina and was on his way to Texas, and that was all she knew about him” (31). Following this queer conception, fleeting and out of wedlock, the narrator contends that Pearl is the “queerest” of the Lester children, which she exhibits through a refusal to speak, and to consummate her marriage to Lov Bensey (11). This behavior, we learn, was inherited from her mother: “Ada was herself like that. She had begun to talk voluntarily only during the past ten years. Before then, 46 While her book focuses on the import of incest narratives in and to U.S. neoliberalism, Gillian Harkins’ reading of incest as constitutive of the American family resonates with the scene, particularly in regards to her claim that “images of incest can be read as forging connections between legacies of America’s older family-nation couplets and emergent forms of ambiguously national family life” (xix). As far as the health of the poor rural white family was anxiously imagined as a synecdoche for the American “family-nation,” the suggestion of incest in Caldwell’s novel is significant. See Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. 96 Jeeter had the same trouble with her that Lov was now having with Pearl” (2-3). Thus, while Pearl had the most “sense” of the Lester children, inherited from her migrant father, her “queer” (as the narrator describes) refusal to speak was passed down from her mother. Whereas Pearl’s inherited “sense” would prevent her from perpetuating her “inheritance” (i.e. her ability to reproduce), Ada’s queer silence eventually gives way to an excessive sexuality, the degenerate “trait” that most concerned eugenicists: “Ada had once acted as Pearl was now doing, but Jeeter had not been treated as he was treated, because Ada had borne him seventeen children, while Pearl had not even begun to have the first one” (5-6). Curiously, just as hunger prompts Ellie-May’s sexual interest in Lov, Ada’s “queer” silence was cured by hunger, which she replaces with sex: “What Jeeter had not been able to break down in Ada for forty years, hunger had. Hunger loosened her tongue, and she had been complaining ever since” (3). In this comedic formulation, an inherited trait associated with rural poverty—intellectual disability, which appears in the novel as an unwillingness (rather than inability) to speak—is “cured” by the material reality of rural poverty itself: “hunger loosened her tongue.” Hunger causes the queerness of willful embodiment—a refusal to speak—to surrender itself to sexual desire. Caldwell represents the queerness of sex in the country as both a brief tryst with a migrant worker passing through Georgia on his way from North Carolina to Texas (fleeting, migratory), and a proliferative, heterosexual marriage between impoverished tenants who withstand the physical manifestations of poverty as the family’s size grows exponentially (enduring, static). Ada and Pearl’s silence around both sex and speech, might be best described by Sara Ahmed’s concept of “willful embodiment:” while their circumstances are conscribed by rural poverty, they inhabit those circumstances in ways that disrupt a narrative of appropriate 97 responses. Ahmed describes the will in two manners, first, as “a defence against contingency,” since “an independence of character—to be less dependent on both circumstance and happenstance—requires the application of will” (234). 47 Hunger, as one might imagine, takes the place of ultimate circumstance: contingency for which there is no defense. Willfulness, however, does not always operate according to the agency of the subject. Ahmed’s second description of willfulness asks that we also think of the concept “in these terms: a striking feature, a strong impression, a failure to recede or to become background” (“Passing”). 48 Here, willfulness is not a choice nor defense, but that which supersedes the subject. It is a failure to recede into the background that is often rendered as such by the state, and/or standards of comportment (i.e. markers of poverty, physical or mental disability, sex characteristics, gender presentation, and racialized embodiment). Thus, Ada retains what I read as her willful queerness when she begins to speak and to reproduce, thus giving in to Jeeter, the patriarchal order, and the proper comportment of the tenant’s wife. Her offspring—the unwanted children of a poor family barely able to feed them—further pervert her, rather than bolstering her normalcy in the eyes of a population that feels it must defend itself against her fecundity. And yet any refusal of these contingencies is also willfully queer. Unlike Ada, Pearl has married above her station, and her husband provides the sustenance that prevents Pearl’s tongue from loosening in the ways that Ada’s eventually does. The narrator, justifying Pearl’s behavior with a description of her relative intelligence, explains, “The truth was, Pearl had far more sense than any of the Lesters; and that, like her hair and eyes, had been inherited from her father” (31). In this scene, the blood of an outsider is what saves Pearl from the degeneracy of her brothers 47 Sara Ahmed, “Willful Parts: Problem Characters or the Problem of Character,” New Literary History 42.2 (2011): 231-253. 48 Sara Ahmed, “Some Striking Feature: Whiteness and Institutional Passing,” Feminist Killjoys. 14 June 2015. http://feministkilljoys.com/2015/06/14/some-striking-feature-whiteness-and-institutional-passing/ 98 and sisters. Scholars such as Nayan Shah and Colin Johnson have documented the queerness that accumulated around the figure of the migrant laborer, detached from the sexually normalizing influences of a wife and children. 49 And yet, the traits that Pearl inherits from the migrant (i.e. her eyes, hair, and “sense”) are preferable to the traits she might have otherwise inherited from the man who raised her and fathered the other Lester children. This preference, for the queer migrant over the stagnant Lester blood, is in keeping with eugenic thinking of the era, which claimed that most rural degeneracy was due to “consanguinity,” or incest. Through his readings of eugenic family studies, Matt Wray writes, “[Richard] Dugdale theorized that one of the root causes of degeneracy was ‘consanguinity’ (marriage or sexual reproduction by close relations), a situation, he argued, that was brought on not by the relative geographic isolation of rural folk, but by the ‘impudicity of the Juke women [which was] twenty-nine times greater than that of the average of women’” (66). 50 This attribution of degeneracy to consanguinity, yet refusal to think about consanguinity through a framework of isolation and proximity, is indicative of the differences in eugenic racial thinking around whiteness and racial science concerned with differences between racial groups. It was not the case, according to eugenicists, that isolation could lead to “consanguinity” in any family, regardless of race. Rather, one particular family member (typically female, and in Tobacco Road, Ada) was afflicted with degenerate characteristics, appearing as a perverse sexual appetite and a refusal to speak, and imposed those characteristics, hereditarily, on the other members of her family. By this logic, degeneracy has the potential to happen anywhere, not just in stagnant rural gene pools, and it could be contained 49 See Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacies; and Colin Johnson, Just Queer Folks, particularly his chapter on the sexual practices of tramps and hobos. 50 Dugdale’s “The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity” (1877) was one of the earliest and most influential of the family studies. Dugdale was a prison reformer who noticed that six of an upstate New York penitentiary’s inmates were close relatives, and thus began his investigation into the “inherited” nature of their criminality and poverty. 99 through eugenic isolation and sterilization programs. The problem, then, was not with the race itself, but with particular elements of the race, who, importantly, could not be taken as synecdoche for the race itself, and yet were threatening in their ability to reproduce. From Bessie covering her face in shame—her physical deformity posed as both an invitation to look and a rendering of vulnerability—to Ellie-May prostrate after intercourse with Lov, when “Dude went to the pine stump and sat down to watch the red wood-ants crawl over [her] stomach and breasts…” readers are constantly in a position to scrutinize the Lester family. At various moments throughout the novel, Jeeter explains that he could take Ellie-May into town for a minor surgery to correct her harelip, but his laziness prevents him. Instead, she lay vulnerable to onlookers and readers, when “For nearly an hour she slept deeply in the warm February sun, and when she awoke, her right arm was lying across her mouth where Dude had placed it when he left the yard to get some of the turnips before his father had eaten them all” (39). This act of mercy, following a scene of voyeuristic (and incestuous) pleasure, is the only small reprieve that Ellie-May is afforded, and that reprieve only comes after the reader has visualized the whole perverse scene: “[Ellie-May’s] mouth was partly open, and her upper lip looked as if it had been torn wider apart than it naturally was. The perspiration had dried on her forehead and cheeks, and smudges of dirt were streaked over her pale white skin” (39). Being watched from the tobacco road, scrutinizing one another, being subject to the violent gaze of the surrounding townspeople and the felt gaze of the reader, the Lester family—like those families who became the subjects of eugenic family studies—is under constant scrutiny. The visual schema of Tobacco Road, like Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, creates distance between the reader and those on display: starving tenant families, who proliferated across the agricultural South and Southwest during the Depression era. Because 100 racial science and eugenic thought operated differently along axes of black and white, and those racial discourses permeated popular and literary cultures, both the hovel novel and rural photography presented “degenerate” rural whiteness as distinctly other to the (white) readers and audiences who encountered it. Concurrent with the hovel novel, and ultimately (though perhaps unintentionally) participating in ancillary modes of distance-perpetuation between normative sub/urban whiteness and rural white degeneracy, FSA photography categorized, contained, and put these same types of rural subjects on display. Technological development marks the pace of the progressive nation, and rurality always already drags the nation backward. While the hovel novel and FSA photography were working on the same register given their shared subject matter, the shift in form changed the relationship of the reader or viewer to the act of return that an engagement with rurality requires. From the page of the novel to the film negative, cultural producers participated in the othering of rural America; but, traveling in opposite directions, rurality continues its national regression as its formal representations progressed further into the twentieth century, particularly through the lenses of the FSA’s staff photographers. 2.7 The Eugenic Gaze: Visualizing Rurality Before the FSA The two men were whispering to each other when [Bessie] had finished talking. The older one looked at her face, and when he saw the two large round holes in her nose, he stepped forward and tried to see down into her nostrils. Bessie covered her nose with her hand. — Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road Creating something that does not exist and making it real is not only the domain of the writer, but also the police, the overseer, the authorities—particularly in regards to visuality. 51 In 51 I am not making the argument that the novelist is, by definition, the authority, but rather making a connection between Caldwell’s eugenic novel and other methods of representation with the aim to categorize. 101 his formulation of the ways that visuality operates as a tool of authority, 52 Nicholas Mirzoeff describes visuality as a manner of “making … the processes of ‘history’ perceptible to authority,” through such practices as “naming, categorizing, and defining, a process defined by Foucault as ‘the nomination of the visible’” (loc 445). Through Fanon, Mirzoeff adds “aestheticizing” to the Foucauldian nomination, forming what he calls “a complex of visuality” (loc 456). Aestheticization adds beauty to the order of visuality. This switchpoint from ordered to beautiful is an apt place to think through Caldwell’s approach to writing fiction, as well as the FSA photography unit, which hired established photographers to capture beautiful images for the purpose of “naming, categorizing, and defining” rural poverty. Through the switchpoint, we might see power operating across a signifying field in such a way that the order itself—here the dual categorization of whiteness into supreme and degenerate with the intention of eradicating the latter—becomes not only rationalized, but also aestheticized. Caldwell’s taking up the eugenic family study as a basis for the novel is not a simple act of adaptation, but rather exhibits the slippery distinction between that which is ordered and that which is beautiful. As such, visuality becomes important not just for the realm of visual objects, such as photographs, but also novels like Caldwell’s that aestheticize the eugenic order, visible as it was on the landscape of the rural South. Beyond the connections Caldwell personally makes between the fictional and photographic—and that I make between the imaginative and the authoritative—with Tobacco Road, Caldwell took one of the most precise examples of the nominal and categorical—the eugenic family study—and aestheticized it, making eugenic solutions to rural poverty seem not only ordered, but tragically beautiful. 52 This idea has become apparent in recent months, as the police have murdered black men, women, and children, whose deaths have been seen and sometimes recorded; and yet still, the police directive, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here” holds more power than the video of the scene itself. Mizroeff claims that “The right to look confronts the police,” and the opposite of the “right to look” is not censorship, but rather visuality itself, the power of authority to control “the visualization of history” (425). 102 Before I turn to the traces of rural shame that are manifest in Farm Security Administration photography, I will take a brief detour into the visual archive of the eugenics movement’s most infamous case: Buck v. Bell (1927). I will demonstrate the ways that the eugenic approach to making visible the rural degenerate subject would appear again, in the FSA’s most iconic image: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936). In an essay that stares back into the normative and normalizing gaze that set on poor rural women in the early twentieth century, disability studies scholar Eli Clare imagines Carrie Buck, a Virginia woman who was institutionalized for “feeble-mindedness,” and in 1927 found herself central to the Supreme Court case that confirmed Virginia’s right to involuntarily sterilize its “feeble-minded” citizens. Clare “yearns toward” Buck, “waiting for the histories to mourn, rage, reach toward [her], [her] body as solid as [her] mother’s hand on [her] shoulder” (335). Clare’s essay begins with this photograph of Buck and her mother posed together at the Lynchburg Colony in 1924 (fig. 2-4), three years before Virginia confirmed the legality of Buck’s sterilization (which the state carried out immediately following the Court’s decision): “Both of you look steely-eyed into the camera. You know the photo, you and Emma sitting outside at the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. I imagine Carrie’s voice—poor, rough, southern. Imagine her head cocked. Imagine how she might tell this story” (335). 53 Carrie Buck’s questioning, cocked head and her incredulous, downturned mouth are tempered by her mother’s hand on her shoulder, providing comfort in an otherwise unbearable moment, when the institution decides to capture what might otherwise be a mercifully fleeting moment of unjust 53 Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., representing the (seven justice) majority, wrote, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....” 103 imprisonment. 54 This photograph captures a moment when Buck becomes doubly imprisoned: in the Colony and on the sheet of film. If the photograph cannot provide proof of her actual degeneracy, the camera does capture proof of Buck’s docility, and that the institution is protecting the rest of the population from the reproductive rights of the “feebleminded.” Clare reminds us: So many lives [hung] upon that single slippery word—feebleminded. Sex workers, immigrants, people of color, poor white people, people with psychiatric disabilities, people with epilepsy, so-called sexual deviants, blind people, deaf people, physically disabled people, unmarried women who had sex, effeminate men, prisoners, intellectually disabled people were all deemed feebleminded at one time or another. The list kept shifting over the decades, but the meaning of that word stayed the same—inferior, immoral, disposable. (342) The eugenics movement’s establishment of a visual landscape of “feeble-mindedness,” a practice of documentation that was crucial to the movement’s gaining legitimacy, marks the beginning of rural backwardness as it was documented by the camera, an archive of rural degeneracy. 55 54 I refer to Buck’s institutionalization as “unjust” not because historians have since proven that she was mentally competent, although they have (see Paul Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2008.). Rather, I agree with Clare’s line of questioning the revisionist histories of Buck v. Bell such as Lombardo’s: “why is it so important to proclaim Emma, Carrie, and Vivian not imbeciles? Why are Lombardo and other historians so surprised that the diagnoses of imbecile and feebleminded are political fabrications?” (341-42). The category of feeble-minded was created as a way to protect society from undesirable populations of all sorts, not to protect those deemed feeble-minded from themselves. 55 Rural representation before the documentary era included illustrations and sketches in local color accounts of mountain life (particularly Appalachian), with heroic “backwoods frontiersmen” like Daniel Boone or David “Davy” Crockett chief amongst them. The iconic hillbilly, an offshoot of the backwoods frontiersman—with laziness and ignorance rather than heroism his defining characteristics—emerged in the late nineteenth century. These illustrations gave way in popularity to comic strips such as Al Capp’s L’il Abner, which pervaded popular culture at the same time that the FSA’s photographs were in their highest point of circulation, often in the same publications. Anthony Harkins’ Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2004) provides a history of all these illustrations and representations that led up to the photographic. 104 Decades before the FSA was established to make a record of rural life in America, eugenics field workers entered the homes of their subjects to document their behaviors, and employees of state-run institutions—such as the Lynchburg Colony where Carrie Buck was kept for a period of time and where Emma Buck eventually died—kept a close eye on their wards, many of them from rural districts. 56 In his reading of the Colony’s photograph, Clare reads Buck’s “steely-eyed” look into the camera as “solid”: dignified and challenging. This description of Buck as a stoic, dignified rural woman facing the gaze of the state is similar to the established reading of Dorothea Lange’s iconic FSA photograph, Migrant Mother (1936) (fig. 2-5). 57 In an interview with Popular Photography in 1960, Lange describes her subject, Florence Owens Thompson, as a willing one: “There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it” (Lange 42). 58 Lange’s account of the photograph is in keeping with the FSA’s objectives, which were opposite those of the Lynchburg Colony staff photographer who took 56 For a description of the daily life and surveillance of those like Buck institutionalized for feeble- mindedness, see Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. On the importance of visual documentation to the practice of eugenics, Nancy Ordover claims, “racism is a visually centered ideology—stereotyping physical and mental characteristics of outsiders and insisting on recognizable, undeniable, immutable differences between ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ peoples. American eugenicists, armed with charts, photographs, and even human skulls, were there to provide the visual and mathematical support that rendered racism scientifically valid and politically viable” (9). Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism, U of Minnesota P, 2003. 57 According to Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Roy Stryker, the head of the RA/FSA photography section, dubbed Lange’s photo the symbol for the whole project: ‘She has all the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage. You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal’” (55). While Hariman and Lucaites complicate this narrative in their study of the ways the image changed as it became iconic, this combination of suffering and perseverance, always inflected with dignity, is the standard and most widely asserted reading of “Migrant Mother.” 58 Clare speaks through Carrie Buck, voicing a sentiment similar to the one that Lange describes of Florence Owens, the migrant mother. Imagining Buck’s reaction to the photographs of her that were gathered for the Supreme Court case, Clare writes, “I’ve seen those pictures. Hell, I sent that bastard Bell my wedding photo when he asked (‘Carrie Buck’s Photograph of her Wedding’). Mr. Bell, he was the big boss man at the Colony. I’d flat out refuse now, but back then Mama still lived up there, and me and Billy dreamed of bringing her to live with us. I thought playing nice with Mr. Bell might help my case” (337). 105 Buck’s photograph. 59 The purpose of the Lynchburg photograph was not to account for Buck’s dignity, but rather her degeneracy. Departing from the established reading of Lange’s iconic photograph, Colin Johnson accounts for the shame that is inherent to the image, in addition to its dignity: “it is merely redistributed away from Thompson onto her children, both of whom turn conspicuously from the camera’s lens” (161). 60 Following Johnson, I read the images of rurality that were first disseminated from rural America through the eugenics archives of field workers and state institutions as an archive of shame. Buck’s photograph was taken at the Lynchburg Colony twelve years before Lange went on an assignment in search of the “Destitute Pea Pickers in California,” but the migrant mother’s downturned mouth and steely-eyed stare mirror Carrie’s institutionalized gaze. Both were taken on assignment to provide an account—both to the state and the general public—of the problems of white rural poverty. Just as Thompson’s willingness to allow Lange’s shot creates a scene of shame, deflected from mother who can endure to children who must turn away, Carrie’s shame is contained by her mother’s arm on her shoulder, 59 Surely, Lange’s photography was effective in bringing awareness to the plight of displaced farm families during the Depression. However, Hariman and Lucaites complicate the image’s impact as they describe both its iconic status and its reality: “Her photos first appeared in the San Francisco News on March 10, 1936, as part of a story demanding relief for the starving pea pickers. The feature was a success: relief was organized, and there is no record of death by starvation. This story of the photo’s origin and impact is, of course, a bit too good. […] There is no mention of Lange’s government subsidy nor of the fact that the photo was retouched to remove the woman’s thumb in the lower right corner. Most tellingly, it slides over the fact that the iconic photo was not actually shown in the San Francisco News until the day following the original story. Iconic photos acquire mythic narratives: Lange becomes a poetic vehicle for the operation of historical forces; by mobilizing public opinion, the photographer provides the impetus to collective action” (53). 60 An entire record of shame emerged from the photograph in 1978, when Thompson, then elderly and in poor health, was identified and claimed to have felt exploited by Lange. Hariman and Lucaites recount the AP story: “As she states in the story: ‘I didn’t get anything out of it. I wish she hadn’t of taken my picture.… She didn’t take ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.’ Admitting some pride in being the subject of a famous photograph, she concluded, ‘But what good’s it doing me?’” (62). Here, the shame of the photograph, in its afterlife as an icon, is cast dually on the state for failing in the objective the photograph set out to accomplish, and on Thompson, whose individualism is cast over the collective struggle that the photograph was intended to represent. 106 providing both a comfort and a warning: you cannot rise from this bench, they have established their right to see us. 61 The concluding sections of this chapter will argue that despite the agency’s intentions, the eugenic management of rurality in the decades leading up to the New Deal foreclosed the possibility the FSA’s documentation of rural America being divorced from rural shame, and backwardness itself. Although documentary photography in America developed out of urban Progressivism, i.e. the work of Lewis Hines and Jacob Riis, it shifted when the camera was pointed at the country, becoming a backward art through the positionality of its backward subject matter. Cultural historian Sara Blair claims that in asking his photographers to capture the breakdown of rural life, Roy Stryker was asking his FSA photographers to capture an America that had already receded: “…by the mid-1930s, this mental map of the United States as a confederation of small merchants and agrarian landholders under threat—‘the farms and the little towns and the highways between’—was already anachronistic” (Blair 11). The recession of rurality at the moment of its large-scale photographic capture distorts the documentary impulse itself, which FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein describes as one of the unwavering present tense: “The lens of the camera is, in effect, the eye of the person looking at the print” (Stott 29). William Stott elaborates on Rothstein’s formulation: “The two being interchangeable, the person looking at the print is, in effect, present when the shutter snapped” (29). Although there must technically be a temporal gap in this formulation—the viewer is pulled backward into another present, a moment when the shutter snapped—documentary photography works in such a way as to make an impression of a suspended presence, a present moment to 61 In his imagination of Carrie Buck’s story, Clare recognizes the role that cameras came to play in Carrie Buck’s daily life: “They come around with their cameras and microphones every once in a while, like I was some famous person or what happened is some fancy story. Sometimes I hear their cars pull up, and I just close the curtains. […] There never was a camera I liked but the one on me and Billy’s wedding day” (343). 107 which one can return (and in fact must return). This suspended present is different than a constructed past for an uncertain present. Stott claims, “the Depression stimulated, even compelled, a documentary approach” (72). Related to Sonnet Retman’s claim that documentarians searched for a “useable past” for an “uncertain present,” here Stott claims that backwardness—or the stalling of national progress—calls forth modernity, or modern mechanical reproduction. And yet the turn backward, toward the country, was not only about content, but also about form: photography as the technology that allows a public to experience a presence to which they would otherwise have no access. While Caldwell’s hovel novels also attempted to provide the public a visual narration of white rural poverty, the photograph was so highly regarded as a modern instrument of accurate documentation that the state invested in its efficacy for legitimating reform efforts in the throes of the Great Depression. But does photography retain its present tense and its modernity as its subjects drag it backward? If Blair is right, that rural America was “already anachronistic” when it was captured under the FSA’s banner of progress, then rurality shifted the documentary form itself, making it that which provides a past rather than that which provides a present. Like the hovel novel, documentary photography became a backward form, a purveyor of the past rather than technology of a progressive, suspended present, as it turned backward toward rurality in the Depression era. 2.8 The State and the Documentary Era: The FSA Records Rural America Through the FSA, the temporality of photography, the use of a progressive, modern, developing technology to capture a still image, met the temporality of rurality in a way that doubly froze country life in time. While the photograph can stop time, capturing a moment and 108 thus preventing the backward regression of rurality that novels like Tobacco Road document, photography could not compel rural life toward futurity. In fact, while the nation looked to rurality as a figure of identification during the documentary era, its past-ness was precisely its appeal, appearing ancestral rather than present as a presence in the daily lives of most Americans. Historian Maren Stange notes Roy Stryker’s understanding of rural anachronism: Though Stryker was no theorist, his conception of the FSA photography project was clearly influenced by a progressive vision that welcomed modernization and technocratic efficiency as a way to ‘uplift’ standards of rural and urban American life. Despite its stated concern to preserve the ‘decency’ and ‘dignity’ of rural people, the FSA photography project actually recorded the irreversible exodus of farmers from the land, and their consequent status as a newly dislocated proletariat (2). 62 The camera, as a tool of modernization and technocratic efficiency, is directly opposed to the national imagination of rural backwardness. In fact, the camera’s futuristic qualities emerged through an opposition to its earliest subjects. 63 Because the FSA photographers captured rurality, that act of documenting recession exists in proximity to the eugenic documentation of rural degeneracy that had been going on for decades prior to the state’s establishment of the FSA. By the 1930s, more than a dozen government agencies utilized staff photographers to document their projects and progresses. These agencies understood that the amount of 62 For general reading on the FSA, P. Dixon’s Photographers of the Farm Security Administration: An Annotated Bibliography, 1930-1980 (1983) is invaluable. More recent critical and historical approaches include: C.A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (2003); Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and reports from the Field, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008. 63 The history of the camera and its relationship to othered populations more broadly conceived, is rife with this type of ideological and temporal split between form and content, wherein the camera emerges as futuristic because its subjects are portrayed as backward. See Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (Documenting the Image), ed. Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson, New York: Routledge, 2004. 109 government funding being spent on their projects required proof of their success, and the photograph, despite its potential for manipulation, is never entirely distinguished from its referent. 64 Even the Federal Writers Project (a branch of the Works Progress Administration), in its American Guide Series, was replete with the visual. Compared to the Progressive era two decades prior, New Deal politics and objectives mark a shift from the written word to a culture of sight and sound, a shift that was under way before Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933. 65 For the Farm Security Administration, which was created under the title of the Resettlement Administration in 1935, those state-funded projects—securing low-interest loans to poor farmers who might then achieve land ownership, purchasing large tracts of land where the soil had been ravaged by single-crop exploitation, and resettling displaced tenants—were undertaken far from the public eye and from the oversight of bureau chiefs in Washington, D.C. Thus, photography was necessary to bring the state’s interventions in rural life to the urban public sphere, including voters and governing bodies. 66 The photographs that the agency distributed had to demonstrate, as Susan Sontag writes, “that the poor were really poor, and that the poor were dignified” (62). While the rehabilitative logics of these New Deal projects were noble, the visual rhetorics surrounding them were unable to achieve this intended work of portraying the poor, who certainly were really poor, as dignified. 64 Barthes considers this characteristic of photography in Camera Lucida (1980). 65 Pete Daniel and Sally Stein, Introduction to Official Images: New Deal Photography, ix. 66 The Resettlement Administration was created to compensate for the effects of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933), which provided subsides for farmers to reduce crops and kill excess livestock, effectively leading to the displacement of tenant farmers who were no longer needed for crop yield as the government attempted to stabilize agricultural prices. This displacement had a particularly devastating effect on the South and Southwest, where nearly seventy-five percent of the population was made up of tenant farmers (Hurley 30). See F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties, 1972. 110 By the time the economic Depression became apparent in American cities, the rural South had been in a state of catastrophe for over a decade. 67 If New Deal programming was to succeed in rehabilitating America’s agricultural sector, it required a hopeful visual landscape of thriving rurality to justify the project in the public eye. As importantly, if the state were to continue its anthropological impulse of posing rural America as the model of national authenticity, the FSA would have to document rurality as ancestral and nostalgic, thus in decline. 68 This conflation of time and space that positioned rurality as America’s past, yet also central to America’s future, began, as I argued in the previous section, with the eugenics movement. Thus, racial science was crucial to narratives of authenticity that were called forth in the service of a national morale, even as they were taken up by the New Deal. While the FSA photographed a multitude of rural experiences, from immigrant farm laborers to black sharecroppers and white tenant farmers, the majority of the project’s iconic photographs center on white rural subjects, which is not surprising considering that the photographs were produced for a middle-class audience (Sontag 62). 69 The remainder of this chapter will focus on 67 Historian Natalie Ring locates the collapse of cotton (the single crop that in the 1890s, when an economic depression hit Southern farmers especially hard, forcing them to mortgage their future crops. When exorbitant interest rates combined with declining cotton prices, farmers lost land, and the South developed “ ‘a vast credit system,’ that [many considered] ‘a system of indolence,’ [that] ruined farmers’ ‘credit and self respect,’ and… led to the destruction of natural resources” (110-11). 68 Margaret Olin writes about the contradictions inherent in even these two objectives—documentation (as a political practice) and aestheticization—particularly as a commitment to both haunted Walker Evans’s work: “The notion of autonomous beauty contradicts engagement with tenants, just as the inevitability of art and its comforting overtones clashes with political engagement. While social activists like Dorothea Lange pushed photography in the direction of engagement…. Often the seeming activists, like Evans, wished to be viewed as artists and thus were caught… in the modernist disjunction between art and life. Indeed, while Evans’s photographs show extreme poverty, they do not tempt the viewer to donate a chest for the silverware and extra spoons to put in it” (47). 69 Nicholas Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal is the authoritative source on the ways that the FSA photographers covered blackness, while race remained a repressed issue in the ways the photographers’ images have been used. Hariman and Lucaites also claim that race is repressed within the collective memory of the Great Depression, and Natanson’s work establishes the reasons why this repression has set in and persisted: “when we consider one of the best-known published FSA photo collections—important in shaping the traditional view of ‘classic’ FSA images—Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), we find precious few black faces; it is Lange’s white migrant mother, Rothstein’s white Oklahomans plodding through the dust storm, Lee’s white tenant children standing to eat a humble Christmas repast, Shahn’s white rehabilitation client with a furrowed brow, Evans’s white tenant family portrait that receive the prominent play. Or we consider Historical Section Director Roy 111 the preservation of rurality as an articulable national identity, which I argue became part of a national project for the preservation of whiteness itself. As such, the FSA photography unit, no matter how “progressive” the intentions of its photographers, existed in proximity to other efforts of preserving authentic whiteness through the preservation of rurality: namely, the eugenic. 70 The New Deal could not unmoor rurality from the backward pull it had upon the nation, nor would its photographic approach prove effective in releasing rurality from its backward place in the national imaginary through the process of capture (on film). 71 2.9 The FSA’s Anthropological Impulse to Preserve and Contain In order to demonstrate the ways that a eugenic approach to rural whiteness became manifest in FSA photography, like Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, foreclosing the possibility of effective movement toward economic justice, I will consider the type of looking that FSA Styker’s instructions to Lange in June 1937: ‘Regarding the tenancy pictures,’ he relied to her inquiry from Texas, ‘I would suggest that you take both black and white but place the emphasis on the white tenants, since we know that these will receive much wider use’” (4). 70 The inability for the photographic to create distance between rurality and poverty is specific to rurality as it functioned both materially and imaginatively during the 1930s. As a comparison, one might think of Aaron Siskind’s work on the influential “Harlem Document,” a photo-text produced between 1936 and 1939. Sara Blair describes the ways the “Harlem Document” departs from the institutions of New Deal image making like the FSA: “…Siskind’s images meditate on the racial practices and fantasies embedded in Harlem, writ as a social space generated by the interplay between poverty and promise, uplift and drift, authenticity and appropriation. Increasingly, his photographs belie the avowed purposes of documentary: the call to action, pure ‘verism,’ fidelity to social fact. They thus test the limits and possibilities of documentary as the era’s dominant cultural genre. Marshaling the duality of Harlem as a poetic resource, Siskind’s images create a space for more complex, meditative engagement—not only but not least by white viewers—with the failures of America’s defining ideals and the role of culture in redressing them” (20). Harlem as poetic resource—the quality that allowed the subject to challenge the documentary form itself—was a product of its duality: poverty and promise. Rural America in the 1930s was no Harlem. While it may have been branded “authentic” (as Harlem was in its racialization primarily through rural migration), it was also seen as one-dimensionally impoverished and adrift. Images of rurality could not function parallel to images of urban space and culture. 71 My claim about rurality being unable to shake its backward attachments is in keeping with Sontag’s claim that “There can be no evidence, photographic or otherwise, of an event until the event itself has been named and characterized. And it is never photographic evidence which can construct—more properly, identify—events; the contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event” (19). 112 photography invited. This gaze aligns with the formulation about authority and narration that Amy Villarejo proposes in her work around documentary as genre: “Looking at the other from inside one’s normativeness or from the outside as solidarity: either gesture relies upon the authorization to look and to narrate, to assume something about the other based upon what one knows about oneself” (13). As such, the visuality of the FSA’s rural America was quite similar to that established by Caldwell’s eugenic novels, as well as the family studies by which Caldwell was influenced. Following Sontag’s claim that FSA photography was captured for middle-class viewers who required proof of rural poverty as well as the deserving nature of those ravaged by it, my readings of a selection of iconic FSA photographs demonstrate that while rurality was proposed as an ancestral to normative white America (Villarejo’s outsider looking in “solidarity”), only a limited form of identification with rurality was possible when urban viewers set their gaze upon the country, keeping rurality in the space of an “alien reality,” or rather, backwardness. 72 While the nation looked to rurality to provide a “useable past,” its capture on film did not make it a presence upon the modern face of America. Rather, photography contained poor rural whiteness, made it identifiable and manageable, unable to contaminate the efforts of uplift and modernization that characterized urban life during and after the Depression. A limited form of identification between subject and viewer was both intended and necessary for FSA photography to succeed in its mission, and that limited form mirrored the photographers’ relationships to their impoverished subjects. According to Sara Blair, because the photographers were not indigenous to the worlds that they were tasked to capture, their images where never truly embedded in the experience of their subjects. 72 Sontag writes of the appropriation endemic to photography’s efforts to raise consciousness: “During the New Deal, Stryker’s FSA project… brought back information about migrant workers and sharecroppers to Washington, so that bureaucrats could figure out how to help them. But even at its most moralistic, documentary photography was also imperious in another sense.... [reflecting] the urge to appropriate an alien reality” (63). 113 The FSA’s iconic images… record a studied distance from the subjects of their documentation, perhaps inevitable in the work of leftist culture makers invading the domains of [others]. While the most powerful of these images make a virtue of necessity, their austerity is not in the end fully chosen. At best, they register respect for the limits of the camera as an agency foreign to the social world it documents or exposes. (24-25) 73 This distant relationship between photographer and subject (urban to rural), and camera and subject (futuristic and anachronistic), was compounded by the structures of feeling that rurality had accumulated after a decade of economic and agricultural catastrophe, as well as its ongoing practices of Jim Crow violence. 74 More than any other staff photographer, Ben Shahn’s work represents the accumulation of rural recession, dislocation, and backwardness that enveloped rural America in the 1930s, and his work privileges these qualities over the process of identification that would allow for the FSA’s stated objectives to be met. As such, the photographs he produced were in opposition to Director Roy Stryker’s progressive vision for the FSA “that welcomed modernization and technocratic efficiency as a way to ‘uplift’ standards of rural and urban American life” (Stange 2). 75 Exhibiting a tendency toward the documentation of backwardness, rather than the 73 Blair makes this claim in comparison to the urban Feature Group, whose “studied distance can be the purview only of culture makers working on home turf” (30). Outsider status, however, was not the only hindrance to FSA making more complete contact with their subjects: administrative procedures and agency mandates also dictated much of the FSA’s work, even what Blair calls its “guerilla point-and-shoot” style, as Stryker was waiting in Washington D.C. for an onslaught of negatives, not the few beautiful images that would arrive from a photographer like Evans, who most clearly balked against the bureaucratic nature of his work for the Agency. 74 Raymond Williams describes structures of feeling as the meanings that historically accrue through the affects that subjects experience in a given space, situation, or temporal frame. This designation, important to the affective turn in cultural studies, takes affect out of the realm of individuality and into the realm of social structure, and it also recognizes the importance of lived experience to systemic beliefs. See Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1977: p. 132. 75 Maren Stange, “‘The Record Itself’: Farm Security Administration Photography and the Transformation of Rural Life,” Official Images: New Deal Photography, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987. Stange’s broader argument concerns the evidence of the industrial on the lives of agricultural workers documented 114 modernization of the country and its aftermath, Shahn recounts one of his first FSA assignments in a 1964 interview, which also illuminates his approach to photographing rurality: I remember the first place I went on this trip where we were active, one of the resettlements that we built. I found that as far as I was concerned, they were impossible to photograph. Neat little rows of houses. This wasn’t my idea of something to photograph. But I had the good luck to ask someone, ‘Where are you all from? Where did they bring you from?’ And when they told me I went on to a place called Scott’s Run [West Virginia], and there it began. From there I went all through Kentucky, West Virginia, down to Arkansas, and Mississippi, Louisiana, in other words I covered the mine country and the cotton country. I was terribly excited about it…. (Cohen 44) Clearly, Shahn considered his ability to capture the backwardness of Appalachia far more crucial than either creating a means for middle-class identification or legitimating New Deal programming. He had seen little of America outside New York City before he took up assignment with the FSA, and exhibited a high level of romanticism about rurality, the “spirit” of which he was enamored, as he got to know “the South and its story-telling art, stories of snakes and storms and haunted houses, enchanting” (Natanson 89). Shahn aspires to participation in a Southern gothic aesthetic of snakes, storms, and hauntings, which Caldwell writes as plagues, house fires, and the haunting return of bad inheritances. Shahn’s interest in capturing the surreal, backward elements of the rural South on film, recalls Caldwell’s approach to writing fiction: “the in the file. Importantly, her argument complicates the stated mission of the FSA by evidencing an internal acknowledgement that mechanization had penetrated the agricultural sphere to such an extent that there was no going back. Lange’s “factories in the fields” photographs shot in the Imperial Valley are central to Stange’s argument. It is also worth noting here that while my reading of Shahn’s photography puts it in opposition to Stryker’s vision, Stryker’s public disagreements with his photographers center mostly on his tense relationship with Walker Evans, rather than Ben Shahn. 115 ultimate aim of [writing] fiction [is] to create something that has never existed before” (Kehl 234). Shahn’s interest in capturing the South’s “story-telling art,” and indeed to tell a story about the South rather than simply document it, accounts for one distinction between the FSA photograph and the hovel novel that this chapter weakens. While a broad selection of FSA photographs and photographers document the backward attachments that circulated in and around rural representation in the 1930s, I begin with Shahn precisely because this is where he began in his navigation of Stryker’s assignment: aestheticizing the backward within the subject. Art critic Margaret Olin claims that many documentary-style photographers of the 1930s were torn between the “notion of autonomous beauty” and engagement with their subjects, brushing against “the inevitability of art and its comforting overtones” as it “clashes with political engagement” (47). In other words, like many left cultural producers, FSA photographers were caught “in the modernist disjunction between art and life” (47). Shahn’s Wife and child of a sharecropper, Arkansas (1935) (fig. 2-6) exhibits this distance between photographer and subject that allows the “disjunction between art and life” to sit on the surface of the photograph, refusing either the excess of feeling or cool objectivity that would incite a viewer to political action, on either end of the spectrum. 76 The portrait’s subject, Mrs. Mulhall, looks reticently toward the right side of the frame, her uneasy smile revealing her discomfort with the process of image- making, and perhaps Shahn’s presence as well. Whereas Lange’s “Migrant Mother” exudes a troubled dignity as a singular, quiet moment of strength and reflection, a mother shielding her children from the outsider’s gaze as well as the harsh environs of the Dust Bowl, Shahn’s sharecropper mother is distracted by something just outside the frame (perhaps the other Mulhall 76 While I admire expansive work on the FSA file such as Nicholas Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal, which features quantitative analyses of a large selection of the unit’s images, this chapter centers on representative photographs like Shahn’s to make a larger conceptual argument about the ability for the FSA to depict rurality according to its stated mission. 116 children, as they appear in other sequentially shot images). 77 The peaceful pastoral suggested by the field and forest out of focus behind the mother and child is interrupted by a broken fragment of farm equipment, taking up the left side of the frame. While mother and child are foregrounded, Shahn opens the frame to the junk metal, allowing it to off-center the already unstable portrait of mother and child. As a point of comparison, Lange’s Migrant Mother parallels Roman Catholic iconography, translating the Madonna and Child from Western painting to working-class photography, the children’s averted gazes suggesting vulnerability rather than heavenly majesty. 78 If Shahn’s Wife and child likewise call forth this iconography, this mother is rendered vulnerable while the child has yet to learn its relationship to another’s gaze, and the shame that attends that relationship. Mulhall’s motherly gaze is averted, shifty and unsure, while the child stares blankly into the camera. This distortion of power—the child gazing forward while his mother tries to find her bearings, vulnerable before Shahn—suggests her inability to protect him, to nurture him in the ways that Lange’s infamous mother was assumed capable, if only the family received the relief for which Lange was petitioning. 79 These poor white sharecroppers are not only backward, but numerous, exceeding the frame of traditional portraiture of mother and child; they are rendered recognizable, even categorizable, but are certainly not framed as a family with which middle class American 77 See Ben Shahn “Untitled photos, possibly related to: Wife and child of sharecropper, Arkansas,” 6032- M2, 6032-M4, October 1935. 78 Hariman and Lucaites (56). 79 Hariman and Lucaites claim that “Lange’s photograph evokes this ‘iconography of liberal reform’ by the association of the children with their mother in a world of want while leaving the male provider, who had been ‘rendered ineffectual by the Depression,’ out of the picture” (58). The state, then, must assume the role of provider, but mother remains in the role of protector, not stepping outside her gendered boundary even in the case of material need. Colin Johnson complicates the gendered narrative that Migrant Mother suggests in his history of “hard women” whose work was both grueling and necessary, during the Depression. See Just Queer Folks final chapter on “Hard Women.” 117 viewers should identify. While Shahn’s tenant wife does occupy the center margin of the frame like a traditional representation of the Madonna, she grips a decrepit doll in front of her child, the dirt on the doll’s face mirroring the child’s and suggesting that both are base, despite their innocence as child and childish object. Another of the Mulhall children appears in the frame, just a few strands of his blonde hair visible in the left corner. Shahn’s decision to keep the child barely visible in the frame, his face outside it and vertical to the debris that interrupts the idyllic background, reminds the viewer that the sharecropper family has a futurity that surpasses the one dead-eyed child staring eerily back at them. Through the suggestion of numerous Mulhall children—children in need of the state to step in as a benevolent father figure—the photograph participates in the eugenic discourse that exhibits anxiety around the proliferation of white degeneracy. While Lange’s carefully framed portrait galvanized the public around the potential of successful reformist outcomes, Shahn’s disorderly subjects who exceed the frame are not contained within a neat, orderly reformist idiom. In contrast to Lange, Shahn’s photograph suggests that rural backwardness is not as easily “reformed” as Lange, Stryker, and the FSA had proposed. Compared to more widely acclaimed FSA photographer Walker Evans, and his most iconic portrait of a sharecropper family, the freakish qualities of Shahn’s portrait are thrown into stark relief. Shahn does not attempt to compose the photograph in such a way as to suggest a traditional mode of portraiture with which his audience would be familiar and thus ostensibly able to identify. Shahn shoots Mulhall at close range, at the center of his frame, close enough to register her discomfort in front of his camera, and he does not wait for her to collect herself and her children for the pose. 80 As a point of comparison, Walker Evans refrained almost entirely 80 6032-M2, 6032-M4, and other negatives featuring Mulhall as subject participate in this same method of catching her off guard. In contrast, Nicholas Natanson argues that Shahn’s studies of black sharecroppers in 118 from directing his subjects, preferring to allow time for them to compose themselves and make their own choices about how they would become a representation of themselves. 81 Shahn’s portrait—particularly the combination of the mother’s confusion and the child’s dead-eyed stare—is a predecessor to the surreal qualities that would attend image-making of American “freaks” and outcasts decades later, when the disconnect between audience and subject was taken to unprecedented heights by photographers like Diane Arbus. 82 Mrs. Muhall’s pose conceptually levels her child and the decrepit doll, whose missing hand, wide eyes, and voraciously open mouth lend it both an injured and demonic quality, quite separate from the sweetness and innocence permeating standard imagery of children and their toys. A Southern gothic aesthetic attends the eeriness of the multidirectional stares from the photograph’s three central subjects: an uneasy mother, grotesque doll, and dead-eyed child. The latter meets the Arkansas are among the most fair observations of black life in the file. Indeed, Wife of sharecropper, Pulaski County, Arkansas (6020-M5) features a black wife of a sharecropper that is meticulously posed (either by Shahn or the woman herself), and lacks the freakish qualities of Wife and child of a sharecropper, Arkansas, 1935. I concede this difference to Natanson, and agree with his assessment of Shahn’s ethical approach to portraying rural Southern blackness. His difference in approach to white and black sharecroppers is in keeping with my argument that the FSA’s visuality follows logically from eugenic visual schemas of rural whiteness in the decades that preceded their work. 81 William Stott’s analysis of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men includes a 1941 review of Evans’ work, which places it in direct opposition to Caldwell’s, and I would argue Shahn’s, characterized by the “shocking glimpse, …candid exposé” manner of shooting: “His subjects are conscious of the camera, of its manipulator, and of the unknowable audience behind it. They are not taken off guard; on the contrary, they have been given time to arrange and compose themselves for the picture” (268). Stott considers this method one of letting the subject reveal itself, rather than revealing it as a way to seek out the spectacular. See Fig. 2-7. Walker Evans, Sharecropper's family, Hale County, Alabama, 1935 82 While the comparison is perhaps idiosyncratic, bringing attention to the similarities between Shahn and Arbus is important to establishing the extent to which Shahn photographed his subjects well outside the guidelines of the FSA’s mission, particularly in regards to his insistence on the “freakish” qualities of rural poverty, rather than the need for all Americans to identify with their supposedly temporary condition. Despite the surreal qualities of Shahn’s portrait and the distance he felt from his subjects’ experiences, the othering of his subjects is not a product of the same positionality that a photographer like Arbus would articulate in the 1960s. Arbus was clear that her approach to her subjects was a product of “feeling immune and exempt from circumstance,” having been brought up in privilege, her family stable and prosperous even during the Depression. Sontag describes Arbus’s oeuvre as originating in her lack of adversity, which caused her to crave “the shock of immersion in experiences that cannot be beautified” (Sontag 43). The viewer then takes on Arbus’s privilege, and viewing her photographs “[depends] on being outside rather than inside a situation” (Sontag 42). For more on Arbus’s approach, see Studs Terkel’s interview with the photographer in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Depression, New York: Pantheon (1970), 110-11. 119 viewer’s gaze accusingly, giving the photograph a haunting quality. Shahn’s portraiture thus registers as freakish, when as a member of the FSA his work was intended to invite empathy with suffering, rather than to either normalize or sensationalize it. While many of his photographs do achieve the FSA’s compassionate purpose, his complication of the portrait’s frontal orientation highlights the subject’s discomfort, unfitness for portraiture, and thus otherness as compared to the (urban) viewing public. Mrs. Muhall’s discomfort also registers her otherness in comparison to an urban posing public, which would have likely been comfortable with photographic technology, and thus less likely caught off guard in the manner Shah has caught his rural subject. Through Shahn’s portraiture, we see that rurality is, after all, unfit for the modern form, which is, in itself, freakish. Arbus’s work in the 1960s dissolved the line between normalcy and misery, but Shahn’s portraits of freakish poor, white rurality thicken that line. While one might assume that the Depression dissolved the line on its own, as widespread misery becomes the modus operandi of financial crisis, but poverty became freakish and unreal through Shahn’s lens. In an argument for Walker Evans’s modernist aesthetic, one that became incompatible with the FSA’s mission, Eric Rosenberg claims, “[Photography is] not memory in the normative sense, [it] is traumatic. Its status as document is always denied at the same time as it seems well established” (64). In other words, we know that a photograph provides us with a moment in time, but we do not understand what preceded that moment, or what followed. Thus, the state’s demands on photography—that it should act absolutely as document and as memory—placed a burden on these representations they could not withstand. Because photography lacks the ability to narrate national trauma, it cannot stand in for national memory. The state favored photography because its assumed existence as simple document purportedly disallowed the 120 strange identifications that the visual narration of the novel promoted, such as Caldwell’s alignment of the reader with a group of black sharecroppers that I mentioned above. And still, despite the FSA photographs that became iconic, including the dignified poverty of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, the tenor of normalcy struck by Walker Evans in Sharecropper's family, Hale County, Alabama, or the sheer grit and determination to go on living in the face of disaster in Arthur Rothstein’s capturing of the Dust Bowl in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936, many images in the FSA archive are unable (or in Shahn’s case even unwilling) to transcend the backwardness that rurality had accrued in the first decades of the twentieth century. 2.10 Conclusions: The Backward Moves Forward Not all FSA photography refused the process of viewer/subject identification. Walker Evans was released from his FSA assignment in order to take the photographs that would eventually be published as the now-classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and in that documentary-book, his documentation of Southern sharecroppers extended the impulse to document toward the impulse to understand. 83 In order to consider the tension that Evans’s photographs create within what I have argued as the state’s anthropological impulse to identify and contain, complicated as that impulse was by the distance between rural backwardness and progressive reform, I will conclude with a return to Evans’s Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, the site at which this chapter began. 84 83 This extension is not simply a quality of all “documentary books” of the era; as previously mentioned, Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces is notoriously exploitative and condescending, with Caldwell fictionalizing (rather than narrativizing) stories of black women who “got more children now than [they know] what to do with but they keep coming along like watermelons in the summertime” (sic). Natanson compares Caldwell and Bourke-White’s documentary book to more recognizably problematic images of “a white man’s Negro comfortably predictable in an unpredictable age, enviably happy in an unhappy age, consistently entertaining in a mortifying age,” who was often featured in pictorial magazines like Life throughout the 1930s (18). 84 Sontag privileges the written word over the image in her claim that “…functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand” (23). While it is not my intention 121 Shame, a feeling that structures rural backwardness, is central to both identification and effective documentary photography; shame also plays a role in Evans’s work, even if his approach did not render his subjects as particularly shameful, as I have argued that Shahn’s photography did. 85 As part of the ethical process of looking that makes certain documentary photographs effective, in this case Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Margaret Olin claims that “to return the look of the photographs is also to come to terms with our own shame” (30). That shame is the product of privilege, a consequence of looking backward and in so doing, recognizing one’s own position as forward, as future-oriented, as secure. Olin goes on to claim that “because it is these specific people whose gaze we return, the shame we feel is that of being privileged, separate. […] We construct ourselves for Others, but not for such Others as these” (30) (emphasis mine). Ostensibly, that shame is intraracial: only one of Evans’ images in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men features a black subject returning the viewer’s gaze. 86 What might this shame, manifest in the purportedly white viewer, tell us about documentary photography as the state utilized it in the 1930s, and how its form related to the hovel novel’s content? Why might whiteness, experiencing itself as separate from and other to rural poverty, produce feelings of to analyze the impact of James Agee’s prose on Evans’s photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I do concede that Agee’s narratives have undoubtedly affected the reception of Evans’ photographs, and perhaps lend them the qualities that identification requires, particularly when they are viewed in the context of the documentary- book and not the myriad of other formats in which Evans’s photographs appeared both before and since its publication. 85 For an account of the relationship between shame and identification, see Eve Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1. 1 (1993). 86 This is not to say that Evans neglected to shoot black life, even if FSA Director Roy Stryker was less interested in black life, because he found it less useful to the agency. Natanson regards the differential treatment of black representation a product of Stryker’s intentions, not Evans’s: “Even rarer [than Stryker’s reminders that his photographers get agency publicity shots of black projects]… were references to potential black subjects outside the project context. When, for example, the RA/FSA photo-director prepared a list of recommended shooting subjects for Evans’s tour of the Deep South in January 1936, he seemed to mention everything—from soil erosion to old plantation mansions, from tourist camps to steel mills, from a U.S. Tire Company model town to Clemson College—except the subject of blacks. By contrast, a shooting outline prepared by Evans the previous year made specific references to black life” (61). 122 shame that both restrict outright (racial) identification, all the while producing “effective” documentary photography? Recall the reader’s first encounter with poor whiteness in Tobacco Road, in which Caldwell disallows the white reader to approach the poor white tenant characters as a white reader. Rather, the reader encounters the Lester family first within the perspectives of black passersby, gazing onto the family’s perverse scene from the tobacco road. In order to fully exploit the difference between the (assumed white) reader and the backward white subject, the reader is forced to take on the position of blackness itself. The different modes of shame—one stemming from racial identification and the other from difference and privilege—between normative whiteness and rural poor whiteness is redoubled in that moment when the reader sees the Lesters as the black men on the road see the Lesters. The scene visually narrates the right to look as that which, due to the family’s impoverished circumstances, has been extended even to black men, who would have been disallowed that right according to the visual logics of Jim Crow. In contradistinction to the hovel novel, photography has no recourse to provide a different perspective through which the viewer might gaze. The white viewer approaches the poor whiteness of the photograph, and, to echo Olin, “the shame we feel is that of being privileged, separate” (30). While shame can be an effective means toward reform, 87 we might recall Sontag’s insistence that FSA photography not only had to document the poor, but also document their dignity, and thus their worth. The shaming mechanisms of documentary photography can 87 Julie Ellison describes the problem of liberal guilt, wherein action upon guilt often ends up relieving the privileged social actor, rather than the subject with whom an encounter incited the guilt: “In the throes of liberal guilt, all action becomes gesture, expressive of a desire to effect change or offer help that is never sufficient to the scale of the problem” (349). See Julie Ellison, “A Short History of Liberal Guilt,” Critical Inquiry (1996) 22.2: 344- 371. 123 only operate successfully if some form of identification renders the differentially shamed positions of viewer and subject in proximity to one another. In Evans’s image of two white, working-class boys, one is centered in the frame and looking directly into the camera (striking the pose that the majority of Evans’s portraiture subjects strike), and the other exceeds the frame, his head turned away from the camera’s stultifying gaze (fig. 2-1). The central boy’s gaze asks for a return, while his co-subject refuses to participate in the exchange altogether, his bottom lip protruding, suggesting annoyance at Evans’s presence and his image’s capture. Without either refusing or preventing engagement with an audience—a characteristic that, by comparison, defines Ben Shahn’s FSA files—Evans’s image contains, both literally in the frame and figuratively in its composition, the futurity of white rural poverty. On one hand, Evans produces an image that is a clear reflection of the FSA’s mission: the working-poor child, whose gaze implores the state to step in as the benevolent father, a figure that is absent in the image. On the other hand, through the photograph’s de- centered excess, the shamed child looking beyond the camera’s lens, and its suggestion of rural life beyond what the camera is able to capture and contain, the image represents the unwieldiness of rural poverty. To those anxious about the supposed degeneration of whiteness in rural America, this excessive representation of impoverished white childhood doubly suggests the need for state intervention, if not through the FSA’s liberal reforms, then through eugenic measures, which co-existed with the FSA’s plans to simultaneously preserve and uplift American rurality. Nearly all of the photographs that Evans shot in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania are framed askew. Another young boy in overalls poses near the bed of a truck, a mess of lumber behind him, suggesting a scene of labor, while he reaches toward another child’s hand to the left 124 of the frame (fig. 2-8). Eric Rosenberg argues that there is an unrelenting emptiness to the repetitions in Evans’s studies of the physical structures and locations of rural poverty, such as the untouched, stocked shelves of a storefront window in General store interior, Moundville, Alabama (1936) (fig. 2-9) or the train station absent of travelers and tracks stretching into the distance in Railroad Station, Edwards, Mississippi (1936) (fig. 2-10). 88 Opposite the study of the neat, empty repetitions of these iconic images, the less frequently circulated studies of childhood in Westmoreland County suggest mess—not ironic, cruel order—in rural poverty. Rather than the finished projects and orderly rows of relocated tenant housing that Stryker wished captured for the legitimation of the FSA, Evans’s images point to the unfinished, and its presence as a present: the ongoing lives of poor white children living precariously in America’s rural coal towns, agricultural districts, and mountain communities. In the case of the Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania images, Evans suggests that what is pictured cannot be contained: the efforts of the FSA are futile. And yet his images, unlike Shahn’s photographs or Caldwell’s novels, do not allow his subjects to shoulder the blame. Evans figures the shameful relation as our own: the viewer’s shame, as well as the nation’s disgrace. The camera contains. It makes subject into object: a roll of film, a print that can be handled. This form of objectification can ease anxiety, and thus the state utilized photography in its management of rural poverty. However, photography is not exactly the futuristic technology it may have seemed during the proliferation of the visual in the 1930s, and as such was unable to pull rurality forward. Indeed, the state utilized photography under the assumption that unlike 88 Rosenberg calls these empty repetitions a “comedy of form”:, “We are asked to question the status of the documentary when an element of its ridicule seems apparent. […] The comedy of narrative in each of these images… is precisely a comedy of form; a way of saying by the very means of banality and melodrama of aesthetics how impotent is form in the face of the traumatic, of the Depression. The aesthetic is too obvious in the images that seem to add up intractably but undeniably to some kind of immeasurable truth of the historical moment” (Rosenberg 72). 125 narrative, which is released from its author’s intention into a universe of readers, the photograph is able to capture, contain, and categorize, but also to uplift. I began this chapter with the proposition that thinking FSA photography alongside Erskine Caldwell’s hovel novels— particularly Evans’s Pennsylvania boys and Caldwell’s Georgia Boy—was peculiar, and perhaps the two rubbed up against each other wrongly, their ideologies and intentions diametrically opposed. I conclude that the photograph itself is formally connected to the content of Caldwell’s novel. Photography, despite its ability to carry a present into the future, is a backward art, making every subject it touches a past. Documentary-style photography in the Depression era was not only backward despite its intended use, but was also unruly, like the characters who populated Caldwell’s novels, proliferating, refusing containment within the photographer’s frame or the public imagination. 126 Chapter 3: “Beat the System”: Rurality, Whiteness, and Television in the 1970s “I work for the union ’cause she’s so good to me; And I’m bound to come out on top, that’s where I should be.” The Band, “King Harvest,” 1969 3.1 Beat the System Robbie Robertson, songwriter and lead guitarist of The Band, soulfully delivers these opening lines of “King Harvest,” a song that mythologizes union farm laborers and the land on which they toil. The Band—a roots rock group that opened on Bob Dylan’s first “electric” tour between 1965 and 1967—gained popularity in their own right in the early 1970s, in an era when the public’s investment in the power of labor unions was beginning to wane. While his music exhibits an almost religious devotion to working-class culture, Robertson describes the shift in public opinion toward organized labor that characterized the decade: “At the beginning, when the unions came in, they were a saving grace, a way of fighting the big money people, and they affected everybody from the people that worked in the big cities all the way around to the farm people. It’s ironic now, because now so much of it is like gangsters, assassinations, power, greed, insanity.” 1 Despite organized labor’s tarnished reputation, on The Band’s record, the working man is “bound to come out on top” because “that’s where [he] should be.” Although The Band’s nostalgic aesthetic brought them relative success, historian Jefferson Cowie claims that “White working-class America wanted more Muskogee,” meaning Merle Haggard’s country-western expression of white cultural pride, “and less Woodstock—even when Woodstock attempted to 1 Griel Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975: 50. 127 speak in their terms” (186). 2 In this chapter I consider the relationship of normative whiteness to rural backwardness in the 1970s, and opening it with The Band, I am less interested in the legacy of the labor union in “King Harvest” than I am in the assertion that “the top” is squarely positioned as the place where the song’s protagonist, a white worker who is down on his luck, “should be.” 3 With many working-class white men feeling they were no longer where they “should be” in the 1970s, popular television took up the working-class white family as a formation under siege. This chapter considers the feelings of anxiety that arose when white American men—a group that had historically enjoyed unfettered privilege—came up against an expansion of rights for historically disenfranchised, minoritized groups, including women and African Americans. Certainly, there is a distinction to be made between the feelings of victimization that arise when one's formerly unchecked privileges are questioned and redistributed, and the justified feelings of injury that occur along lines of structural violence and state-sponsored inequality. Despite the illegitimacy of white claims to “unfairness” in the 1970s, I take them seriously in this chapter in order to think about the ways that they, in conjunction with fomenting concerns about economic scarcity, worked to substantiate the political Right’s inroads into the white working-class family, 2 Cowie argues that “King Harvest” and The Band are nostalgic formations, longing for a mythical past and inheritances from labor movements of the 1930. See Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, “I’m Dying Here,” p. 186. 3 Since The Band considered calling themselves “The Crackers” before settling on “The Band” (the name they adopted on tour as Dylan’s supporting act), I think it’s a safe assumption that the iconic farmer, and more broadly the union worker, who the song represents is most certainly white. Alfred Aronowitz, “The Beginnings of the Band: Getting Started, Meeting Bob Dylan, and 'Music From Big Pink,’” Rolling Stone, 24 Aug. 1968. <http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-beginnings-of-the-band-getting-started-meeting-bob-dylan-and- music-from-big-pink-19680824#ixzz3KsgUYxeo> For an account of the historical confluence of whiteness and the American working class, see, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso, 2007. 128 and the ways this played out on the small screen with particular regard to representations of rural America. Pete Hamill's 1969 New York Magazine piece "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class" is a testament to the anger and resentment that defined white masculinity in the 1970s. Hamill insists: ...it is imperative… to begin to deal with the growing alienation and paranoia of the working-class white man. [...] [He] feels trapped and, even worse… ignored. [...] ...he is beginning to look for someone to blame." Hamill cites common white working-class complaints —the tax burden, the welfare state, and black men obtaining union jobs—and he claims that "It is very difficult to explain to these people that more than 600,000 of those on welfare [in New York] are women and children; that one reason the black family is in trouble is because outfits like the Iron Workers Union have practically excluded blacks through most of their history; that a hell of a lot more of their tax dollars go to Vietnam... than to Harlem.... (Hamill) Under the influence of the New Right, which built a socially-conservative, working-class voting bloc upon these resentments, the seventies saw white communities redirecting frustration from the realities of deindustrialization and the rise of neoliberalism, toward the welfare state. “Beat the system” was a chant heard everywhere, from anti-busing rallies to popular music. Complaints about social welfare accumulated around the amorphous “system”—which was generally cast as 129 an effect of women’s liberation and the Civil Rights movement—that white masculinity set out to “beat" in the seventies. 4 In this cultural climate, the rural TV sitcom—the most widely-disseminated form of rural popular culture to date—underwent shifts in popularity, which suggests the extent to which urban and suburban working-class whiteness was felt to be a precarious formation, anxious about the inadequacies that rural backwardness on television seemed to suggest. I focus here on a particular incarnation of the rural white family that emerged on the 1977 NBC television sitcom, The Kallikaks. The show, which was the first rural sitcom to emerge after networks had purged the majority of rural programming in the early seventies, depicts the Kallikak family as comedic deviants committed to living off the system rather than living off the land. 5 As an early iteration of the contemporary state of rural backwardness, in which rural Americans are imagined to financially drain the rest of the nation with their proliferative downward mobility and subsistence on welfare, each episode features patriarch J.T. Kallikak in his attempts to “beat the system.” His first attempt, which serves as the show’s framework, occurs when the family inherits a decrepit, two-pump gas station in a town called Nowhere, California, and they move there looking to get rich and escape their lives in the coal fields of rural West Virigina. With J.T. Kallikak’s weekly schemes—from welfare scams to fraudulent business deals—a new form of rural whiteness emerged on television, one that aligned the Kallikaks with the specter of the urban black family, supposedly destroying the moral fiber of America by relying on social welfare rather than thrift, 4 On the rise of the New Right as a multifaceted development in American politics that was motivated and mobilized by far more than a post-1968 backlash against cultural revolution, see Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2008. 5 The rural programs that were purged from television in the early 1970s include: Petticoat Junction (1970), The Jackie Gleason Show (1970), The Red Skelton Show (1971), Green Acres (1971), The Beverly Hillbillies (1971), Mayberry R.F.D. (1971), Hee-Haw (1971), Lassie (1971), and The Lawrence Welk Show (1971). 130 industry, and a competitive ethos for survival. 6 Not only in its attempts to “beat the system” purportedly stacked against white men (and designed to privilege minorities), but also in its effort to stay on the air, The Kallikaks failed. And yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, the show’s failure indicates its ability to disrupt, which is where I locate the queerness of its backward rurality. The negative responses to degenerate rural representations like The Kallikaks in the late 1970s were related to the rise of multicultural neoliberalism and the decline of the urban American working class, two interrelated shifts that redefined white citizenship in that cultural moment. In other words, by the end of the 1970s, while retaining a sense of racial entitlement, many in the white working class began to (materially, if not politically) join the numerous—the permanently poor—and thus began to experience the spectacular elements of televised rural poverty differently. 7 Although accounts of white working class rage like Pete Hamill’s exhibit 6 In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant maps out the consequences of privatizing citizenship. As part of this turn to the private to define one’s civic life, Berlant notices “an increasing tendency to designate political duty in terms of individual acts of consumption and accumulation” (loc 3355). The two major economic platforms that were born of this turn were 1) the increasing emphasis on sexual morality by conservative politicians and media platforms and 2) the contention that the acceptance of federal welfare funds somehow corrupts the individuals who need to do so, effectively working to decay the inner city, which leads to the decline of the entire nation. One need look no futher than the vast reach of a text like Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 The Negro Family: A Case for National Action to imagine the ways that the privatization of citizenship has detrimentally effected the black family, and the black mother in particular. Roderick Ferguson’s “Something Else to Be: Sula, The Moynihan Report, and the Negations of Black Lesbian Feminism” argues that the pathologization of black “welfare queens,” who purportedly lacked the competitive ethos necessary for participation in a global economy, “provided the discursive origins for the dismantling of wefare as part of the fulfillment of global capital by the millennium’s end” (124). 7 Chandan Reddy’s framework of “the numerous” has been instrumental to my thinking about the white working class in the deindustrializing 1970s. Reddy’s articulation of the numerous is an alternative to the “precarious,” which describes populations that forge alliances spanning national, class, legal, and sexual categorization to address what Lauren Berlant calls the “fraying fantasies” of “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intamcy” (3). According to Reddy, “the precarious” cannot account for the permance of poverty for certain minority populations, including racial and sexual minorities as well as the disabled and criminalized populations. This distinction is important when thinking about the ways a precarious population, such as the white working class in the 1970s, encounters other populations whose conditions temporally exceed precarity, which implies a state of impending rather than permanence. Chandan Reddy, “The Numerous,” Roundtable on Queer Studies and Class, Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, 9 Nov. 2014; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. 131 reactionary defenses and misplaced blame rather than political mobilization and coalition, this class certainly experienced itself anxiously, seeing its racialized privilege secure, yet unable to impede a national wave of inflation, unemployment, and the decline of real wages. 8 Presently, I will move through the ways that normative white urban and suburban, working and middle classes imagined white rural poverty—the closest that network television got to representing “the numerous”—between the post-War economic boom and the stagflation decade of the 1970s. The relationship between rurality on television to the urban and suburban white audiences for whom it was produced is key to theorizing the ways that the precarious white working classes encountered and negotiated their similarities to the white rural poor, which was and remains a class of permanently impoverished who, until the economic and identitarian crises of the 1970s, could be enjoyed as entertainment because they were experienced as other to the normative— read middle-class—white American experience. Certainly, these cultural and economic shifts also affected non-white workers. However, because this chapter focuses on the televisual encounter between urban and rural white populations, I follow Robyn Wiegman’s claim that “worker” became eponymous for “white” in the formation of the American working class. Using David Roediger’s work on race and US labor history, Wiegman explains that working class formation and the development of a sense of whiteness intertwined in the US “so much so, in fact, that the very meaning of ‘worker’ would be implicitly understood as ‘white’ by the end of the century” (173). The Right’s political projects with regards to working class whites 8 Historian Thomas Borstelmann provides perspective on the severty of the economic crises that changed the American working class in the 1970s, including inflation (“After averaging 2.5 percent annual increases during the 1960s, prices soared 6.6 percent annually from 1973 to 1980”), unemployment (“As the national and world economies slowed in the early 1970s and slipped into recession in 1974, millions of workers lost their jobs”), and deindustrialization (“A service economy was gradually replacing an industrial economy in the United States, and the 1970s served as a critical trasition period. Incresingly efficient flows of information and goods around the world encouraged ‘globalization,’ a new term for an accelerated verion of an old reality”) (Borstelmann 60-62). The 1970s: New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012. 132 compounded this racialized class formation in the 1970s, at precisely the moment when labor markets were becoming more open to non-white workers and women. 3.2 The Queer Value of Failure The Kallikaks is not—like The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction or any number of popular rural sitcoms of the 1960s—a television show that most Americans recognize or remember. Few copies of the program circulate in specialized film and television archives, and it was never converted to digital or reproduced for contemporary viewers. 9 It was, unquestionably, a flop. That said, my interest in exploring the implications of the show’s failure, rather than the successes of the numerous rural programs that preceded it, extends beyond the desire to uncover or revive a text with cultural value that has been historically overlooked. Given the ways that “cultural value” is typically defined, I am not sure that The Kallikaks has any. However, the object-choice of this chapter does challenge the politics of archival selection in television and media studies. 10 As scholars, we often have access to programming that was popular in its airing, but unpopular, forgotten, and rejected programming (which often aligns with programming found distasteful by majoritarian audiences) will rarely garner enough interest 9 The UCLA Film and Television Archive holds viewing copies of the pilot episode and “The Bells Are Wronging,” which are the only copies of the program available for research viewing. The Paley Center for Media in New York owns each episode of the series, but they are not in circulation, i.e. they have not been added to the Center’s digital collection. I requested that the Registrar for the Center’s archival collection make these episodes available for research, but the request was declined. The materials used in this chapter’s analyses, then, include the two available episodes at UCLA and the NBC Masterbook transcripts (including scripts), which I consulted at the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room of the Library of Congress. These NBC broadcast materials are available there on microfilm, as well as the promotional materials for the program. 10 As a reminder that even those institutional repositories filled with “supposedly enduring materials” are mediated, interpreted, and often work to sustain dominant systems power, Diana Taylor claims “There are several myths attending the archive. One is that it is unmediated, that objects located there might mean something outside the framing of the archival impetus itself. What makes an object archival is the process whereby it is selected, classified, and presented for analysis” (19). For accounts of the ways that archives are selected particular to television and media studies, see: John Corner, “Finding data, reading patterns, telling stories: issues in the historiography of television,” Media, Culture and Society 25.2 (2003): 273-80. Rachel Mosely and Helen Wheatley, “Is Archiving a Feminist Issue? Historical Research and the Past, Present, and Future of Television Studies,” Cinema Journal 47.3 (2008): 152-58. 133 to warrant becoming archival. Attention to failed ideas, projects, and proposals that struggle to become archival is a practice of queer historiography, which involves documenting and interpreting failures, attempts, and absenses. The few texts that make up the material archive of NBC’s failed effort at reviving the rural sitcom illustrate a larger silence around the ways that whiteness began to fortify itself against rurality during the rise of neoliberalism, a marked shift from a decade previous when rural icons were celebrated on television and relief efforts were pouring into rural regions such as Appalachia through the so-called “War on Poverty.” Despite its obscurity today, and audience disapproval in 1977, The Kallikaks warrants attention because it was the first rural sitcom to emerge after that moment in television history known as the “rural purge.” 11 While I will detail the history and motivation for the absenting of rurality from network television in a subsequent section, it is worth noting here that The Kallikaks was NBC’s failed attempt at reviving a format that dominated the Neilsen ratings for rural-skewed CBS for years before the purge. 12 Audience and critical rejection of the rural sitcom’s return, then, indicates a clear shift in television audiences from the early to late 1970s, rather than simply the tastes and objectives of network producers and executives who orchestrated the rural purge in spite of audience demands for rural TV. In order to more fully understand the implications of the rural purge, how it shifted American attitudes toward rural America and the people imagined there, as well as the ideal urban and suburban audience’s sense 11 The “rural purge” is a historically delineated event in American television history, recognized by many scholars working in television studies. For the most complete account of the purge, see Mark Alvey, “‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies’: Quality Demographics and 1960s U.S. Television,” Television: The Critical View. 2 nd ed. Horace Newcomb, New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 12 Rural programming like The Waltons (1972-81) ran concurrently to The Kallikaks, but its setting in the Great Depression allowed it to shirk contemporary social issues in a moment when television executives considered their inclusion paramount to successful programming. As a drama rather than a comedy, it also fostered nostalgia for a time when the rural family supposedly lived through and overcame the economic hardships they faced, rather than succumbing to the stagflation that defined the American economy in the 1970s. 134 of self-definition, this chapter expands a widely studied moment in television history beyond the 1971-72 rural purge season, and into the late 1970s when the rural sitcom attempted a comeback. Beyond contributions to television history and media studies, I want to stage here a conversation with scholars interested in the ways that majoritarian discourse frames and interacts with minoritarian subjects in “post-racial” America. I would include Lauren Berlant’s work on the fraught relationships between cultural fantasies, political emotions, and economic realities that differientiate and define privileged and underprivileged classes of citizenship in both The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997) and Cruel Optimism (2011) among this chapter’s interlocuters. This chapter also intersects with Robyn Wiegman’s work on the emergence of whiteness as an injured identity in Object Lessons (2012). The chapter is, however, in contradistinction to the critical trend of “whiteness studies,” one of Wiegman’s own objects of critique, which emerged in the early twenty-first century with the goal of “rearticulating a postsegregationist white identity at the site of the historical” (Wiegman 171). 13 Rather than rearticulate postsegregationist whiteness in the name of disaffiliating whiteness from white supremacy, I instead articulate the complex relationship whiteness itself 13 Wiegman cites three strands of Whiteness Studies, each of which, in an effort to form an anti-racist whiteness, attempt to disaffiliate forms of whiteness from the legacy of white supremacy. The first looks to the legacy of labor history, which it mines for evidence of the ways that whiteness was historically produced. This model ultimately gestures backward to a pre-white ethnic working-class figure that might bring forth a future of “cross-racial economic affinities” (175). Wiegman argues that this theoretical trend “establishes whiteness as an injured identity: injured, that is, by whiteness itself” (176). The second trend in the field emerged as critics introduced the “white trash” figure into the theoretical fold, which participates in the fantasy of white minoritization, inaugurating an antiracist project for whites who are actually concerned with injured whiteness (184). The white trash figure ostensibly has no racial debt to pay. And finally, a strand of Whiteness Studies also promotes the “race traitor” a white subject who wills himself to divest himself of what George Lipsitz has called “the possessive investment in whiteness,” thus imagining “an empowered humanist and quintessentially masculine subject whose intent to repeal its own whiteness is consecrated as the central practice of anti-racist struggle” (181). Does any act require more privilege than that of racial disavowal? While Whiteness Studies produced many articles and monographs during the early 2000s, the early, key texts that Wiegman cites in this critique are as follows: David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, New York: Verso, 1994; Race Traitor: The Journal of the New Abolitionism; Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, White Trash: Race and Class in America, New York: Routledge, 1996. 135 had with (maintaining) its own supremacy in the 1970s. Thus, I propose The Kallikaks and its reception as texts through which we might witness the relationship between normative urban and suburban whiteness to its rural poor counterpart as necessary to how we understand the ways that dominant whiteness functioned during the rise of neoliberalism, and the role that rurality played in that formation. As we will see, The Kallikaks represented whiteness acting queerly. Given that the show revolves around a white, heteropatriarchal family unit, this may seem a strange statement, and yet the whiteness on the show is also a strange formation. I would not argue that the intersection of an underclass economic position with whiteness “queers” the privileged racial position, and thus my use of the word “queer” to describe the functioning of whiteness on The Kallikaks is not simply a gesture toward the family’s failed whiteness as a testament to the (nonexistent) radicalism of its “white trashiness.” Rather, I find queerness in The Kallikaks because of the queer work the show performs in its reception. Its representations of a particular, nonnormatively sexualized, low-class rurality threatened and offended the white working and middle class status quo to which it was intended to appeal. The fact that the show elicited reactionary responses does not diminish the power of its threat. Thus, as in this larger dissertation project, I join scholars such as Scott Herring who, in order to attend objects that typically fall outside the purview of queer studies, use the term “queer” “primarily, if not exclusively, to signify sexually nonnormative acts rather than a legible lesbian and gay identity” (Herring 98). If we recognize queerness in the country, and even in The Kallikaks, we are opening the possibility of including “throwaway populations” like the rural poor in a queer political framework. These populations are too often assumed incapable of attaining class-consciousness, being stuck in place (and time), and thus counterrevolutionary. As the following demonstrates, there is the potential for 136 representations like The Kallikaks to threaten the logics of white supremacy that continue to secure unequal distributions of wealth and opportunity, which is to say, doing the work of queer politics. 14 3.3 The Rise of Hillbilly Television Between 1952 and 1970, a critical mass of backwoods sitcoms dominated network primetime slots. During this period, television producers believed that urban audiences were able to enjoy rural programming, but the reverse was impossible. Even as late as 1970, when Moore and Grant Tinker pitched The Mary Tyler Moore Show to CBS, Marc Golden, an audience research specialist, told the network, “there are four things America can’t stand: Jews, men with moustaches, New Yorkers, and divorced women” (7). 15 These supposedly urban elements were disfavored, but all Americans were thought to be able to enjoy rural rubes. However, even America’s rubes had to be made for TV. 16 Until this moment in the 1950s, discourses of rural savagery were central to both negative and positive representations of rurality—even comedic ones—making the hillbilly a figure that had to be managed and maintained, shorn of slovenliness and criminality, before he could serve the audiences tuning in to rural sitcoms. 17 Phoebe Bronstein’s work on The Andy Griffith Show demonstrates the ways that the South, through the 14 Christina Hanhardt’s new work on drug addicts within queer social movement history inspires this gesture toward a coalitional queer politics that recognizes, rather than distances itself from, representations of rural poverty. Hanhardt’s insistence on following “the odds of queer activist history” toward “throwaway populations” like addicts and sex workers involved in ACT UP in the 1980s and 1990s brings the political agency of illegibility to the fore in ways that I find instrumental to thinking through the possibility of considering the deviancy of hillbillies like the Kallikaks within a queer studies framework. Christina Hanhardt, “‘Dead Addicts Don’t Recover’: ACT UP’s Needle Exchange and the Subjects of Queer Social Movement History,” University of Southern California Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, 11 Feb. 2015. 15 Sally Bedell, Up the Tube: Primetime in the Silverman Years, New York: Viking, 1981. p.64. 16 The 1967 revisions of the National Association of Broadcasters Television Code demanded television as an augmentation of the institutions of education, church, and home. It precluded images of illicit sex and drunkenness which had before attended many representations of rural America. See Josh Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change, 1968-1978, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. p. 2-3. 17 See Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of An American Icon, Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2005. 137 re-branding of the Southern sheriff, was rehabilitated and made profitable in the volatile 1960s. 18 The entirely white mise-en-scène of rural sitcoms such as The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres, which were set in or portrayed families that originated in Appalachia and the Ozarks, likewise participated in the creation of a safe, sanitized space for imagined all- white audiences. But unlike Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, Appalachia’s mythologized history of “racial innocence” and Anglo-Saxon purity distinguished the Mountain South from the Deep South, which had a serious public relations battle to fight in the 1960s after sheriffs and public safety commissioners like Talahatchie County, Mississippi’s Harold Strider and Birmingham, Alabama’s Bull Connor became the face of Southern white supremacy. 19 Brutal clashes between law enforcement and protestors were broadcast nightly on the national news, and the contradictions between the South as a place of hospitality and small town values, and the South as a place of racial oppression and violence had to be negotiated before audiences could enjoy their weekly trips to Mayberry, even from the comfort of their suburban homes. 20 18 Phoebe Bronstein, “Comic Relief: Andy Griffith, White Southern Sheriffs, and Regional Rehabilitation,” Forthcoming in Camera Obscura 89 (September 2015). 19 Bronstein cites Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith on the ways the South was brought into the national media spotlight during the Civil Rights struggles. See their “Southern Media Cultures” in The Encyclopedia of Southern Cultures 18, Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2011, 21. For the most well-known account of the Mountain South’s mythologized racial innocence, see Carter G. Woodson, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachia America,” The Journal of Negro Life 1.2 (1916): 132-50. In recent years, historians have challenged Woodson’s account, and Appalachian racial innocence more broadly, see John Inscoe, “Olmstead in Appalachia: A Connecticut Yankee Encounters Slavery and Racism in the Southern Highlands, 1854” and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Racial Violence, Lynchings, and Modernization in the Mountain South,” Appalachians and Race: The Moutain South from Slavery to Segregation, University of Kentucky Press, 2001. 20 In this section, I theorize the immense growth in popularity that rural programming enjoyed in post-War America. Like Lynn Spigel and Eric Avila, critics of post-War popular media with whom I am in conversation, I focus on suburban audiences because they were the idealized consumers and citizens that propelled rural representations to popularity. This is not to suggest that there were few urban or rural audiences for these programs, but rather that suburbanization, and the middle class family values that attended it, helped shape television production in the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, while television viewership as a whole grew considerably during these decades, Victoria Johnson’s work shows that television, through the 1960s, was still primarily an urban and suburban phenomenon: “In 1955, television households averaged seventy-eight percent in cities with a population of 50,000 or more, while in rural areas only fifty percent of households had television” (42). For consideration of the ways that particular rural and small town audiences did experience rural television, see Johnson’s third chapter in Heartland TV, “‘Strictly Conventional and Moral’: CBS Reports in Webster Groves,” Heartland TV (2008). 138 After its racial terror became spectacular on the small screen, the South required re- branding for televisual consumption; likewise, those who produced rural television, typically set in or associated with Appalachia and the Ozarks, had to manage regional evidence of American poverty. Because widespread unemployment in southern coal regions drew over three million Appalachians toward Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic cities between the 1940s and 1960s, by the time that rural programming gained popularity, most television viewers had non-mediated access to rurality. 21 If urban television viewers had not yet encountered rural migrants on their city streets and in their industrial centers, they would have likely experienced Appalachia through the national news. Before rural poverty became apparent, politicians and scholars alike described American poverty as an insignificant anomaly, a deviation that government research and public programming could correct. That illusion was so widespread that when Senator Kennedy visited West Virginia during the 1960 Democratic Presidential primary campaign, he “seemed genuinely stunned by the conditions he witnessed,” failing to believe that American citizens, and especially white American citizens, were living in such squalor (Eller 54). The illusion of widespread American affluence ended when a collection of writing, including Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) and Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963), flooded the media with depictions of Appalachian poverty. 22 While most of this writing participated in a reform effort that implored the state to intervene and offer relief, certain detractors, such as the Ford Foundation’s sponsorship of The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, “laid most of the blame for regional backwardness on the provincial culture of the mountain people” (Eller 65), 21 Harkins provides readings of some articles and editorials written by urban residents that denigrate rural migrants in Hillbilly, pgs. 175-77. For details on the Appalachian migration to urban areas, see William Philliber, Clyde McCoy, and Harry Dillingham, eds. The Invisible Minority: Urban Appalachians, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. 22 Ronald Eller, Uneven Grounds: Appalachia Since 1945, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. 139 thus effectively chipping away at the white supremacist claim to Appalachian racial superiority through isolation. 23 Whether commentators placed the blame on rural cultural backwardness or the region’s poor infrastructure, Appalachia became the face of national poverty in the early 1960s, and that face was widely broadcast on television. 24 Despite the widespread dissemination of these images, the comedic rube dominated a televised Appalachia in the 1960s. In an era when politicians and scholars debated the potentially damaging effects of television on families and children, safety became a necessary quality of programming that could capture the ideal audience: the new citizens of suburbia. 25 Thus, by virtue of a white mise-en-scène, combined with a comedic approach to the shock of rural poverty, the sitcom sanitized rural poverty. 26 The “fish out of water” formula, which prevents viewers from identifying with the hillbillies who entertain them, defines nearly all rural programming, including The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Rural humor on The Real McCoys and Petticoat Junction, which did not rely on hillbillies taken out of 23 The belief that Appalachians had the qualities of (racial) character to rise out of poverty dates back to the Reconstruction era. In light of these beliefs, reform efforts aimed at improving the conditions of mountain whites arose in at the historical juncture when Reconstruction efforts to aid African Americans waned. Nina Silber claims that “By creating racial and political myths of the Anglo-Saxonism and unqualified patriotism of Appalachia, northerers learned to view the white people of the southern moutains as unique among the mass of poor whites throughout the South” (256). See Nina Silber, “‘What does America Need so much as Americans?’ Race and Northern Reconciliation with Southern Appalachia, 1870-1900,” Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, ed. John C. Inscoe, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001, 245-58. Also, see Natalie Ring, “The ‘New Race Question’: The Problem of Poor Whites and the Color Line,” The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, ed. Stephanie Cole and Natalie Ring, Arlington, TX: The University of Texas Press at Arlington, 2012. 24 Among the news outlets that translated these sociological texts on Appalachian poverty to television was CBS News’s 1962 documentary “Christmas in Appalachia, which Harkins describes as “movingly [contrasting] the ideal of Yuletide plenty with the ‘wretched’ poverty of the remote Appalachian hollers” (185). See also ABC’s Crossroads, “Sky Pilot of the Cumberlands” (1955), NBC’s Matinee Theater “A Thread that Runs So True (1957), the CBS Playhouse dramatic special “Appalachian Autumn” (1969). Each of these programs lends dramatic flair to the theme of Appalachian poverty, and each is held at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. 25 See Lynn Spigel, “Television in the Family Circle,” Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. 26 Harkins claims that the upbeat, joyful images of hillbillies that coexisted with the media’s attention to Appalachian poverty “tacitly reinforced the widespread belief that the mountain people were trapped in a ‘culture of poverty,’ but redefined it from a crippling cycle of degeneracy and dysfunction to a lifestyle choice of a people who valued leisure pursuits over material advancement” (186). 140 their element or urban cosmopolitans finding themselves stranded on a farm, still relied on an influx of urbane outsiders to create conflict with hillbilly lifestyles. 27 Indeed, the rubes of rural situation comedy are never left to their own devices, free to let their hillbilly flags fly upon an entirely rural mise-en-scène. Rather, urbane characters, and evidence of their material abundance, always counterbalance the rubes, thus contrasting, containing, and ultimately defanging rural poverty on screen. While rural America underwent a migration that mirrored the movements that the Clampetts and the McCoys made within CBS’s Studio City lots—from Appalachia to California—these programs kept rurality contained amongst the individuals who originated there, implying that only the regionally disadvantaged were vulnerable to economic and cultural disgrace. Audiences were aligned with the logical, urbane characters who happened to cross paths with these “fish out of water.” The hillbillies on network primetime were not the only “fish out of water” in the early 1960s. As Lynn Spigel has shown, while sociologists criticized their culturally devoid, homogenous environs, the segment of white America that left families and friends in cities to become the suburban middle class faced anxieties about “rootlessness” in their new, pre-planned communities (Dreamhouse 42). 28 Given these concerns about the new manner of occupying and utilizing space in suburban sprawl, Spigel claims that post-WWII family life was predicated on a particularly fraught relationship of the family unit to the public and private spheres, and television worked to alleviate that tension. As white populations shifted from urban to suburban, 27 See Kristal Brent Zook’s Color by Fox, which claims that comedy cannot invite identification because it deals primarily in stereotypes. Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television, Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1999. 28 While these criticisms dominated suburban studies in the academy, alternative perspectives have emerged to complicate the narrative of suburban homogeneity. See Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, New York: NYUP, 2011. 141 the boundaries between public and private began to blur: “…the central preoccupation in the new suburban culture was the construction of a particular discursive space through which the family could mediate the contradictory impulses for a private haven on the one hand, and community participation on the other” (32). 29 Television became the family’s window to public life, bringing the public sphere into the private space of the home where it could be experienced safely, at a comfortable distance. 30 And yet suburban families were not exposing themselves at a safe distance to the urban malaise from which they so recently escaped. 31 Rather, viewers tuned in to Appalachia and the Ozarks, both of which, like the televisual South bereft of blackness, provided a racialized sense of “safety,” while helping to distinguish new suburban lifestyles from those of backward rural America. 32 Like that of the suburbs, the representational history of Appalachia suggests a universal whiteness by force and mandate, a policed territory that was made safe by the political and geographical fortification of whiteness. Victoria Johnson claims that the Midwest “Heartland” is a site at which the reconstitution of whiteness is “all the more politically powerful 29 Eric Avila’s study of the suburbs and white flight confirms Spigel’s claims about safety and mediations between public and private spheres. The central claim of Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight (2004) is that post-war culture itself had a suburban character in the sense that their was a popular quest for an ordered alternative to the disorder of the city, which was a place of congestion, crime, pollution, anonymity, promiscuity, and diversity in the decades following WWII. 30 While certain critics made attacks on television because of the assumption that it would degrade family values, Spigel clarifies that “It is a truism among cultural historians and media scholars that television’s growth after World War II was part of a general return to family values” (31). Part of her goal in Welcome to the Dreamhouse (2001) was to negotiate that impulse toward family with the contradictory ideal of community participation, and her chapter, “The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America” claims that television served the function of bridging those two ideals that seemed to be at odds. 31 Avila shows that film, not television, served this function of re-presenting the city to those who had escaped it: “the phase of mass suburbanization that settled on [Southern California] during the postwar period brought forth an alternative sociospatial order, one very different form the racial and sexual mélange of the modern city. Iterating a fear of going out into the big city, film noir and the urban science fiction film called for a privatized alternative to the public city and anticipated a new spatial experience that promised order, regimentation, and uniformity” (105). 32 While the majority of scholarship on the suburbs focuses on the features that distinguished suburban from urban living, suburbanization was clearly not a process of going “back to the land,” even if it was a retreat to “small town values.” For an analysis of the anti-urbanism that defined the suburbs, and yet also distinguished them from rural America, see Steven Conn, Americans Against the City, Kindle loc. 4712-4892. 142 for the fact that it is not couched in overtly raced terms, but, rather through a spatial imaginary” that presumes racial invisibility (18). Likewise, rural programming gained mass appeal during the decades when a growing population of white suburbanites utilized television for self- definition, and that self-definition was overtly racialized. Rural television provided all the comforts that a white, suburban fantasy of racial invisibility entailed. The Beverly Hillbillies director Richard Whorf described rural programming as a safe family choice because, unlike urban programming, with rural television, “You know that no one will be killed” (Barnouw 307). For a population of viewers negotiating their own newfound homogeneity, as well as their relationships to the racialized “dangers” of the city they have left behind, rural television became a “safe” way to experience alterity. 33 The suburban desire for “safe” programming that could be easily welcomed into the family home brought the rural family into television, even if the market logic of networking meant that television was not necessarily being brought to the rural family. 34 Considering that safety defined their existence—touching everything from community involvement to viewing habits—it is no coincidence that rural television enjoyed its strongest duration of popularity precisely during the years of the greatest increase in the nation’s suburban population, which jumped from 35.1 million to 75.6 million between 1950 and 1970 (Avila 3). Television ratings reflected the ease with which American viewers, particularly suburban viewers gathering around televisions as the centerpieces of their new pre-fabricated homes, welcomed rural hillbillies into their families. Television historian Mark Alvey claims that CBS’s 33 In Make Room for TV, Lynn Spigel reads advertisements for televisions and other consumer comforts of the post-War suburbs, showing that “[such] advertisements appeared in a general climate of postwar expectations about television’s ability to draw the family closer together” because the family would prefer to stay at home and watch programs together, rather than going out into the public sphere for amusement. 34 In regards to the uneven distribution of broadcast networking, Victoria Johnson explains, “In the market logic of networking, the Heartland became important only as its residents’ consuming power could strengthen its economy and enhance its strategic position” (43). 143 rural programming was so popular that “in 1964… CBS was essentially blind selling its prime- time schedule, locking sponsors in to a time slot to be filled later by a programme” (26). These programs included Paul Hennings’ The Beverly Hillbillies, featuring a family from the Ozarks that finds itself amongst the California ultra-rich, which ranked first in the Neilsen rankings from 1962-64 and remained in the top twenty during primetime until 1970. Weekly shenanigans at a rural hotel on Petticoat Junction, another Paul Henning show, also did well in the ratings, debuting third in 1963 and cancelled at its low point (#34 out of 88 shows) in 1970. Petitcoat Junction had its own CBS spin-off, Green Acres, which enjoyed top twenty success from its debut in 1964 through 1969. The ratings successes of these rural sitcoms, along with The Real McCoys (1957-63), The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68), Mayberry RFD (1968-71), Gomer Pyle, USMC (1964-69), and Lassie (1954-71), not to mention rural sketch programs such as Hee-Haw and The Lawrence Welk Show, indicate that rural programming was a trend embraced by a wide swath of the American viewing public, spanning from country to city. Victoria Johnson quotes Si Siman, the co-producer of ABC’s country music program Jubilee USA, on the perceived indistinguishability between rural and urban television audiences during this era: We told them, with the advent of television, Broadway as they knew it, and Main Street, U.S.A., as we knew it, were almost becoming one and the same because the population was exposed to the same entertainment … Instead of being tremendously apart, New York and the Ozarks were like super highways running parallel to one another—and getting closer all the time. (Johnson 59) 35 Toward the end of the 1960s, when television executives began to turn their attention from sheer ratings success to demographics and niche programming, rural programming would come to be 35 Johnson quotes from Reta Spears-Stewart, Remembering the Ozark Jubilee, Springfield, MO: Stewart, Dillbeck & White Productions, 1993, 8. 144 associated with rural audiences and an aging population, instead of the younger, suburban consumers who once welcomed the hillbillies into their livingrooms. Still, there was a period of time in which the rural aesthetics of the Appalachians and Ozarks were realized as the national aesthetic of safety, whiteness, familiarity, and escape, despite overwhelming disapproval from Hollywood establishment. 3.4 Television’s Rural Purge, 1970-71 Entertainment industry trade publication Variety had few words of praise for the rural programs that dominated television rankings throughout the 1960s. 36 A 1968 Variety review of Petticoat Junction attacked Neilsen’s sample audiences with insults that suggested fomenting tensions between industry insiders and television producers, who were accused of degrading audiences with lowbrow content: As this little tribe of dreary hicks chugs into its sixth season the question now is how much longer Nielsen’s horde of boondockers can tolerate this saccharine nonsense. The mindless sweetness emoted here is enough to make a viewer do violence to the tube. That the producers have hepped (that’s hepped, not hipped) it up with a little heart comedy still leaves this anachronism with meager excuse for existence other than financial relief for cast and crew. (Variety 1968) 36 Negative reviews for The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres appear at each season premier in Variety. Highlights include: 3 Oct. 1962, p. 35, which calls the first episode of Hillbillies “painful to sit through,” and 13 Sept. 1967, p. 56, which claims that hillbilly comedy has “appealed to the American psyche for reasons unfathomable.” After the rural purge, Variety warms up to The Beverly Hillbillies in syndication, calling the Clampetts the nation’s “first family,” and the show “a television classic and an American institution.” I contribute this shift in opinion to the lack of primetime competition for the show in syndication, as many of the earlier Variety reviews were aghast that the show could outrank more “respectable” programming from documentarians and more urban-slanted networks like NBC. 145 Ironically, the reviewer insists that those Neilsen audiences who, by design, determine a program’s “hipness,” are anachronistic, out of touch with current trends in entertainment. He determines that the audience is out of fashion by their positive response to the producers “hepping up” (an anachronistic variant of the term “hip”) the show by selling “mindless sweetness,” which draws upon a century of rural discourses that locate the country not in a far off place, but rather in a far past tense. The show’s “sweetness,” not its rural setting, is the quality that precludes Petticoat Junction, and other “[tribes] of deary hicks,” from modernity. This devaluation of rural politeness and escapism is part of a broader shift in industry standards, away from entertainment programming and toward an embrace of television’s public service duties. By the late 1960s, television was no longer intended as a “safe” and “sweet” way to bring families together through shared amusement. Rather, 1961-1966 marked television’s “reform years,” a culmination of factors ranging from atonement for quiz show excess, to the FCC’s increased pressure on network programmers to take responsibility for their content, and the industry’s piqued interest in demographic marketing. 37 According to Victoria Johnson, as well as scholars of Cold War television culture such as Michael Curtin and Laurie Oullette, television’s reform years marked a period of tension between cultural producers and consumers in which “‘a small body of opinion leaders… had common concerns uncommon to the great majority of 37 FCC Chairman Newton Minow proposed an industry shift that would elevate the American public through consumption of educational television programming. Minow was clear in what he believed should be the didactic function of television in the cultural and political climate of the New Frontier. Speaking to those producers of situation comedies and action-adventure shows that made up the “wasteland,” he made the following statement: “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.” Newton Minow, “Television and the Public Interest,” 9 May 1961, National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, DC. <http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm> For an account of the quiz show scandals that rocked the industry in the late 1950s, see Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2 nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 146 Americans’” (Johnson 90). 38 Like the Variety reviewers who could not fathom populist tastes, regulators, politicians, and cultural elites began shifting the tides of television programming toward “quality programming,” with an emphasis on the documentary, by the decade’s close. 39 However, television’s rural purge of 1970-71 was not a direct response to threats of government intervention or critical appeals about the medium’s responsibility to create an informed public. As Herman Gray’s work insists, in order for television to succeed, it must operate according to cultural “common sense,” “[framing] its representations in appropriate and accessible social terms that express the shared assumptions, knowledge, and experiences of viewers who are situatied along different alliances of race, class, and gender…” (58). In the two decades preceding Gray’s area of study (the 1980s), age and region were the “alliances” that concerned the television industry. Decades of demographic research brought about a shift, from lowbrow apolitical programming—much of it rural—that drew in aging populations and children, to programs that addressed contemporary issues, such as racial and gender politics, with the intention of capturing younger, more urban and educated audiences. 40 In other words, the anti-populist sentiment most associated with Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland speech”—which 38 See Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995; Laurie Oullette, Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 39 Curtin’s work on the 1960s as “the golden age” of the television documentary makes clear that any of these linear causalities regarding the shift from lowbrow to highbrow content throughout the 1960s fail to account for the convergence of social, economic, political, and institutional factors that linked the critique of lowbrow American television to the politics of the Cold War. Curtain claims that Kennedy’s New Frontier agenda tapped television as the mass media that would “transform popular images of the United Sates and … position it as an active leader of the Free World” (8). Needless to say, this image was not going to be achieved by The Beverly Hillbillies. 40 While Les Brown’s Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box provided an account of the quest for younger, affluent viewers, more recently, scholars have challenged the “sea change” narrative of the rural purge, given that years of demographic research by marketers and networks themselves led up to the rural purge, which was not a hasty decision, nor the product of “the personal vision of a few executives” (Alvey 15). In other words, the purge was a culimation of years of marketing and demographics research. Mark Alvey makes this argument in “‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies’: Quality Demographics and 1960s U.S. Television,” Television: The Critical View, 2 nd ed. Horace Newcomb, New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 147 Oullette has identified as “socially and historically bound to urban, upper-middle-class, white Eurocentric, university-bound, and, very often, masculine experiences”—was recognized as lucrative as well as tasteful. As such, networks began to market themselves to younger, urban viewers, eschewing older and rural viewers, as well as racial minorities. Network research identified these audiences as having the purchasing power to attract advertisers, but as Janet Staiger explains, the type of programming that would appeal to younger, more urban audiences was not obvious to producers. Television executives were aware that polling as far back as 1967 showed that television was losing better-educated, affluent viewers, and the purge marked the first time that programmers, specifically CBS’s new programming executive Fred Silverman, attempted to appeal to that disaffected yet desired targeted audience. 41 Networks would no longer rely on the assumption that, rather than seek out specific programs that appealed to their particular interests, viewers would continue to watch television as a general practice. 42 As such, CBS took the first step toward becoming part of a medium that is and was increasingly reliant upon niche marketing and programming. Various television historians have written about the rural purge as a monumental shift in the industry’s approach to programming and demographics, but each of these studies end in 1971, when “CBS killed everything with a tree in it,” and more urban, realistic, and urbane 41 Janet Staiger, Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era, New York: NYUP, 2000. 97-98. Additionally, Josh Ozersky’s description of marketing research into The Red Skelton Show, a notoriously- backwoods variety program, is one of the most clear examples I have seen that reveals the logic behind the rural purge. Ozersky writes, “As early as 1967, the reason behind those sales problems was obvious: it lay in the nature of Skelton’s audience. The survey broke down the ratings across a half dozen lines of cleavage: blue-collar versus white-collar, South versus Northeast, grade school education versus one or more years of college, annual income under $5000 versus income over $10000, and most important of all, adults 18-34 versus adults over 50. The Skelton show was fourth in the overall top ten and high on the lists of blue-collar, Southern, grade school education, and annual income under $5000. But he did not even appear on any of the other top tens. A huge line of cleavage demarked the TV audience now; the question was only who could exploit it first” (45). 42 The theory of “least objectionable programming” dominated programming rationales until the early 1970s. See Paul Klein, “Why you watch what you watch when you watch,” TV Guide (July 24, 1971) 6-9. 148 programming took hold. 43 However, the effects of the rural purge, and the re-introduction of the rural sitcom after the dust had settled, extend into the late 1970s and early 1980s, and they contributed and responded to changing cultural attitudes toward rurality and the (white) rural family. The remainder of this chapter will show that an extension of interest in the rural purge into the late 1970s, when NBC attempted to re-introduce the rural sitcom, reveals the role that rurality played in defining the normative American family and its viewing preferences from the 1960s through the beginning of the 1980s. In 1977, NBC became the first network to turn “backward,” toward the rural family sitcom that had captured popular audiences a decade prior. Yet with The Kallikaks, their failed effort at this backward revival, NBC also became the first network to televise white rural poverty, which would become a widespread spectacle of “white trash” TV in the decades to follow. 44 Audience rejection of this new form of redneck TV suggests that the normative (read: middle-class and white) American viewing public could not enjoy representations of degenerate whitness at that precarious cultural and historical juncture. 3.5 Working-Class Whiteness and Return of the Rural Sitcom By 1977, six years after the rural purge, NBC became the first network to take another shot at the rural-themed sitcom. However, by continuing to cater to educated, urban, affluent 43 Green Acres actor Pat Buttram spoke about 1971 as “the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it.” However, CBS’s Robert Wood described the changes as temporal, not spatial, claiming that he wanted to “[change] the character of the network from more bucolic material to more fresh or updated, contemporary, whatever you want to call it” (Gitlin 207-208). Wood’s seamless collapse of urban and contemporary is striking, and while Buttram points to the purge as a particularly rural one, television executives speaking for and about CBS during this change consistently speak of it as a move toward temporal “relevancy,” not a move away from rurality. 44 While The Kallikaks particular brand of rural poverty failed with audiences, economic upturns in the 1980s and 1990s saw the explosion of popular “white trash” television, with varying degrees of relation to the rural. Within this trend there is a “heartwarming” gradient, ranging from the loveable, working-class Illinois Connor family on Roseanne (1988-1997), to the crude Bundies of Married with Children (1987-1997). Meanwhile, degenerate forms of whiteness became a staple of “reality” programming on talk shows like The Jerry Springer Show (1991-present), which hit its peak of popularity in the late 1990s. 149 audiences, NBC would approach rurality from a different angle, one intended for those who had been tuning in to “relevant” programming like All in the Family, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Bringing the nationally debated issue of the welfare state to the rural sitcom, NBC’s The Kallikaks depicts the rural family as unequivocally backward: a band of dirty, ignorant deviants committed to living off the system rather than living off the land. This new incarnation of the rural white family was entirely disconnected from the innocent ignorance of a clan like the Beverly Hillbillies’ Clampetts, who lacked formal education and urban refinement, but whose honest, family-oriented, anti-materialistic values situated them as the moral center of an otherwise shallow urban sphere. A departure from the fish-out-of-water formula, The Kallikaks was the first incarnation of what is instantly recognizable today as “white trash” rural television. 45 With his endless list of entitlements, each episode of The Kallikaks features patriarch J.T. Kallikak in a unique attempt to “beat the system” that has left him—an economically-insecure, rural white man—behind. Fiddle and banjo open The Kallikaks theme song, as Hee Haw host Roy Clark sings “It’s hard to like the US government / They’re taxing us and taking every cent […] You must be out of sorts / When they’ve got you by the shorts / But no one ever said that life was fair.” Fairness, the state, taxation, inflation—issues that were being covered by the nightly newscast—were also up for debate on The Kallikaks, and J.T.’s complaints about “the system” sound a lot like another popular televisual representation of white male victimhood: Archie Bunker. After five consecutive years at the top, All in the Family—the most cited example of 45 I revisit the upswing in rural television popularity in the final chapter of this dissertation, but it should be noted here that the majority of the “white trash” rural television that has gained immense popularity is not scripted, but reality TV. I am referring to television phenomena such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (TLC) and Duck Dynasty (A&E), as well as more minor yet still wide-reaching shows like Moonshiners (Discovery), Swamp People (History), My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding (TLC), Buckwild (MTV), and Appalachian Outlaws (History). 150 urban programming that tackled controversial social issues—had just begun to slip in the ratings in the 1976-77 season when The Kallikaks aired. Like The Kallikaks, the All in the Family opening theme takes a cliché statement of nostalgia as its title and refrain: “Those were the days.” The days that the Bunkers fondly remember (or imagine) at the start of each episode were economically secure—“Didn't need no Welfare state”—and fiercely heteronormative—“Girls were girls and men were men.” These two concepts, economic security and heteronormativity, were beginning to intertwine in the 1970s, as the Republican party began to coalesce around both Evangelical Christianity and big business to steer the nation toward the Right. 46 As we will see, the rural poor Kallikaks, with their ambitions to spawn a house full of children that would fill the welfare rolls (and thus, allegedly, line their pockets) were the antithesis of the Bunkers’ urban imaginings. All in the Family was creator Norman Lear’s first attempt at capturing younger, more urban audiences for CBS, and the network first aired the program in the time slot directly following what is arguably the most backward—and most enduring—rural program on television: country music variety show Hee Haw. 47 While the time slot decision may seem miscalculated, All in the Family was not alien to the “common sense” percolating in rural 46 Nixon’s infamous “New Majority” strategy, which rallied the working class against a “liberal cultural elite” began to take shape in 1972. According to Cowie, Nixon worked to “[make] workers’ economic interests secondary to an appeal to their moral backbone, patriotic rectitude, whiteness, and machismo in the face of the inter- related threats of social decay, racial unrest, and faltering national purpose” (127). David Harvey sums up the ways that the working class elected to turn toward the Right during the rise of neoliberalism most succinctly: “This political base could be mobilized through the positives of religion and cultural nationalism and negatively through coded, if not blatant, racism, homophobia, and anti-feminism. The problem was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of culture, but the ‘liberals’ who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups (blacks, women, environmentalists, etc.). […] Not for the first, nor, it is to be feared, the last time in history has a social group been persuaded to vote against its material, economic, and class interests for cultural, nationalist, and religious reasons” (50-51). 47 Hee Haw only ran three years on CBS, premiering in 1969 and ending with the purge in 1971 (shortly after the network introduced All in the Family), but it ran an impressive twenty years in syndication. Re-runs still air today on RFD-TV. For a historical account of All in the Family, see Janet Straiger, Blockbuster TV: Must See Sitcoms in the Network Era, New York: NYUP, 2000. 151 America in the early 1970s. What would ultimately become the most successful television program of the 1970s featured a white male protagonist, a dock-worker from Queens, waging a battle against “the system” he felt was oppressing him. These concerns were no more foreign to rural America than to the urban white working class that Archie represented. As it relates to The Kallikaks, I am interested in the ways that All in the Family was considered “relevant” programming, meaning that Archie’s feelings of white male injury in a post-Civil Rights era were considered among (if not definitive of) the most relevant feelings of that era. Archie’s bigotry and paranoia, as well as his insistence on systemic unfairness toward the white working class, set the tone for the rural programming that would attempt to re-emerge on primetime, five years into All in the Family’s successful run. 48 However reactionary Archie Bunker’s longing for a time when America “Didn’t need no welfare state / Everybody pulled his weight,” it is also a far cry from the queer crisis of white masculinity on the pilot episode of The Kallikaks. Archie Bunker may have spent his free time shouting racial epithets from his easy chair, but because he was a “pot-bellied, cigar-smoking, church-going son of Middle America,” rather than a backwoods hick, Archie’s urban resistance to social change was staged differently than J.T. Kallikak’s (Ferretti 70). Kallikak’s method for “beating the system” was not to rail against it like Archie, but rather to join the ranks of the 48 Emily Nussbuam’s New Yorker piece on the audience response to All in the Family, “The Great Divide: Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rise of the bad fan,” does an impeccable job of capturing the difference between those viewers who understood Lear’s (stated) intention of defanging bigotry through comedy, and those who embraced Archie because they saw him as one of their own. For an overview of the debate over All in the Family during the time of its airing, see Fred Ferretti, “Are Racism and Bigotry Funny?: C.B.S. 'Family' Series May Shock Some,” The New York Times, 12 Jan. 1971, p. 70; Laura Z. Hobson, “As I Listened to Archie Say ‘Hebe’ . . .” The New York Times 12 Sept. 1971. See also Lear’s response to Hobson, “As I Read How Laura Saw Archie…” The New York Times 10 Oct. 1971. 152 minorities for whom “the system” was allegedly tipped. 49 Unlike Archie, who infamously claimed that African Americans had it easier because he “didn’t have no millions of people marching and protesting to get [him his] job, ” on the pilot episode of The Kallikaks, J.T. plans to eschew work altogether, explaining to his wife, “we could be millionaires if you was a deaf, dumb, blind, nymphodesiac [sic]” because “a family like us could get three to four hundred dollars a month on welfare.” 50 J.T.’s downward aspirations toward social welfare, and toward (sexualized) disability, make it clear that at this juncture in the late 1970s, show creators Stanley Ralph Ross and Roger Price did not want the return of rural television to coincide with a turn away from the incendiary politics that kept All in the Family in the number one spot for five consecutive seasons. 51 That said, J.T. Kallikak’s weekly schemes—from welfare scams to fraudulent business deals—differentiate rurality from urban iterations of injured whiteness and align the Kallikaks with the specter of the urban black family, which was supposedly destroying the moral fiber of America by its reliance on the welfare state. Thus with the Kallikaks, a new form of rural whiteness emerged on television: the white trash family. 52 3.6 The Right-to-Work South and the Redneck Ideal Following the geographic shift in American industry, from the unionized Northeast to the anti-union South, film and television fixated on an emergent class of rural outlaws and “good ole 49 In this way, the Kallikak family occupies the stereotype of the black family in a manner similar to the poor white tenant families of the early twentieth century, like Erskine Caldwell’s Lesters, whose representations incited anxiety in normative white populations, which I unpacked in Chatper Two. 50 The tendency for J.T. to mispronounce words when attempting to make a claim about a social issue also mirrors All in the Family, on which a common punchline involved Archie arguing with his liberal son-in-law Mike, but being rendered automatically incorrect in his reactionary stance because he did not have control over his language. Here, J.T, mispronounces “nymphomaniac,” the suggestion he was trying to make being that his wife should be more proliferative, making them rich in children, thus in welfare. 51 Stanley Ralph Ross was also a writer for All in the Family. 52 The white trash family did not succeed in its rural form with The Kallikaks in 1977, but the show laid the groundwork for a host of working-poor family sitcoms in the 1980s and 1990s, which ranged from the abject— Married with Children (1987-1997)—to the heart-warming—Roseanne (1988-1997). 153 boys” in struggles against their own version of “the System”—typically figured as the police— and the vice lords and urban corporations with whom they conspired. Indeed, if television saw the emergence of the white trash welfare family in the wake of Archie Bunker’s smash hit bigotry, the good-natured and apolitical good ole boy character also became popular at the close of the 1970s. In his argument about the Southern cycle of films that pitted individualist heroes against villains who represented a corrupt “System” in the seventies, Derek Nystrom claims that programs like The Dukes of Hazzard defanged the cycle’s working class radicalism, marking the good ole boy instead with a “sunnier kind of southern white working-class masculinity” (80). Although certainly exhibiting a “sunnier” attitude about their oppression by the law and their adrenaline-pumping methods of evasion, The Dukes of Hazzard theme song shares the same crisis of white masculinity with All in the Family and The Kallikaks. It begins, “Just’a good ole boys / Never meanin’ no harm / Beats all you ever saw / Been in trouble with the law since they day they was born.” Rather than aligning the Duke boys with the anarchic elements of rural culture, their outlaw status as moonshine runners wishing only to do their business, “never meanin’ no harm,” aligns them instead with another class of good ole boys: the political architects of the New Right, who, in their attention to “social issues” that would detract from questions of economic class, harnessed the spirit of cultural icons like Bo and Luke Duke as early as the 1970s. The police, bosses, and government officials who tried to keep the good ole boys down embodied the backward qualities of Southern white masculinity, such as racism, corruption, and hostility, thus effectively making the Dukes’ brand of outlaw redneck masculinity palatable even to those who held negative conceptions of the rural South. Once the leftist and antiauthoritarian elements of his character had been evacuated, New Right commentators were free to claim that “‘being a good ole boy’ was ‘not a consequence of 154 birth or breeding; it cuts across economic and social lines; it is a frame of mind that life is nothing to get serious about’” [sic] (Nystrom 104). After this representational shift, working- class Southerners and Wall Street businessmen could imagine themselves as allied within a new class of (white) Americans who are working against state intervention, and the Right capitalized on this geographically- and economically-fluid class configuration. Perhaps needless to say, neither of the most popular working-class representations of the 1970s and 1980s—Archie Bunker or the Duke boys—posed any threat to the status quo. Commentators in the 1972 Presidential election dubbed viewers who identified with the supposedly “good-hearted” bigotry of All in the Family “the Archie Bunker vote,” and they voted for Nixon. Likewise, the New Right seized upon good ole boys, dispelling their potential for “radical energies of working-class militancy” (Nystrom 105). Thus, the two dominant televisual representations of whiteness “beating the system” in the 1970s—both urban and rural—were co-opted by the political Right. 53 3.7 Whiteness, Injury, and The Kallikaks As becomes apparent in these three regionally and aesthetically distinct forms of white masculinity that set out to “beat the system” on All in the Family, The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Kallikaks, popular culture played a role in the attempted fortification of an increasingly precarious whiteness in the deindustrializing, post-Civil Rights seventies. During the years when programming like All in the Family and The Dukes of Hazzard succeeded with audiences, communities of color were transitioning from grief to grievance according to rights-based logics 53 I am not suggesting that the working class was entirely co-opted by the Right, even if its representation in popular culture suggested as much. One notable example of interracial affiliation and radical energy in the labor movement was the 1972 struggle over the pace of production at the Chevrolet Vega Plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Labor historian Jefferson Cowie claims that when the Lordstown workers gained national attention, “People gravitated to the refreshing vision of youth, vitality, inter-racial solidarity, and enlightenment hidden from the public behind the likes of television’s Archie Bunker, pro-war labor leadership, and the growing politics of the blue-collar backlash” (48). 155 of reparative justice. In turn, whiteness shifted from a formation of privilege to a formation of grief, as it began, through these representations of white injury, to make its own cultural and legal demands for reparation. 54 Clarifying the systemic logic behind these representational politics, Robyn Wiegman describes whiteness as a formation that shifts according to the inroads made by racialized resistance to dominant systems of power (162). Which is not to say that white privilege diminishes as minority communities make claims toward civil rights, but rather that whiteness began to experience and describe itself in relation to rhetorics of injury, victimhood, and particularity. In her exegesis on racial melancholia, Anne Anlin Cheng asks, “If one traditional method of restitution has been the conversion of the disenfranchised person from being subjected to grief to being a subject speaking grievance, what are the advantages and disadvantages of that transformation?” As the victimized white men of 1970s television demonstrate, one disadvantage is the white co-optation of grief that spread across both rural and urban forms of working-class whiteness. If the American working class shifted from an economic identity that was culturally racialized as white, to a cultural identity that was economically politicized as victimized, that class also retained its sense of racial entitlement. It was in this environment that the re- introduction of rural programming failed. After critics across the board lambasted it, The Kallikaks ran a short five episodes and was never renewed for a full season. 55 Unlike the 54 While theorists such as Roopali Mukherjee locate white claims of “reverse discrimination” amidst the battles surrounding affirmative action in the nineties, the “unveiling of the category of whiteness” in claims about American meritocracy began as early as the sixties: “[Whiteness’s] claim to normalcy—the silent hegemony of its centrality—disrupted by epistemic shifts since the civil unrests of the sixties, the category of whiteness, and white masculinity with it, appears to have tumbled toward crisis” (Mukherjee 42). Among State petitions to alleviate white injury as early as the seventies, I include the issue of court-mandated busing, which was meant to achieve educational equality among racial groups (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971). 55 Bill Carter, reviewer for The Baltimore Sun, claimed that the premise of The Kallikaks is “a sort of Archie Bunker gone country” (“Enough Stupidity”). This comparison between the two is apt, but The Kallikaks was rejected for the exact reasons that Archie titilated and attracted sixty million Americans every week: “[The show] 156 successful gestures of white men struggling against the system on All in the Family and The Dukes of Hazzard, The Kallikaks showcased a particular, rural form of whiteness that—by accessing a long history of perceived rural criminality, degeneracy, and moral contamination— threatened that formation’s ascendancy in the moment when it imagined itself as most vulnerable to losses of power. This threat, one suggesting that normative, working and middle class white families were becoming structurally closer to the impoverished dregs of whiteness in rural America, worked to instantiate an affective climate of revulsion toward rural representation. Because industry and organized labor were concentrated in the urban Northeast and industrializing Midwest, and because rural poverty had been made spectacular throughout the 1960s, white resentment in rural America was staged differently than in its urban iterations. The spectacle of rural whiteness threatened those urban and suburban white audiences who imagined themselves as having the potential to become “white trash” alongside the Kallikaks of West Virginia, a family that moved to “Nowhere, California” in search of a better life, but never found it. 56 Those same audiences who were feeling the effects of deindustrialization and economic downturn in the 1970s—including the possibility of their own dependence upon social welfare— could imagine themselves contaminated by the rurality they found on The Kallikaks. In this way, is… about as funny as ignorance, illiteracy or racism, three subjects the show tries to make jokes out of” (“Lemon”). See Bill Carter, “Is this the Sourest Lemon of All?” The Baltimore Sun 31 July 1977, p. TV2; Bill Carter, “There’s still enough stupidity in Kallikaks for viewers to get the message,” The Baltimore Sun 3 Aug. 1977, B3; Fob, Review of ‘The Kallikaks.’ Variety 288.1 (Aug 10, 1977): 46; Marvin Kitman, “NBC Goes for the Bottom,” Newsday 24 Aug. 1977, p. 71A; Cecil Smith, “Homely Hokum of the Kallikaks,” The Los Angeles Times, 3 Aug. 1977, p. H18. 56 I contrast the rejection of the degenerate rural sitcom to the embrace of horror films like Deliverance. The latter captured the popular imagination of rural degeneracy, but normative American audiences could enjoy the film, imagining themselves as more closely aligned with the yuppie protagonists than the deranged hillbillies that they violently encounter on their canoe trip down a Georgia river. The sodomitical mountaineers of Deliverance were clearly figured as Other to the audiences they taunted, both middle and working classes. For an account of the complex modes of identification and disidentification that the film incited, see Ryan Lee Cartwright, Peculiar Places: A Queer History of Rural Nonconformity, Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2011. 157 the show invites us to take stock of a moment when, as Lauren Berlant argues in Cruel Optimism, “the dissolution of optimistic objects/scenarios that had once held the space open for the good-life fantasy [opens onto] dramas of adjustment to the transformation of what had seemed foundational into those binding kinds of optimistic relation we call ‘cruel’” (3). For the Kallikaks, as well as the white audiences that rejected them, the optimistic object that seemed in dissolution after years of deindustrialization and gestures toward reparative justice for minoritarian subjects was whiteness itself. Their drama of adjustment disallowed participation in the disparagement of white rurality. The Kallikaks emerges from this scene as queerly backward in its ability to render the white status quo’s loss of its optimistic object visible. The show’s visual narration is not simply that of a comedic rural whiteness, displaced from Appalachia or the Ozarks onto “Nowhere, California” (The Beverly Hillbillies hit that mark a decade prior). Rather, the trans-mediated elements of The Kallikaks, i.e. its reception, also narrated the felt displacement of whiteness from the fruits of its supremacy. 3.8 Representing and Rejecting Rural Failure On each episode of The Kallikaks, writers Stanley Ralph Ross and Roger Price attempted to humorize the fantasmal experience of white precarity and entitlement. For instance, on the show’s third episode, “Swami, How I Love Ya,” the first scene opens with a shot of the male family members—J.T., his precocious son Junior, and hired mechanic Oscar—sitting around a table in a filthy kitchen playing Scrabble. Junior exclaims “A-N-O-I-A… Paranoia!” J.T. reveals his lack of education and extensive vocabulary by asking his son, “Pair of what?” Junior explains: “Paranoia is a disease, Dad. It’s when a person thinks everytbody in the world is out to get him.” In a manner similar to ways that Archie Bunker reacts to his educated son-in-law on All in the 158 Family (but without the warm, clean, and secure mise-en-scène of the Bunker home), J.T. barks back, “That ain’t no disease, boy. That’s life!” And so it is for the Kallikak family, who never venture beyond the filthy kitchen and living room that set the parameters of the rural, white trash comedy, as if their optimism about the good life ran dry as soon as they transplanted their roots from rural Appalachia into the hopeless, barren California desert. Indeed, while Junior and his sister Bobbi Lou leave the home to attend school, and Bobbi Lou works evenings at a fast food joint (another indication of the shift from industry to service in a dead-end American economy), J.T. and his wife Venus never leave the run-down property by the side of the road in Nowhere, California. As such, the show explores the white family as broken, bored, and dispossessed. Its avaricious desire to beat the system aligns the Kallikaks with minoritarian “enemies” of white normality, and the state that purportedly supports them. They become part of what Berlant has described as “the people at the bottom of the virtue/value scale... who are said to be creating the crisis that is mobilizing the mainstream public sphere to fight the good fight on behalf of normal national culture” (Queen of America 176). The relegation of the titular family to the bottom of the virtue/value scale comes as no surprise, especially considering that the real Kallikaks were not a band of fictional heartland rubes, but rather were based on an actual family, one that helped “prove” the heredity of feeble- mindedness and criminality and thus legitimated the American eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. The popularization of degenerate family studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—particularly Richard Dugdale’s 1871 The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity and Henry Goddard’s 1912 The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness—contributed to an environment in which the US Supreme Court could uphold, in the 1927 case Buck vs. Bell, Virginia’s right to involuntarily sterilize its 159 mentally disabled citizens. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. explains the decision’s logic in his account for the majority: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…” (Keely 25). I bring up these eugenic studies, and their resonance in the late seventies, not as an argument for degraded whiteness as a form of injury that diminishes racial debt, but rather to recognize that the language used to describe the poor whites who make up eugenic archives often replicated “stereotypes explicitly connected to racist renditions of blackness” (Wiegman 184). NBC’s historical point of reference, and its move toward comically representing this very real eugenic family study, was not lost on audiences in the 1970s. A Variety reviewer introduces the show through a description of the family studies that inspired it, which he remembers being taught as part of his high school sex education: “In New York high school days gone by, biology teachers avoided the issue of how we got here, but managed to present case histories on the dangers of in-breeding. One of the horrible examples was a New Jersey family in an isolated community that had developed a high incidence of mental defectiveness, poverty, illness and delinquency. They were given the fictitious name of Kallikak” (46). Interestingly, The Kallikaks creators relocated their version of the Kallikak family from the “real” family’s rootedness in New Jersey—the U.S. state perhaps most clearly assocated with suburbanization—to West Virginia. 57 West Virginia’s eastern panhandle region provides space for Washington D.C.’s suburban sprawl, but the state is hardly associated with urban or suburban living. In fact, following Appalachia’s 57 While the 2000 census indicated that sixty percent of New Jersey’s land remained rural, New York City and Philadelphia have metropolitan areas that comprise 17 of the state's 21 counties. See Wendel Cox, “New Jersey: Still Suburbanizing,” New Geography, 9 March 2011. Web. 160 media coverage during the early 1960s “War on Poverty,” which I mentioned above, West Virginia’s presence in the national imaginary was most clearly associated with rural poverty and isolation. Thus, The Kallikaks were not positioned too close to their viewers’ homes, but rather were spatially transposed into the rural hinterlands, where, far from the sprawl, ideal viewers could laugh at their redneck antics as they had laughed at the rubes who preceded their presence in urban and suburban living rooms. In a changing television culture, through the Kallikak family, The Kallikaks producers re-introduced rural programming to their urban and suburban audiences with this shared knowledge of rural degeneracy in mind, transforming rural TV from an expression of national heartland ideals to a spectacle of otherness. This spectacle allowed audiences to cohere around their shared values of progress and industry, values that the Kallikak family most clearly lacked. However, at this historical juncture, the producers’ plan backfired. It was no matter that the show featured a Kallikak family from isolated West Virginia; audiences refused association with the family, even at a distance. The show’s overwhelmingly negative reviews assume that because it deals in hillbillies and rural themes, it is only suited for rural audiences. This judgment documents a stark departure from logics that dominated rural programming less than a decade earlier, when any aspect of urbanity was feared to have a narrowing effect, and rurality was presumably relatable to a wide swath of the viewing public. And yet by 1977 with the emergence of The Kallikaks, a reviewer for Variety writes, “The wonder is that the producers were able to assemble so many Jukes for a live audience to laugh at the material.” 58 Likewise, Marvin Kitman for Newsday speculated on the audience that the NBC research department was trying to reach: “This is the audience for whom ‘Laverne & Shirley’ is 58 Fob, Variety 288.1 (Aug 10, 1977): 46. 161 a highbrow, drawing-room farce. […] It makes ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ seem like a sophisticated comedy written by Goodman Ace for Woody Allen” (Kitman). These jabs at audience members who enjoyed the show implies that by this point in the seventies, you were assumed to be a rural degenerate yourself if you enjoyed rural programming. In addition to disparagement by critics, rural audiences were degraded by the show itself, indicating that conceptions of rurality were being cleaved further from the symbolic national heartland of the Midwest, which Johnson’s work centralizes as “‘low’ in terms of taste and cultural sensibilities” yet valued because its averageness was considered by network executives to be “reliably majoritarian, unswayed by fads, and, therefore, allied with stability, traditional values, and the smooth functioning of representative democracy” (12). In The Kallikaks’ final episode, “TV or Not TV,” the rural, Appalachian viewer, unlike the small town Midwesterner, can be bought. In exchange for his family’s participation in an audience study, a ratings pollster offers J.T. a new television set to replace his broken and outdated one. This attracts the attention of a crooked producer who offers J.T. five hundred dollars per month to watch his shows and write to the networks about their quality. J.T.'s acceptance of the producer's offer confirms a national devaluation of rural audiences, and divests them of the positive attributes that attend Midwestern sensibilities: stability, tradition, and representative tastes, however low they may be. In its appeal to urban viewers, The Kallikaks itself participates in the denigration of rural and small town audiences that networks “periodically invoked in ideal terms” (Johnson 12). By the late seventies, rural whiteness was not stable, majoritarian, or authentic: it was particular, injured, and in this instance, unethical. In other words, the transformation of whiteness that allowed white subjects to make claims about their oppression in a post-Civil Rights era, also made more visible 162 the devalued forms of whiteness that were distinguished from the national ideal by class, style, and spatial embodiment. I am staging the process of making injured rural whiteness and its reactionary fortifications visible—the process in which The Kallikaks participated—as a queer moment in the rise of neoliberalism. The queer consequence of The Kallikaks, and the role it plays in the history of 1970s American television, is its revelation of the (fragile) relationship whiteness forged to the neoliberal nation-state, which had fortified its basis in racial supremacy as deindustrialization unmoored whiteness from economic security. As a shifting world economy restructured American citizenship in the 1970s, the logics of vulnerability that whiteness evoked through characters like J.T. Kallikak, particularly his ambitions toward sexual and economic degeneracy, demonstrate the felt fragility of the white heteropatriarchy. This formation’s former representations of authenticity (i.e. the rural family) are queered in their proximity to normative, middle- and working-class families on the brink of economic disaster, and they suddenly appeared closer to discourses of black criminality and fecundity than their former representations as the ideal American way of life. In a turn back toward Kimberly Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, Chandan Reddy claims that intersections have the ability to “generate distinct practices of oppositionality that are conventionally illegible within the modes of perception and knowledge that organize the reproduction and extension of liberal political modernity” (32). On The Kallikaks, the intersection of whiteness and rural poverty revealed white American audiences to themselves, becoming a queer threat to their fortification of privilege, a fortification in which television had been participating, rather than threatening, for decades. 163 3.9 Rural Contagion and Fear of the Bottom By the end of the seventies, “the redneck”—with his outlaw bravado, patriotic nationalism, and good ole boy charm—had “moved successfully from pejorative to point of pride” (Cowie 171). Jefferson Cowie calls the popularity of Southern rock music, stock car races, and mechanical bull rides in the seventies an instance of “redneck chic,” and writes that the demi-rednecks who took up these rural stylistics also “adopted the posture of Nixon’s conservative working-class populism as a tamed and sanitized form of rebellion against an increasingly homogenous and effete national world of suburbs, service work, and corporate consolidation” (174). But The Kallikaks’ emphatically unpopular form of rurality also threatened to expand across America alongside the redneck, and its debasement threatened normativity beyond the realm of style and taste. In all of NBC’s promotional materials for the show, they repeat that the Kallikaks were dissatisfied with their economic status, and set out to open a business “in the middle of nowhere, California.” Literally, the town where the Kallikaks settle— operating their decrepit, failure of a gas station—is called “Nowhere, California.” Alongside the Southern rebel, burning down the highway in his best imitation of the General Lee, was the Kallikak family: white, dispossessed, trying desperately to “beat the system” they felt kept them from claiming their innumerable entitlements. The ability for rurality to dislodge itself from the Appalachian coalfields and spread across America, bringing “the middle of nowhere” with it, for instance, to California, suggests that white trashiness was becoming a contagious, transferable disorder rather than a place-bound condition, associated with isolated hillbillies in the backwoods of some forgotten Appalchian territory. It was no longer only the style of redneck chic that was contagious, but also the condition of white rural poverty, a condition that 164 industrious, progressive, normative white audiences had been consuming as distinct and distant for many years. At the close of the 1970s, white precarity was no longer appropriate as televisual farce. Which is not to say, as multicultural neoliberalism began to influence popular representation, that minoritarian precarity played well either. 59 TV critic Bill Carter recognized its force when he wrote of The Kallikaks, “Needless to say, the family is white. Had they been black they would have been declared utterly scandalous and driven off TV. That would have been racist. Since it involves white people, it is merely idiotic and totally offensive.” 60 TV, and especially the sitcom, found a new mode of escapism that had nothing to do with hillbillies in Beverly Hills: the banal comforts of the televised middle class, that cruelly optimistic object of perpetual investment. Television historian Josh Ozersky recounts that even “Archie Bunker, the epitome of the hardhat, by 1977 found himself longing to enter the bourgeoisie” (133). With Archie Bunker’s Place, the spin-off that retained Carroll O’Connor as Archie, but placed him in a middle-class mise en scéne as he no longer toiled at the docks but rather owned a bar, and his life included “a Jewish partner, a Jewish stepdaughter, Hispanic employees, an Irish cook (the pretense was still being maintained that Archie was not Irish), and eventually, a spunky, liberal teenage boarder and even a black live-in maid” (Ozersky 133). While the comfortable, accomplished, and secure Archie of Archie Bunker’s Place was not nearly as popular with audiences as his injured and bombastic iteration on All in the Family, his ratings blew The Kallikaks out of the water. The Kallikaks brand of white trash rurality was cast as the aesthetic, ethical, and political bottom of the nation, and it remains there today, when rural TV again dominates reality line-ups on TLC (Here Comes 59 See Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24.4 (2006): 1-24. 60 Bill Carter, “Is this the Sourest Lemon of All?” The Baltimore Sun. 31 July 1977: TV2. 165 Honey Boo Boo, My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding), A&E (Duck Dynasty, American Hoggers), MTV (Buckwild), History (Appalachian Outlaws, Swamp People, Mountain Men), Animal Planet (Hillbilly Handfishin’), National Geographic (Rocket City Rednecks) and Discovery Channel (Moonshiners, Swamp Loggers). Historian Colin Johnson writes about the Country Life Commission, whose 1909 report to the US Senate contended that "[the] welfare of the farmer is of vital consequence to the welfare of the whole [American] community. The strengthening of country life, therefore, is the strengthening of the whole nation" (51). Under the logic of this initiative, rural degeneration was seen as a threat to the entire nation. Rural America, in effect, became and remained a formation to be managed by dominant regimes of whiteness, masculinity, and patriotic nationalism. In a moment when the acceptance of federal welfare was considered a morally corrupting act, a television show featuring a white family living in what they call “the armpit of luxury”— Nowhere, California—scheming ways to support themselves on welfare by “beating the system” was bound to fail. The “white trash” rurality that emerged on The Kallikaks broadcasted an intersection of race, class, and sexuality that approached the limits of what whiteness could withstand in the midst of American deindustrialization. This project’s next and final chapter brings us to backwardness on the contemporary U.S. televisual landscape, where representations of rurality in their most popular form to date— hillbilly reality TV—no longer seem to threaten audiences, who are watching these shows in record numbers. In an era of enduring neoliberalism, rural degeneration is no longer a threat to the nation, but rather has been rendered, through the highly mediated genre of reality TV, another lifestyle choice that viewers can dismiss or try on for themselves from the comparative comfort of their living rooms. Precarity was a new experience for the normative, white middle 166 and working classes in the 1970s, lost to cultural memories of economic downtown after the post-War boom. The novelty of working class uncertainty is evident in the actions of many New Deal democrats, who changed their party affiliation toward the New Right in the 1970s. 61 I draw one final moment of attention to this anxious potentiality in order to highlight the turn this project is making from the novelty of precarity in the seventies, to the fascination with which audiences now tune into backward rurality, after having endured neoliberalism for decades. The backward, scripted rural sitcom—as invasive as it was into the space of the family and as comparable as its families were meant to be to those watching—was repellant to the normative viewing public in the seventies. My final chapter will turn to a new set of “authenticity” genres, documentary film and reality television, in order to think about the ways that today, representations of rural backwardness fascinate and entertain at levels unimaginable, harkening back to the level of engagement enjoyed by The Beverly HillBillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres in the sixties, yet without that wholesome mid-century hillbilly sweetness. And yet, like the representations of backward rurality that Chapter Two on Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and the Farm Security Administration exhibited, those representations meant to discipline rurality often exceed the forms of their containment, queerly contaminating their viewers with a backwardness that cannot be easily dismissed. 61 Cowie also signals to the newness of white working class anxiety in the 1970s: “Political forecasters in the seventies saw working people’s hope layered with anxiety and their traditions undermined by a confusing phalanx of new problems” (3). The novelty of these experiences is important to the distinction I am making between the seventies and today. 167 Chapter 4: Enduring Neoliberalism and Consuming Rurality: Rural Reality Television and Documentary Film in the Twenty-First Century A dolla makes me holla, Honey Boo Boo Child. —Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson Come in this world with nothin’. I guess I’ll die with nothin’. At least the world knows who the fuck we are. — Mamie White 4.1: From Disgust to Desire: Rural American Representation and Enduring Neoliberalism In 1977, in a gesture of downward mobility and deviant reproduction, J.T. Kallikak expressed his desire to fill his home with children, supported by the state, on NBC’s failed rural sitcom, The Kallikaks. He tells his wife that he wishes she were “a deaf, dumb, blind, nymphodesiac” (sic), reasoning that a “nymphomaniac”—a queer condition of excessive sexual drive—would provide him with enough offspring so that he “could get three to four hundred dollars a month on welfare.” Television audiences were repulsed by Kallikak’s embrace of sexual and economic debasement, particularly in regards to its association with disability and rural whiteness. 1 Three decades pass, and representations of rural debasement have proliferated more quickly than Kallikak was able. The turn from narrative television to reality TV was attended by a shift from regionally non-specific scripted programming to an explosion of rural reality on a range of networks. My last chapter claimed that 1970s working- and middle-class 1 Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on debasement is instructive toward the ways I will be thinking about queer rurality in this chapter. Writing about the ways that shame traverses blackness and queerness in ways that supersede black queer subjects themselves: “[Debasement] is key to understanding the ties, bold and subtle, between two signs that would seem linguistically, historically separate. The strangeness of queerness would not seem particularly destined to meet the darkness of blackness, except in the bodies of dark queer folk. We will see this is not so. Shame is an equal-opportunity meeting-place for these signs” (8). For Stockton, the embrace of this meeting place holds the potential for “bottom pleasures so dark and so strange” (8). Like Stockton, I consider subjects who embrace debasement in this chapter, and locate those debasements in the intersection of rurality, disability, poverty, and queerness. My work diverges from hers in the sense that the debasements and “bottom values” I explore, more often than not, involve white heterosexual configurations, thus exploring shameful downward aspirations and their potentials for disruption that queer studies’ turn toward shame has yet found unthinkable. 168 white American viewers were not able to take pleasure in representations of degenerate rurality while they experienced their own downward mobility in the midst of the American economy’s unprecedented stagflation and the decline of blue-collar industry. This rejection of the rural sitcom during the rise of neoliberalism and consequent shrinking of the working class helped to shape visual repertoires of race, class, sexuality, and region in the U.S. This chapter takes up a similar question about the reception of rural degeneracy on popular film and television, but in our present moment, decades into the neoliberal entrenchment, when the American working class has worked for the service economy for decades, and Reagan’s infamous “welfare queen” was put to rest during the Clinton era. 2 Enduring these cultural and economic shifts, American television audiences have likewise shifted since the 1970s. In her work on the emergent genre of “normporn,” Karen Tongson reminds us that “we can no longer assume that TV is ‘playing to Peoria,’ to the straight, white, middle-class, middle-American nuclear family with 2.5 kids” (Public Books). Tongson’s assessment is spot on, and yet overwhelmingly, these beyond-Peoria audiences are attracted to Peoria content, or even further past the provincial and toward the backward. For instance, Amazon Prime’s 2015 Transparent features a scene in which a Latina trans* woman Davina and her boyfriend Sal invite Jewish, trans* woman Maura to join them as they watch a white, bearded redneck, shown swinging an ax, on a reality program in which “real people” get 2 Lisa Duggan aptly describes the descent into neoliberal entrenchment that I am invoking here: “During the 1990s a new liberalism appeared, defined against the ‘old’ liberalism, heralded by the New Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council and led by Bill Clinton. This new liberalism was not a parochial U.S. political formation, but echoed the appearance of ‘third way’ politics in many Western nations—a politics defining itself as somewhere between the ‘old’ liberalism and conservative political parties and policies. Various ‘third way’ parties and leaders labored to combine pro-market, pro-business, ‘free trade’ national and global policies with shrunken remnants of the social democratic and social justice programs of Western welfare states. Third way proponents argued for smaller, more efficient governments operating on business management principles, and appealed to ‘civil society’… and ‘the family’ to take up significant roles in the provision of social safety nets” (9-10). 169 “dropped into the wilderness with like a box of crackers or some shit” (sic). 3 The three watch this show, waiting for the redneck to “get mauled by a bear,” in an urbane setting: a Los Angeles living room, with novels strewn about, glasses of red wine placed on tables, and playbills from Verdi’s Aida and Puccini’s Tosca hanging on the wall opposite the television. This scene demonstrates that in recent years, watching rural reality television has become an urbane affair, enjoyed by a multitude of viewers with varied identity markers. With these shifts in television’s content and audience, representations of backward rurality have rapidly proliferated, particularly after the 2012 premiere of TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo—a spin-off of lifestyle reality program Toddlers and Tiaras. HCHBB follows a precocious pageant child and her unconventional “redneck” family in McIntire, Georgia, and its popularity is rivaled by A&E’s Duck Dynasty, a reality program that follows a family of Louisiana entrepreneurs who retain their redneck lifestyle after finding financial success in the duck hunting equipment business. Indeed, rurality has dominated reality line-ups over the past several years: on TLC (Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, 2012-14; My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, 2011-14), A&E (Duck Dynasty, 2012-15; American Hoggers, 2011-12), MTV (Buckwild 2013), History (Appalachian Outlaws, 2014-15; Swamp People, 2010-15; Mountain Men 2012-15), Animal Planet (Hillbilly Handfishin’ 2010-13), National Geographic (Rocket City Rednecks, 2011-13) and Discovery Channel (Moonshiners, 2011-15; Swamp Loggers, 2009-12). 4 The Appalachians and Southerners who appear in these representations of rural reality represent what Kathleen Stewart calls “a space on the side of the road,” one which “is the site of an opening or reopening into the story of America” (3). For Stewart, rurality exists in this liminal 3 Transparent. Season 2, Episode 6, “Bulnerable.” Dir. Silas Howard. Writ. Jill Solloway. Amazon Prime: 11 Dec. 2015. 4 There are similarities between this chapter’s archive and that of Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, which Halberstam describes as “silly archives,” places to mine for “low theory and counterknowledge in the realm of popular culture and in relation to queer lives, gender, and sexuality” (loc. 307). 170 space because it is “‘occupied,’ exploited, and minoritized,” which allows it to “back talk to ‘America’s’ mythic claims to realism, progress, and order,” opening “a gap in the order of myth itself” (3). My intention here is not to cast these rural subjects as marginal, or even to center these margins in order to theorize about dominant culture more broadly conceived. Rather, I will continue to frame backward rurality—and its current proliferation through the “authenticity” genres of documentary and reality television—as always already central to a national narrative of whiteness and citizenship. As I theorized in previous chapters, rurality becomes culturally important particularly in times of economic crisis, when these marginal spaces and their inhabitants complicate the ways we think about whiteness and progress, race and failure. As such, representations of white rural poverty and “degeneracy” do “open a gap:” they reveal a fissure in the racial order and the legitimacy of white ascendancy still in effect as a structuring myth of the US nation-state, a fissure that becomes visible during economic downturns which, ironically, are constant and reinvigorating to neoliberal capitalism. 5 Rurality has signified the “authentic” in the American imaginary since the early twentieth century, and thus its current merging with “reality” genres comes as little surprise. 6 Sarah Banet- Weiser describes our culture’s current obsession with authenticity, an obsession that I will argue contributes to a shift toward the consumption of rurality in our cultural present: In the US, the 21st century is an age that hungers for anything that feels authentic, just as we lament more and more that it is a world of inauthenticity, that we are governed by superficiality. People pay exorbitant rents to live in the part of town 5 While the literature on this topic is vast, for a concise account of the reinvigorating crises of capitalism, see David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, New York: Oxford UP, 2010. 6 Sonnet Retman’s work on authenticity genres during the Great Depression is instructive for thinking about the historical aspects of the connection between rurality and the authentic: “Amid skyrocketing unemployment and spiraling deflation, in the wake of the stock market’s collapse, various writers, ethnographers, documentarists, filmmakers, and reformers sought out something real, something genuine, with which to ground an increasingly tenuous sense of national identity. The found it in the folk. The folk’s rural, artisanal know-how seemed to compromise the ‘raw stuff’ with which to remake American identity” (1). 171 that is edgy and ‘real,’ that has not yet sold out to bland suburbia; we go to extraordinary lengths to prove we are not ‘sellouts’; we defensively define ourselves as ‘authentic.’ (3) Consumers seek that which seems less fabricated, untouched, pristine. Although media habits in general are important to an individual’s self-fashioning, most would not associate this consumption-oriented, neoliberal quest for authenticity as one related to lowbrow rural television. And yet, the signifiers of rural authenticity surround even the urban hipster in the twenty-first century. From “urban farming” to “lumbersexuality,” urban hipster authenticity is laced with the trappings of rural elsewheres. 7 While these bourgeois bohemian aesthetics are practiced in gentrifying urban centers, an anti-urbanism attends the search for authenticity, drawing urbanity toward rurality, just as rurality’s television audiences are becoming more racially, regionally, and economically diverse. Although it serves as an “authentic” option in a sea of endless lifestyle choices, this chapter will argue that rural reality television gained popularity because, through the reality form itself, it has lost the characteristic that repulsed earlier audiences: poverty. In recent years, reality “stars” like the members of the Shannon/Thompson family (HCHBB) have garnered upwards of $15,000-20,000 per episode, and the publicity of that compensation fuels arguments against the 7 See Lauren Markham, “Gentrification and the Urban Garden,” The New Yorker, 21 May 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/gentrification-and-the-urban-garden; Willa Brown, “Lumbersexuality and its Discontents,” The Atlantic, 10 Dec. 2104, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/ lumbersexuality-and-its-discontents/383563/. Particularly important to my comments here is that these urban movements are mostly aesthetic, and lack the actual practices of rural life. Markham claims that homebuyers in the Bay area are interested in “a kind of rustic, down-home vibe” that is satisfied by “staged” vegetable gardens in back yards: “‘It’s a life style that buyers buy into,’ [real estate agent] Edwards said. ‘The life style of growing food. Which they may or may not do, but they’re buying into that food culture.’” Likewise, Brown attributes the lumbersexual aesthetic to a crisis of urban masculinity, one again that is concerned with surface, not substance: “They don’t exactly cut down trees, but they might try their hand at agriculture and woodworking, even if only in the form of window-box herb gardens.” 172 family’s exploitation. 8 Not only has the compensation been made public, but the family has been repeatedly praised for its frugality in the face of fame and fortune. These public displays of compensation result in rural reality television that retains its backward aesthetic, without that which perpetuates its actual cultural and economic backwardness. Through a reading of TLC’s reality television program Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012-14), as well as the event of its cancellation, this chapter will demonstrate the ways that rural “reality” presents the signifiers of poverty without the poverty, which appeals to viewers looking for ways to disidentify with downward mobility, while maintaining a relationship with authenticity, both of which remain attached to rurality in and era of ongoing neoliberal entrenchment. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, as well as the show’s publicized cancellation, provides the schadenfreude audiences have come to expect from reality television, paired with the authenticity of rurality without the disturbance of poverty within the American authenticity narrative. Meanwhile, Julien Nitzberg’s rural documentary film The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (2010) exists in closer proximity to rural art and performance that threatens the myth of American ascendency and progress, placing his film in proximity to the literary work that opened this project: Jean Toomer’s Cane (1926). Considering the ways that rurality has the potential to disrupt narratives of national progress and belonging—Kathleen Stewart’s “space at the side of the road”—this chapter begins with Nitzberg’s documentary film and then shifts its focus to reality television with Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Through The Wild and Wonderful 8 Deery makes clear that compensation like that paid to the Thompson’s is atypical: “There has been little investigation of the legal status of such performers and whether they ought to be extended the same rights, protections, and compensation as other workers…. Some shows pay high salaries to professional talent (e.g., judges receive millions per season on American Idol) and some ordinary participants on very popular multiseason shows can command increasingly high salaries (in 2011, it was reported to be $100,000 per episode for Jersey Shore or up to $250,000 per season for Real Housewives). But these figures are not typical. Most people who appear on reality shows earn only a small per diem stipend that may not cover loss of wages or other expenses” (21). 173 Whites of West Virginia, I will show that the documentary—despite its conservative intentions— allows the perversion of queer rurality to upset national narratives of progress and ideal citizenship, while (sexual) perversion becomes the limit that shuts down the queer rurality of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Ultimately, I argue that the form of reality television itself compromises rurality’s ability to queer, disrupt, and disturb national narratives of progress, which often leave behind those same rural populations without the resources and infrastructures to achieve “progress” alongside the rest of the nation. As such, rural reality television’s emergence and popularity in an era of entrenched neoliberalism is far from surprising or subversive. 9 4.2: Blurring Boundaries, from Rural Documentary to “Jackass” Reality On the promotional trailer for Julien Nitzberg’s The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (2010), notorious punk rock agitator GG Allin screams “No Rules” over scenes of a rural white teenager blasting off a shotgun in front of a rundown trailer and a young boy performing flips on his bed for the camera, breaking the cliché childhood rule—“don’t jump on your bed”—on a another level entirely. Both aesthetically through the use of Allin’s punk soundscape and textual commentary overlaid on these scenes, the film announces itself as “a different kind of documentary.” If it announces its difference, what type of documentary is it? In his early work on the styles of documentary film, Bill Nichols identifies the early “direct- address” style of didactic documentary filmmaking; cinéma vérité with its impression of capturing unadulterated reality; the combination of direct address and cinéma vérité, with 9 The comparison I am making between two genres of rural authenticity—reality television and documentary film—is adjacent to but ultimately different from those such as Jane Feuer’s undoing of the distinctions between “reality TV” and “quality TV,” which is based in aesthetics rather than ethics and the ethical imperatives of form, where I locate my argument. 174 interviews intended to provide historical and ideological context; and finally “self-reflexive documentaries” (“Voice” 18). Nichols describes self-reflexive documentaries as those that “mix observational passages with interviews, the voice-over of the film-maker with intertitles, making patently clear what has been implicit all along: documentaries always were forms of re- presentation never clear windows into ‘reality’; the film-maker was always a participant-witness and an active fabricator of meaning” (“Voice” 18). 10 While he explains that the first cut of the film was made in the cinéma vérité style, Nitzberg’s filmmaking falls into this fourth, “self- reflexive” category, particularly as the Jackass aesthetic of the film’s producers (Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine) is easily identifiable in both the film’s punk aesthetic as well as the White family’s antics, such as popping pills, shooting guns, and generally raising hillbilly hell for the camera. 11 That said, while the filmmakers make themselves present, usually to warn the Whites of incriminating themselves on camera, the subjects do not seem to be clearly performing for the camera. Rather, particularly through the interviews that attended the film’s release, viewers get a sense that the filmmakers lack distance from the documentary’s subjects because they identify with them on some level. Although they are removed from the poverty that fosters it, the filmmakers clearly wish to see themselves as part of the White family’s “rebel” lifeworld. In a filmed interview with DP/30, Nitzberg and his producers speak to the fact that the Whites were comfortable with the crew, but that the crew did not instigate any of the film’s drama. They 10 Nichols would later label this style “participatory documentary,” and in his Introduction to Documentary, describes the ways it differs from the cinéma vérité style: “When we view participatory documentaries we expect to witness the historical world as represented by someone who actively engages with others, rather than unobtrusively observing, poetically reconfiguring, or argumentatively assembling what others say and do. The filmmaker steps out from beyond the cloak of voice-over commentary, steps away from poetic meditation, steps down from a fly-on-the- wall perch, and becomes a social actor (almost) like any other. (Almost like any other because the filmmaker retains the camera, and with it, a certain degree of potential power and control over events)” (Introduction 182). 11 Evidence of WWWWV as a self-reflexive documentary abounds in the later sections of the chapter, particularly as I discuss the ways that Nitzberg uses intertitles to introduce subjects giving interviews. 175 claim that they “didn’t have to push the envelope,” they “just had to open it” (DP/30). One crucial point of involvement between filmmakers and the documentary’s subjects concerns compensation, and there is no evidence that the White family received any. As with professional journalism, most viewers assume that documentary subjects are not compensated for their statements and appearances, and this lack of compensation lends itself to the ability for audiences to accept what they witness on screen as a representation of reality, even if they are conscious of the ways its been filtered through the filmmaker’s perspective. 12 The film’s perspective is obvious early on, as the trailer’s title sequence advertises the film as being “from the people who brought you jackass” (sic), referring to the popular MTV reality television stunt series that ran from 2000-2002. The series, featuring skateboard culture extremists who perform stunts ranging from the base—such as Steve-O drinking a gold fish—to the dangerous—such as Johnny Knoxville dressing himself in a “meat suit” and roasting his body—spawned a series of films, beginning with 2002’s Jackass: The Movie (Jeff Tremaine). Blurring the boundaries between reality television and documentary film, Jackass: The Movie kept the same amateur aesthetic and stunt-focused format that Knoxville and the cast had begun on their MTV program. The only significant difference between the reality program and the film was the length and the level of regulation and oversight, a factor of television production that frustrated Knoxville and crew. 13 12 Nichols covers the ethics of paying documentary subjects in Introduction to Documentary (2010) (3), and Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario’s New York Times coverage of Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure in “Film on Abu Ghraib Puts Focus on Paid Interviews” covers much of the industry standards and audience expectations around compensation and the documentary film. For my purposes, I wish to establish that audiences expect that documentary subjects are unpaid, and the outrage over Morris’s practices thus confirm those implicit expectations of the genre. 13 In an interview with Rolling Stone, Knoxville and crew discuss what can and cannot be shown on MTV “The thing MTV wants us to stay away from,” says Clapp, “is imitatable behavior – obviously, they don't want anyone to get hurt – and what they call spreadable cheeks” (sic) “The balls, the pubic hair, none of that can show,” says Tremaine. “If you show an ass,” says Clapp, “you've got to cover it.” 176 Like WWWWV, the trailer for Jackass: The Movie made an announcement about form: while the film’s scenes are clearly similar to what viewers had seen in the thirty minute stunt reality format, the film’s content was “the stuff you’d never see on TV.” I make these comparisons not only because Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine produced Nitzberg’s wild and wonderful documentary, but because, borrowing the Jackass stunt aesthetics and antics that were infamous amongst teenagers and young men in the first years of the 2000s, both Jackass and WWWWV blur the aesthetic boundaries between reality television and the documentary film, while Nitzberg’s ethics around documentary filmmaking remain clearly within the documentary genre. 14 Nitzberg became interested in the White family after meeting Mamie White while he was on location in West Virginia, shooting footage of rockabilly legend Hasil Adkins for a PBS documentary, The Wild World of Hasil Adkins. He would go on to produce Dancing Outlaw (1991), a character study of mountain tap dancer and infamous local criminal, Jesco White, the central figure in the White family’s history of representation. After Knoxville prompted him to revisit the Whites a decade later, Nitzberg directed his camera at the entire family for WWWWV, filming an exhilarating “Jackass-esque” failure of rural whiteness, which is mired in poverty and the hopelessness of the Appalachian coal industry. The film premiered at the Tribeca film festival in 2010, and has since found a wide audience on streaming platforms such as Netflix Instant and Amazon Prime. The most widely-circulated and critically acclaimed redneck “reality” in a non-reality TV format, the documentary exhibits a year in the life of its subjects: a 14 It is also worth noting that while there was once, ostensibly, two separate audiences for reality television and documentary film (and indeed that was likely the case in 2002 when Jackass: The Movie premiered, new docu- series such as Netflix Original Making a Murderer (2015) have also begun to erode the separation of reality television and documentary film audiences, which previously had cultural cache and festival access holding them apart. 177 clan of West Virginia “rednecks” whose lives revolve around fighting, fucking, drug use, mountain tap dance, and criminal activity. The level of filmmaker participation, which becomes more clear in the DVD extras than the body of the film, not only categorizes WWWWV as a participatory documentary, but also overlaps with the behavior that defines the Jackass genre: stunt boys with a camera incite violence for the entertainment of themselves and the film’s audience. For instance, the film shows Derek White spontaneously ask the guests in his living room (including the film crew) if they wanted to see how “rednecks” shoot guns, bringing them outside to watch him shoot a bottle with his twenty-two gauge shotgun. In the film’s extra footage, we are privy to the set-up for the shot, with Nitzberg on the ground beneath Derek, dodging discarded shells as he tries to find the right angle to shoot the scene. In an interview with the filmmakers on the DVD extras, audiences witness producer Jeff Tremaine joking that they wanted Nitzberg to impregnate one of the White women, truly becoming part of the family, and Nitzberg admits that he was sexually propositioned by various White family members, both male and female. 15 Nitzberg goes so far as to claim that they were trying to create a situation that would result in Tremaine being shot during the filming. These antics that insert the filmmaker into the action of the documentary exceed the participatory mode as Nichols imagines it, bringing the “jackass” into sexualized, violent, and certainly close contact with the documentary subject. As I claimed in the previous chapter, television audiences in the seventies began to fear rurality—and particularly its association with white poverty and backwardness—as something “contagious” and encroaching on the American working class, no longer circumscribed by location and proximity. The White family’s association with Jackass makes their condition 15 “DP/30: The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia,” Interview with Julien Nitzberg, Johnny Knoxville, and Jeff Tremaine, 28 Aug. 2011. 178 likewise contagious, given that a great deal of concern with Jackass circulated around the anxiety that viewers would ignore MTV’s plea to refrain from attempting the stunts at home. In his article on the gendered politics of “extreme sports” and performance art, Robert Sweeny quotes film critic Brian Webster, whose writing exemplifies anxiety about Jackass’s contagion and claims its popularity is part of a problem, one in which the entertainment industry in the twenty-first century has become nothing more than “an infectious meme that, upon viewing, spreads beyond the sealed confines of the cathode ray tube into the living room, the backyard, and the quiet suburban street” (Sweeny 136). Sweeny, too, claims that the amateurish, DIY aesthetic of the low-budget Jackass films invites replication, a legitimate fear of parents across the nation, particularly after headlines such as “Teen Burned Imitating MTV Stunt” began appearing in the national media. 16 These fears, of (masculine) behaviors that are unsafe and unsanctioned being contagiously spread across “quiet suburban [streets]” brings to mind images of queer contagions, such as the threat of HIV/AIDS a decade prior to Jackass, as well the idea that queer sexualities might be something that quiet, suburban teens can “catch” if they are unknowingly exposed. Webster’s claim that the extreme, dangerous, (queer) masculine “jackassery” might “spread” onto “the quiet suburban street” assumes that it did not originate there, thus spatializing this type of crude behavior as that which can be transported to the suburbs through the “cathode ray tube into the living room,” but that which could not originate there. 17 But Webster’s conception of the suburbs as a safe, sanitized space—one antithetical to jackassery—is narrow. 16 “Teen Burned Imitating MTV Stunt,” Associated Press, 29 Jan. 2001. 17 Based on the amount of time the show’s male stars participate in various forms of anality and socially unsanctioned male bonding, I claim Jackass as queer. One such example is the “Toy Car Butt X-Ray” stunt, in which Ryan Dunn puts a toy car into his butt (claiming it happened when he was partying with frat brothers) and has it X-Rayed to the shock of his doctor for Jackass: The Movie (2002). The clip of this scene is posted to YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGOHE1zqEmY 179 Isher-Paul Sahini claims that “Many of Jackass’s shenanigans… would be impossible ‘without the spaces that foster their play’” (73). Sahini references Andrew Shanken’s article “The Sublime ‘Jackass’: Transgression and Play in the Inner Suburbs” here, which claims that rather than being produced in a delinquent elsewhere and transported into the suburban sphere, “‘the show’s creative crucible is the suburb’” (Sahini 73). Shanken’s definition of the suburban is a space that “uneasily abuts the commercial and industrial, or leaches out to a nonurban frontier” (52). Taking a Burkean approach to this liminality, Shanken finds that the suburbs are “sublime,” presenting their denizens with “comfort tinged with terror” in their proximity to either the country or the city (Shanken 52). It is this combination of comfort and terror that defines Shanken’s suburbs, those particularly suited to the adolescent play of Jackass. Shanken describes these suburbs as the spaces that allow for jackassery because, rather than community, his Recession-era suburbs, marked by foreclosure and unfinished development, are defined by isolation. He calls the suburbs in which Knoxville and crew stage Jackass “unsupervised,” a “kingless realm,” “neglected and remaindered,” and “left-behind.” Shanken’s definition of the suburban sublime verges on the unkempt, outlaw qualities of rurality, more so than that of the orderly and privatized suburban. That said, the Jackass ethos and aesthetics are intrinsically urban, as they were developed out of skateboard culture, one in which skaters appropriate public spaces for play and interrupt private spheres with performances of both athleticism and delinquency. Through WWWWV, Knoxville and Tremaine took the “left-behind,” “unsupervised” spaces in which they performed and videotaped Jackass to their logical limits, uncovering a “jackassery” inherent to the country. The documentary participates in all the titillating elements of Jackass—bodily harm, base humor, criminality, violence—without the overt process of designing and staging the stunts. According to the film, Jackasses do not have to 180 produce jackassery in the country; the country simply produces Jackasses. There is no public infrastructure, and little private infrastructure, for a band of outlaws to aggressively appropriate in Boone County, West Virginia. Deep in the “hollers” and honky tonks of Wild and Wonderful’s West Virginia, rural space appears open to a perpetual state of disruption, at least in those moments when state institutions—mainly child protective services and the state police—are not encroaching on the White lifestyle. With this, the documentary form allows for rurality to appear in its “authentic” state, which the televisual “reality” genres foreclose, both on Jackass and, I will later demonstrate, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. 4.3 A Cautionary Tale for the Downwardly Mobile Anti-social behavior and a violent drive toward death pervade Nitzberg’s backward rural documentary. The film begins with Mamie White’s description of her father, D. Ray, as the best mountain tap dancer in the world, who was on the verge of fame when he was shot and killed twenty-five years prior to filming. As Mamie recounts the deaths of her father and siblings, a montage of newspaper clippings detail the tragic endings of various family members, killed in shoot-outs, stabbings, and by self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The film drops in on a wide swath of the White family who remain, from Mamie, the self-described “biggest, meanest, and baddest of all the White family” to Jesco, a former gas-huffing armed robber who inherited his father’s dancing shoes. The film also covers the younger generation of Whites, including Kirk, a single- mother who admits to the attempted murder her child’s father on camera, and Brandon Poe, who is currently serving a fifty years prison sentence for the attempted murder of a family friend and subsequent violent stand-off with state troopers. These macabre qualities led Pop Matters reviewer Bill Gibron to describe the film as a “freak show, cautionary tale, found comedy, 181 frightmare, and perhaps most importantly, a window beyond the white picket fences and weekly Wal-Mart trips of most mainstream America” (Gibron). The film operates on each of these registers, but this chapter will focus on its function as a cautionary tale: it cautions viewers to simultaneously appreciate the White family as a “dying breed,” and to reject them as welfare queens, parasitic drains on the U.S. economy. Interviewee Francis Curnutte, a defense attorney familiar with the family, places the blame for the Whites’ economic failures and criminality on the state of West Virginia, particularly its geographical and cultural isolation: “The Whites are a product of the mountain culture, and this is the same culture that spawned the Hatfield and McCoy feud, for example. They come from a time and a place where they were isolated: they were isolated by geography, they were isolated by culture” (WWWWV). The state of West Virginia is a central character in the film from its first shot, which focuses on a sign welcoming travelers into the state: West Virginia: Wild and Wonderful. Rather than serve as a metaphor for Appalachia more broadly, the film’s second shot tightens in on the roadside sign announcing the “Boone County” line, the camera focusing in on this particular place as significant, as audiences are asked to follow the film into the specificity of this county known as the “Gateway to Coal Country.” The Whites localize their failures throughout the film. Kirk White, a young female family member whose struggle with addiction is one of the film’s central storylines, claims “Boone County’s my downfall. I love it but if I’m there too long it’s like, it’s my hole and it sucks me in. And it fucks me up.” In a heart-wrenching moment after Kirk has given birth, she speaks directly to the camera about what she perceives as the regional nature of failure: “When my baby gets older, I want her life to go in a totally different direction than what mine went. You know, finish school, do the right things, stay away from the wrong people. You know, have her own dreams 182 and work hard toward ‘em. You know, you stay in Boone County, I don’t care how many dreams you got, it’s not gonna happen” (WWWWV). While this hope for her child may seem a departure from the ethos of failure and hopelessness that the Whites typically promote and embody, the film immediately cuts to a shot of Kirk crushing her pain medication in the hospital room, doing lines of it with a friend. She points at her baby––“She’s the next Miss America”––and the delusion of that statement is both heart wrenching and apparent. In these instances, the film serves as a cautionary tale, not to the lay viewer, but to the state: provide infrastructure to rural denizens, or breed the type of failure and fatalism that has produced the Whites. Aside from these indictments of state governance, all of which come from the rural subjects themselves, not the filmmakers, the film operates as a Right-leaning cautionary tale against the purported indulgences caused by the welfare state. The documentary includes various scenes of child and drug abuse that clearly demonize the White lifestyle, while blaming the US social security system, the availability of “free money” and “crazy checks,” for the family’s seemingly hopeless condition. In an interview with online magazine Dangerous Minds, Nitzberg explains the manner by which the Whites survive: Most of them get a government check. There’s a lot of things that led to the Whites being who they are and one was what should have been beneficial programs created by LBJ and the great society which include things that are meant to take care of people who are mentally ill. They all get these crazy checks. And they are all crazy. Or they made sure they’re crazy. [...] If there’s free government money, why wouldn’t you take it? (Nitzberg). Ending this statement with a rhetorical question posed to a majority of documentary film viewers who, ostensibly, are not subsisting on social security disability benefits, Nitzberg provokes a 183 reactionary form of anger (similar to that which the Right provoked in the 1970s) that would position the family as a social blight, a new incarnation of American “welfare queens.” In either of these formulations, the state is to blame; a common refrain in American electoral politics, the government is either doing too much or too little. 4.4 The End of (Outlaw) Culture They might be the most hated family, but they’re probably the most free. —Hank Williams III While WWWWV cautions viewers against the potentially dangerous and contagious elements of poor white rurality, it also celebrates the Whites as “America’s last outlaw family,” a dying breed that must be preserved on film before their culture is gone. The film conducts this alternate type of warning most forcefully through interviews with Hank Williams III. Like Jesco White, Williams descends from infamous “outlaws,” country music royalty Hank Williams and Hank Williams, Jr. However, rather than originating in any type of anti-establishment thought, Williams’ assessment of the White family as “the true rebels of the South” stems from his normative ideals of American citizenship, and his delusional claim that the White family adheres to those ideals. Williams’ formulation of “freedom” consists of the ability to act and do as one pleases without interference by the state or laws of social decorum. Williams evaluates the White lifestyle as rebellious and free because his view of the family is entirely nostalgic, participating in logics of rural white idealization that have marked particularly nationalistic forms of country music for decades. 18 In his song “The Legend of D. Ray White,” written about the late White 18 Regarding his politics, Hank Williams III is in line with his father. Amy McCarthy’s “A Night of Racism, Patriotism, and Homophobia with Hank Williams Jr.” for the Dallas Observer does a good job of positioning Williams within a nationalistic trend that pervades contemporary country music and its alliance with the “outlaw” figure. 184 family patriarch, Williams sings in his signature twang, “Way down in West Virginia / There are some people who are one of a kind / They don't need nothin' from nobody / 'Cause they're already doin' fine.” And yet this song plays toward the end of the documentary, when audiences have already seen the Whites needing much and often doing far from fine. Rather than denying their participation in what one interviewee calls “entitlement culture,” Sue Bob White claims that her father “signed her up for a check” when she was eleven years old, and she has been receiving state assistance ever since. Mamie likewise claims that she gets a check from the government because she is “fucking certified crazy.” A voice from behind the camera asks, “Why are you crazy?” She answers, “Cause I wanna be.” The antithesis of “don't need nothin' from nobody,” the film allows Williams’ song to play in direct contradiction to the argument it makes about the White family and their entitlements. Williams’ song praises the family for “always fightin’ hard / An’ livin’ off the land,” and yet we watch them fighting only out of mindless violence and living off the state and the low-level drug trade in which nearly the entire family is engaged. Thus, Williams’ celebration of the Whites as the “true rebels of the South” is fueled by nostalgia, and a particular type of nationalistic nostalgia marked by the trappings of a pioneer ethic and colonial spirit. This outlaw nostalgia mirrors that of Archie Bunker’s, recounted in the previous chapter, and it marks much of the anger seething in Right wing American masculinity today. However, the Whites themselves lack any sense of nostalgia for their past, their family, or its meaning. Rather, they celebrate their “failures” as successes, embracing the debasement of their queer rurality as that which allows them to take from the state that has likewise failed them. 4.5: “Dirty white, good, old people: hillbillies”: Dirty Whiteness and Queer Rurality 185 The White family describes and aestheticizes their lifestyle—a culture of criminalized and celebrated poverty—as “dirty whiteness,” implying that their racialization as white is somehow sullied by their location, behavior, and circumstance.” 19 Throughout the documentary, the Whites do not describe themselves as “white folks,” as may be heard throughout the Appalachian region, but rather as “dirty whites.” This designation of whiteness with a difference as it intersects with poverty would not be the first occurrence of such a designation in Appalachia. In Rural Community in the Appalachian South, anthropologist Patricia Duane Beaver draws from John Fiske’s 1897 study of Virginia, in which Fiske claimed that those who settled the Appalachian Mountains were social misfits who became isolated and inbred because they could not assimilate into modern, industrial societies. Similar to the phrase “dirty white,” which the Whites use to describe themselves, Fiske called the mountain population “degraded white humanity,” “crackers,” and “shiftless people who could not make a place for themselves in Virginia society, including many of the ‘mean whites’” (Beaver 144). Like those isolated “mean whites” from which the family descended, the Whites are both a product of and detriment to the state. Bo, a female member of the White clan, uses the “dirty white” descriptor to characterize the family, introducing them as “right down, dirty white, good, old people: hillbillies.” In this description, it is the “hillbilly” status that differentiates dirty whiteness from whiteness itself; and yet Bo is making the distinction between her family and other families in the Appalachian region, suggesting that living in Appalachia is not enough to make one “dirty white.” Her son Derek gets to the essential difference between being a hillbilly and being dirty white when his 19 Certainly, constructing an aesthetic out of economic hardship, coupled with geographic and cultural isolation, should be critiqued as one of the film’s problematic elements. The documentary does positively render the members of the White family as the “true rebels of the South” and “America’s last outlaw family,” valuing the hopelessness that sets them free. However, I am interested not only in waging this critique, but also tracking the ways that this aesthetic might be used to reveal contradictions in the construction of racial hierarchies. 186 description of himself as a “dirty white boy” includes a demonstration of his method of sexual advance. Demonstrating the “Boone County mating call” for the camera, Derek shakes a pill bottle, implying that prescription drug use is the manner by which he finds sex with women. In this way, dirty whiteness takes on a queer difference beyond its association with whiteness as it intersects with place, poverty, and/or criminality. For Derek, and other queer characters of the White clan, the “dirtiness” of whiteness takes on the tone of sexual perversion, as one might think of a “dirty old man,” whose sexuality exceeds that which is socially appropriate or expected. Dirty whiteness is a concept that exists outside the strictures of white citizenship that the US nation-state generates and propagates. This failure of whiteness to place itself as normative coincides with other queer gestures toward backward glances, bottom ethics, and various arts of failure, but the rural poor are rarely considered capable of political consciousness as are other queered deviants. 20 Through repeated mention of the Whites’ “crazy checks,” i.e. disability benefits, the film implies that the welfare state produces dirty whiteness. In so doing, it racializes the Whites as other to normative whiteness, allowing “white trash” to parallel the black “welfare queen” on issues of state aid. Because the welfare queen has historically been figured as a woman of color, 21 we must reformulate her image in order to account for the accusations of welfare fraud 20 Influential works of queer theory that refuse to abandon the dark, negative, and painful in order to “progress” forward include Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame, and Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, among others. 21 Dean Spade explains, “Even though explicit racial and gender exclusions are less frequently written into law, ideas about race and gender are commonly mobilized to support a general policy or program that may not explicitly target a group on its face, but that still accomplishes its racist/sexist purpose. A memorable example is the way the depiction of “welfare queens”—portrayed as Black single mothers “cheating” the welfare system—was used to support the elimination of certain public assistance programs in the 1990s. Ronald Reagan famously invoked this mythic image to justify his attacks on welfare programs, relying on falsified and exaggerated anecdotes about women defrauding welfare systems” (Spade 112). Regan’s original “welfare queen”—based on the case of a real Chicago con artist Linda Taylor—became synonymous with the stereotype of the indolent black woman. However, as Gene Demby finds for NPR, Linda Taylor was “Born Martha Miller, [and] she was listed as white in the 1930 Census, just like everyone else in her family.” See Demby (2013) “The Truth Behind the Lies of the Original Welfare Queen” and Josh Levin’s “The Welfare Queen” on Slate (2013). 187 that are aimed at the White family, especially if the motive for making such accusations is to blame the state for the family’s illness, thus calling for further “reform.” Dean Spade lays out the stakes of racializing debates about welfare reform”: “The campaigns waged to promote Welfare Reform... have relied on and reproduce racialized-gendered images of the national population, drawing from long-existing racist depictions that perpetually posit white people as chaste, intelligent, responsible, independent, and industrious, and people of color as various combinations of promiscuous, dangerous, dependent, lazy, violent, foreign, and unintelligent” (113). Racializing the recipients of state assistance as people of color, then, secures the ascendancy of whiteness and renders people of color as enemies of the state who absorb resources and pose threats to whiteness itself. In our economically precarious present, paired with a multiculturalist politics that will no longer tolerate overtly racist representations in the mainstream, 22 the new image of the welfare queen may be more likely presented as the patriarch of a white family in America’s coal belt than a black matriarch on Chicago’s South Side. 23 This shift in representation lines up with Jodi Melamed’s insight that in our era of multicultural neoliberalism, “Privileged and stigmatized racial formations no longer mesh perfectly with a color line. Instead, new categories of privilege and stigma determined by ideological, economic, and cultural criteria overlay older conventional racial categories” (2). Economic failure, which the Whites describe as a choice rather than as a lack of options for employment (although that reason would be legitimate in rural West 22 See Melamed (2006) and Bonilla-Silva (2014). 23 For further discussion on multiculturalism as a means of masking “the centrality of race and racism to neoliberalism,” see Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism.” Also, see Chandan Reddy’s chapter “Moving beyond a Freedom with Violence: The Politics of Gay Marriage in the Era of Racial Transformation.” Here, Reddy explains the outcomes of “egalitarianism,” which is now the fulcrum of the US state’s existence and serves to legitimate many of its violences. 188 Virginia), 24 destabilizes the racial order that casts women of color as “welfare queens” and white citizens, especially of America’s rural “heartland,” as the rightful inheritors of social and material capital. Racial capitalism, which depends on this established racial order and racism itself to “[justify] the nongeneralizability of capitalist wealth,” thus takes a blow to its organizing logics when representations of white rural poverty proliferate (Melamed 2). 25 As a way to exploit fractures in these racial state logics, Chandan Reddy argues that we must look for “mediations,” i.e. whiteness mediated by poverty, criminality, and anti- heteronormativity, 26 as the locations that might help us reveal the contradictions in racial formation and the logics of disposability and vulnerability that structure citizenship. In a turn back toward Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality, Reddy explains that a quality of intersection is to “generate distinct practices of oppositionality that are conventionally 24 For instance, one scene features Mamie White having just made a transaction with a client for the purchase of prescription pain medicine. She describes her industriousness around making a few dollars per pill as her “hustle, rustle, and bustle,” claiming “that’s how you survive in the country.” 25 Robin D.G. Kelly’s Forward to Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism clarifies the connections between racism and capitalism that produce “racial capitalism”: “Robinson explains, capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West most notably in the racialism that has come to characterize European society. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide” (xiii). Racism was integral to the development of capitalism, and thus capitalism flourished in the racialism of the West. We must also attend to “state racism,” for which we might turn to Foucault, or more particularly to Ann Stoler’s explication of Foucauldian connections between race and state power, a particular regime of the biopolitical: “[Foucault’s] concern was with state racism, not its popular forms. Racism is a state affair, confirmed by a set of scientific discourses that bear witness to it. This latter may seem like a curious formulation, given the common rendering of Foucault’s position that the state is not a privileged site for the discursive construction of power. ...[But] the state is not written off as a locus of power. Rather, Foucault locates how state institutions foster and draw on new independent disciplines of knowledge and in turn harness these micro- fields of power as they permeate the body politic at large” (Stoler 28). Thus, racial capitalism and state racism are each the horizon of possibility for the other in the neoliberal regime. 26 While all of the subjects documented in WWW seem to identify as heterosexual (with the exception, perhaps, of Mousie White’s daughter Cheyanne, who dresses in boys’ clothing and exhibits a young, butch “swagger”), the family’s practices of birthing multiple illegitimate children (which they fund with state income) and raising those children cross-generationally with mothers and daughters acting as caregivers far more often that mothers and fathers are queer practices, certainly not resonate with heteronormative family-structuring. Additionally, the film reveals various scenes where the women in the family chase down and sexually assault desired male partners, exhibit their bodies for the camera, and expose others, non-consensually, to the camera’s gaze. These sexual practices, while operating at different levels of violence, certainly do not equate an image of heteronormativity either. For more on “Heterosexuals on the (Out)side of Heteronormativity,” see Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: the Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” 189 illegible within the modes of perception and knowledge that organize the reproduction and extension of liberal political modernity” (32). The White family is a space where various discourses about whiteness, normativity, and citizenship intersect, allowing us to see the family as an opposition to the racial state’s modes of perception, to which “dirty whiteness” is necessarily illegible. “Dirty whiteness,” then, might be thought of as a contradiction in whiteness as a formation. To reveal dirty whiteness as a contradiction does not indicate a radical departure or even an oppositional politics from or to white supremacy as such, but rather simply an opening, a means by which to think through the contradictions that neoliberal capitalism occasions, even for its purported most deserving populations, i.e. white citizens of a Western, developed nation. Illegible subjects like the Whites impede the smooth flows of resources and privilege amongst white subjects in the US, thus resulting in a paranoid representation about the failures of whiteness. In their introduction to the GLQ special issue on “Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism,” Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo remind us that “crisis is endemic to the functioning of capitalism and has been since its inception. [...] Such crises do not, in themselves, signal the death knell of capitalism. Quite the opposite. [...] [Crisis] is a tried-and-true tactic of the consolidation of class power and imperialist nationalism...” (1). If crisis is endemic, the casting of whiteness as “dirty” is a product of and a reaction to that ongoing state of crisis: it incites panic in the (white) population, as I theorized around 1970s television viewership. As the wounds of a deindustrialized and dispossessed commons were fresh in the 1970s, fear around the failure of whiteness worked to renew faith in the state (and particularly the political Right) to redeem the object that should not be tarnished: white normativity. And yet: even if the 190 documentary’s purpose is to create a cautionary tale, to warn viewers about “dirty whiteness” rather than promote it as a critically queer mediation, the mediation remains. 4.6: Dirty White Queers: Sexuality, Perversion, and Rural Poverty With a narrative frame haunted by eugenic discourses, Nitzberg uses an image of a family tree as a narrative device to introduce the various members of the White family when they first appear in the film. Typically before an interview, there will be a cut to the entire family tree, then the camera will focus in on one particular member of the White clan (fig. 4-1). 27 Through the use of this introductory device, the film reminds viewers that each of the individuals pictured are connected by blood to matriarch, Bertie Mae, and patriarch, D. Ray, drawn at the root of the tree (fig. 4-2). While her time on camera is spent cautioning her adult children against drug use, her introductory frame features the head of a snake, ready to strike, implying that despite her upright demeanor, and her praise as “the Miracle Woman” for taking in and caring for various orphans over the years, Bertie Mae White is poisonous, at least in her union with D. Ray. While viewers get a sense of D. Ray early on—videos and images of his brief fame as a mountain tap dancer establish the importance of his character after his death—the last word on D. Ray comes 27 WWW is a portrait of a “degenerate” family, a version of other portraits that have circulated throughout the twentieth century, most notably through eugenicist research. One such study aimed at improving the biological inheritance of the US and relieving its social welfare systems is Henry Goddard’s The Kallikak Family: A Study of the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. It serves as a warning to the sexually weak-willed of high social standing: “We here have a family of good English blood of the middle class.... Then a scion of this family, in an unguarded moment, steps aside from the paths of rectitude and with the help of a feeble-minded girl, starts a line of mental defectives that is truly appalling” (50). Goddard defines the Kallikak family as a study in the heredity of feeble- mindedness because a large section of the family tree contains “paupers, criminals, prostitutes, drunkards, and examples of all forms of social pest with which modern society is burdened” (116). Yet Martin Kallikak Sr. (the “young scion”) also reproduced with a “normal” woman, generating over four hundred descendants who became land owners and proprietors (116). 191 from Francis M. Curnutte, West Virginia resident and defense attorney: “D. Ray was the master. D. Ray understood the social security system better than most attorneys. He got all of his kids ‘crazy checks.’” As such, the snake at the root of the White family tree is not simply genetic, but also the film’s culprit in its paranoid meditation on white failure: the welfare state. The roots of their union spread out, as the fruits of that union reach up, crows perched ominously on the branches that hold their offspring, all of whom, we are to infer, are doomed by circumstance as well as genetics, both of which have the power to poison the well of whiteness. In his work on the relationship between race, sex, and normativity, Julian Carter theorizes the depoliticization of white dominance and its relationship to sex and reproduction through a discussion of plaster casts Norman and Norma, “the Average American Boy and Girl.” According to Carter, these casts, exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, captured the “normal” state of youthful, heterosexual national-bodies, and were thus used for instruction on both proper sexuality and citizenship: Representations of modern American civilization as an evolutionary achievement… record the attempted depoliticization of white dominance in response to challenges to the entrenched racial order. This is where sex comes in. Because evolutionary thought emphasizes reproduction as the vector for inheritance and therefore as the primary mechanism for racial development or degeneration, an evolutionist perspective on civilization drew attention to the importance of a specifically sexual ‘fitness’ among modern whites. (5) The historical processes by which whiteness became “normal” provide a stark contrast to the representation of the White family’s degeneracy, also depicted in evolutionary terms. Carter claims that “The normality [Norman and Norma] represented was inseparable from their race, at 192 the same time that it was formed and expressed through rich cultural codes that gradually rendered overtly racial language redundant” (Carter 2). “Normal sexuality,” an extension of whiteness, did not have to be overtly coded as white, because whiteness itself was communicated through these “normal” sexual depictions. I bring Carter’s critical entanglement of whiteness and normal sexuality to my discussion of the White family tree in order to highlight the documentary’s departure from a century of mythology around the advent of normal (white) sexuality. Eugenic discourses of the early twentieth century often pathologized “degenerate” poor white sexuality through the cautionary images of family trees such as the Kallikaks and Jukes, but this pathologization was achieved through the “blackening” of degenerate poor whiteness. A 1955 psychology textbook rendering of the Kallikak family tree exhibits the evolutionary devolvement of Martin Kallikak’s genes as they mix with “a feeble-minded tavern girl” whose features, particularly when compared to the “worthy Quakeress” Kallikak married, are visibly “blackened” (fig. 4-3). A tuft of dark, curly hair pokes from under her hat, and her thick lips and wide nose sit under eyes clearly drawn to exhibit a sinister gaze, made up with long, curled lashes, purportedly batted at otherwise upstanding men like Kallikak. Nitzberg’s framing of the WWWWV through the image of the family tree places the Whites within this history of white degeneracy, warning “normal” America of its poisoned faction, living and reproducing in the country, out of sight. If representations of proper sexuality—i.e. Norma and Norman, Martin Kallikak’s “worthy Quakeress”—established normalcy as white, Nitzberg’s portrayal of white (hetero)sexuality as anything but normal in its intersections with rural poverty demonstrates the ways that class and region complicate the perpetuation of normalcy. We are yet far from a world in which whiteness and its establishment as “normal” have begun to disintegrate, even in the 193 midst of downward mobility and enduring neoliberalism. Yet still, representations like that of the White family’s “dirty white” queer sexuality emerge as a response to the paranoia that whiteness may lose itself in failure. As I made clear in this dissertation’s previous chapter on the cultural maintenance of white supremacy through an endurance of the neoliberal turn in the 1970s, my interest in these “dirty white” rural representations is less about articulating whiteness as somehow, through class and region, disentangled from white supremacy. Rather, Nitzberg’s paranoid scrutiny of white failure signals a turn toward the maintenance of whiteness: through caution, the cinematic technologies of making visible, and the search for a social or biopolitical remedy. Although WWWWV follows lines of heredity through the White family tree, there are no signs of “normal” citizenship in the family, which is a key difference between Nitzberg’s documentary and Goddard’s eugenic family study that warned males of high social standing against “sowing wild oats” with feeble-minded females. 28 For Goddard, genetics renders feeble- minded individuals who then seek remedy from the state, costing “normal” society great amounts of care and resources: “A great majority [of the feeble-minded], having no such interested or capable relatives, become at once a direct burden upon society” (Goddard 55). By the twenty- first century, Nitzberg’s documentary, despite its nod toward genetics with the family tree, claims that the welfare state plays a significant role in white degeneracy, rather than acting as a remedy for it. Thus, the solution is not to sterilize the Whites (the eugenic solution), but rather to take away their enabler: the welfare state. Although a white family serves to fuel this argument 28 One possible exception being Poney White, the only member of the family to leave West Virginia. While he and his family are still portrayed as living a “white trash” ethos with their accents, clothing, lack of dental work, and drug/alcohol use, he is the only member of the family also represented as a “working man,” and thus closer to the standard of normal citizenship. Although its focus on Poney as distinct from the rest of the Whites, the documentary formulates the particular space of West Virginia as playing a significant role in the family’s downfall, beyond the implied hereditary causes. 194 against social safety nets in the documentary, people of color are most affected by welfare reforms: “Although ‘welfare reform’ harms many white families, it has had a particularly calamitous impact on female-headed families of color that mirror the underlying racialized- gendered structure of the United States public benefits systems and the specific rhetoric mobilized by the campaign” (Spade 118). While both discourses, Goddard’s and Nitzberg’s, threaten the multitudes, my final claims about the documentary push toward imagining the White family’s aestheticization of failure as a complication of state racial formation, despite Nitzberg’s attempt to tame and defang it. Their performance of rural whiteness as an unstable signifier reveals the contradictions inherent to the state’s management of its subjects according to their ability to exist as “normal whites,” and not “dirty whites,” or “dirty Whites.” From children born to mothers who attempted to murder their fathers, to acts of familial indecency and exposure, Nitzberg and crew make a point of capturing White sexuality as deviant and excessive. At times, the portrayal even hints toward the incestuous, a common trope of country sexuality, thus exacerbating both the disturbance audiences are meant to experience around the proliferation of dirty whiteness, and the familiarity of that expected perversion. Viewers are audience to Bertie Mae’s birthday party, where Jesco and his niece Annie Mae “shotgun” a joint, their lips close to touching as they pass the smoke back and forth (fig. 4- 4). Moments later, Mamie yanks down her brother’s pants, laughing quite like the Jackass stuntmen as he gyrates his penis before his mother and the other guests (fig. 4-5). Later, with Hank Williams III’s “Punch, Fight, Fuck,” setting the tone of the scene, viewers witness Mousie White’s seduction of her former husband Charles in the back of a van. As he protests her advances, she tells him he will not be permitted to leave because “Mousie’s getting’ dick tonight” (fig. 4-6) This aggressive expression of non-consensual, bullying female sexuality is 195 performed in front of Mousie’s daughter Cheyanne, who watches the scene and comments “I’m never getting married” (fig. 4-7). The inclusion of Cheyanne’s commentary further queers the scene’s gender comportment, which already features a female aggressor and male sexual object, as Cheyanne is the film’s most clear visual representation of female masculinity, her “baby dyke” aesthetic clear amongst a cast of characters who, for the most part, conform to stereotypical feminine and masculine manners of dress, even if their gendered behaviors do not necessarily match up to their visualization. The intersections of family and queerly sexualized scenarios hits an apex when Derek shares a couch with his mother, and describes the “Boone County mating call” for the camera. As he shakes a prescription pill bottle, he calls out, “Come and get it, baby,” 29 implying that sexual conquest in Boone County, West Virginia is made in the service of drugs, rather than either pleasure or reproduction. During this scene, the camera tightens on Derek’s hands, taking viewer’s out of the hyperrealistic feeling of the filmed interview, staged on the couch, and into the stark, simple realism that characterizes the shot’s aestheticization of prescription drug addiction, a very real epidemic that plagues Appalachia (fig. 4-8). 30 Even Mousie’s reminiscences of her marriage to Charles included their initial stop at the pharmacy, where they picked up prescription pain and anxiety pills before taking their vows: “We get the medicine. We come out here to the truck. We crush four up, snort ‘em. The pharmacist, who was also a preacher… took us over to the flower department and married us. What the fuck? I wanted to get married.” 29 “Dirty white” is used again by one of Poney’s daughters, the only family member to have left West Virginia for a life in Minnesota. She describes how teachers in Boone County would call them “dirty White,” which may be read as both a reference to their last name and their status as “white trash.” 30 Sean Dunne’s documentary Oxyana (2013), which is set in Oceana, WV, provides a full account of this epidemic and its effects on the region. 196 What happens, then, to the children of these queer unions if, according to queer theory’s most cited theorist of childhood, Lee Edelman, political appeals on behalf of “reproductive futurism” are impossible to refuse? We may not have yet taken into account the child itself as failure, blight, degenerate, and “dirty white,” as Nitzberg portrays the White children. The final scenes of the film document a White family party in a park, and as dusk settles the film focuses on the children. Although they serve as the final image, these children were not central to the film, with the exception of Tylor, a child who we hear threaten to murder his own father––“If I had a knife I’d slit his damned throat open; or his nuts”––after overhearing his mother tell the camera that she “meant to kill that motherfucker” when she stabbed him. Tylor is portrayed as bratty, yet sympathetic, jumping wildly on his bed, begging his mother for a fight, and being scolded, finally, that “six cans of pop is too much, it’s hypin’ you up.” In an interview, Nitzberg recounts Mamie White’s expectation for these children: that they will end up incarcerated (Dangerous Minds). These white children are not the images of innocence that Edelman claims terrorize the present. For Edelman, to imagine another political horizon, a politics untethered from the Imaginary in which parents believe they can reproduce their own images into the future, we must declare, “Fuck the Child!” In WWWWV, the child’s image––the white child at that–– instead, warns us: “You’re all fucked!” The young children in the documentary’s final scenes smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and yell “fuck you” to the camera. All the while, Mamie, the living matriarch, laughs hysterically, and tells the interviewer that when she dies she wants those attending her funeral to “Party their balls off. Blow pot in [her] face and snort pills on [her] head. Fuckin’ rock and roll baby.” The children privy to these statements are not the white children valued by reproductive futurity. Nor are they the proto-gay children who may grow into the negative, white queers that Edelman figures as the antidote to a stymied political sphere. Rather, 197 these are the children who are illegible to the state, and who will most likely grow into adults who are made disposable by the state. 4.7: Hope in Failure Fatalism and hopelessness are prevalent in WWWWV, and they are located in coal country, specifically, with the economy of West Virginia entirely dependent upon the coal industry. While the White family chooses drug dealing and social security disability over working in the mines, interviewee Francis Curnutte makes a direct correlation between fatalism and coal: “People who’ve been working in one of the most dangerous jobs that there is [coal mining], it creates a sort of fatalism and a lack of a fear of death. That type of thinking is pervasive. It’s a sense of hopelessness. Because you don’t find a whole lot of optimism about the future” (WWWWV). Labor historian Paul Rakes corroborates these claims, describing coal mining culture at the turn of the twentieth century as one in which “High casualties during the early expansion era [1890-1910] heightened the subculture of danger among miners and equally influenced public acceptance of such unnecessary deaths” (58). This acceptance of danger––and the fatalism that results, leading Charles to tell the documentary crew that “You’d be a stupid motherfucker if you didn’t think you was going to die.” Rakes asserts that the dangers of early coal mining continues into our present moment: “Although technological changes altered the underground environment over the years and reform rhetoric surfaced after catastrophes [such as collapses and explosions], coal mining’s intrinsic dangers provided the industry an official and personal defense of its abysmal safety record throughout much of the twentieth century” (58). 198 The acceptance of these dangers is unavoidable as the economy is entirely dependent on mine labor, nine out of ten Appalachian men have not attended college, and as Nitzberg describes, there are not enough fast food jobs to go around and the service industry is nearly the only alternative to mining in Boone County (Dangerous Minds). Being one of the only options for traditional, heteronormative support of a family, coal mining is tied to masculinity and economies of desire, as Charles’ friend, an interviewee explains: “Bitches love coal miners.” Sexualized, yet vulnerable and in constant danger, the Appalachian coal miners, friends and family to the Whites in the documentary, are considered disposable by the state. 31 Journalist Jeff Goodell, writing after the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, addresses the state’s production of disposable subjects: The reason mine safety reforms have failed is the political power of the coal industry. After every coal mining tragedy, there are passionate calls for new safety rules and regulations. After those reforms are proposed, they are fought over in Congress and state legislatures, where politically connected coal operators make the case that the reforms are too onerous, too expensive, too difficult to implement. And so they are watered down, loopholes are inserted, timelines extended. This is particularly true in West Virginia, where Don Blankenship, the head of Massey Energy, the coal company that owns the Upper Big Branch mine, holds sway over state politics there like one of the old coal barons of yore. (New York Times) 31 The largest-scale mining accident in the US occurred in Monongah, WV in 1907, killing 362 workers, and in the past few years, the Sago Mine Disaster of 2006 killed twelve in Appalachia, and the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster killed twenty-nine. Federal regulators had ordered portions of the mine to close sixty times, just in 2009, and 90% of all US mining deaths in the past two decades have been determined “preventable” (Roddy). 199 Bringing us back to Reddy’s theory of mediation, the hopelessness and fatalism that is bred by the coal industry and its hand in state politics reveals “dirty white” subjects of the Appalachian coal fields who are illegible to the state and its objectives: to aid corporations in outputting as much production as possible, making the most capital gain as possible, all the while expending the least amount of capital on safety regulations for the backward, backwoods, isolated miners who labor underground. Reddy emphasizes the importance of seeing these violent state practices as revelatory of contradictions in state logic, produced by the undercutting of the welfare state and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism with its attendant violences. Before NAFTA, before the working classes were driven toward the Right by the culture wars, an important fracture that resulted from these mediations was the radicalization of Left labor politics in places like Boone County. 32 There was once a potential in Appalachian labor radicalism, combined with a refusal of normal citizenship and willingness to oppose the state. My admittedly queer attachment to the improper object of a gun-toting “dirty white” family holds onto the hope that they demonstrate the effects of enduring neoliberalism on some of the most vulnerable subjects of the US nation- state, while troubling the conflation between whiteness and normalcy as the citizen ideal of “heartland” rural America. The Whites negotiate and embrace their failures toward an exploitation of the state, rather than a reactionary move toward the political Right, which has been the typical modus operandi of rural poor whiteness in U.S. politics since the sex and race- baiting turn toward social conservatism in the 1970s. 33 32 See David Montgomery’s The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 for more information on the connections between mining, Left and Socialist movements, and the development of the United Mine Workers of America, which remains a highly visible force in Boone County and across Appalachia. 33 In his article on “hixploitation” films of the 1970s, Scott Herring provides one interesting example of the ways that “queerness ignited reactionary conservative movements” (97). In terms of “hixploitation,” the reaction was not to queerness that originated outside the “hick,” but rather queerness within: “Now largely forgotten, regionally sexualized hillbillies on film contributed to the cultural imaginary of what we have come to think of as the New Right” (98). I bring in Herring’s essay here in order to draw connections to the different type of reaction the 200 The documentary form, which by its own code of ethics does not compensate its subjects, allows for dirty whiteness to remain mired in its backwardness and its poverty, a condition that unsettles viewers in a manner unavailable to reality television. Mamie ends the WWWWV by saying, “I ain’t never fuckin’ seen [the world] be good. Come in this world with nothin’. I guess I’ll die with nothin’. At least the world knows who the fuck we are.” For the Whites, the “dirty white” aesthetic becomes a way to refuse progress and as proper white citizens, a refusal that acknowledges the fatalism attendant to that righteousness in an economy that has made the worker in Appalachia a disposable subject, heading nightly into a mine from which he or she might never return. Meanwhile the documentary allows the Whites to garner some form of fame for this “queer art of failure.” 34 While Nitzberg’s paranoid film sets out to warn the American public about the dangers of failing rurality, we end up with a portrait of negativity that might prompt us to expand our notions of queerness as it relates to the condition of enduring neoliberalism. Mamie may be right in her assessment of what good has come from the film: “At least the world knows who the fuck we are.” 4.8 Reality TV: Broadcast Rurality for Twenty-first Century Audiences “At least the world knows who the fuck we are” could be an anthem of our reality television culture, in which it seems that everyone from the housewife to the parking attendant White family has had to their internal forms of “queerness,” which I also read, like Herring, as “sexually nonnormative acts rather than a legible lesbian and gay identity” (98). If Herring demonstrates the ways that reading queerness more broadly can implicate “rednecks” in queer practice, giving way to reactionary politics, my argument here has demonstrated that by reading queerness more broadly, we might implicate “dirty whites” in queer practice, giving way to anti-sociality and a radical rejection of the state. 34 If, as Halberstam claims, there are possibilities for “ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings of success,” which “equate too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” in our heteronormative, capitalist, and white supremacist society, perhaps failures of capital might reveal queer failures: failures at whiteness, at heteronormativity, and thus at citizenship itself (Queer Art of Failure loc 63). 201 has their own reality series. Media studies scholar Laurie Ouellette gives a concise definition of the form that reality television took in the early 2000s: “hybrid ‘reality entertainment’ programs that combined the factual conventions of journalism, observational documentary, and video diaries with the plot elements and entertainment appeals of soap operas, sitcoms, dramas, and game shows” (1). Ostensibly, reality television is unscripted, and it uses ordinary people as its subjects, but it is also heavily edited; despite the eschewal of scripts to provide content, the televisual format requires entertainment-based appeals be made (Ouellette 5). Jane Feuer makes the connection between reality television’s form and content when she notes that “On reality TV, the narrative does not follow people’s lives in the fly-on-the-wall fashion that ostensibly structures direct cinema. Rather, real people structure their lives to follow the formula. This is a formula heavily influenced by the conventions of television melodrama” (191). Thus, if a potential reality television star wants recognition for his or her “ordinary” life, that life must be lived according to the form. This dissertation’s previous chapter provided a history of scripted rural television in the 1960s, arguing that rural programming offered television’s then key audience—white, middle class, newly relocated suburbanites—a safe, accessible window into otherness that they experienced as a loss in their move from city to suburbs. As they transitioned from the urban to the provincial, suburbanites in the 1960s required a safe (rural) encounter with otherness, and the television sitcom provided that contact. Today’s encounter with rural otherness also produces assurance and stability. In a scathing review of rural reality television, Ryan Broderick, for online popular culture magazine The A.V. Club, theorizes the appeal of rural TV for those who do not see themselves mirrored on screen “The shows are cheap to produce and give a viewer an addictive mix of schadenfreude, existential horror, anthropological fascination—a feeling of ‘I 202 might have it bad right now, but at least I’m not a pregnant teenager crying in a Burger King parking lot in Georgia or a pageant mom hot-gluing rhinestones on my 4-year-old in the lobby of an Alabama Hotel Marriott’” (“Dark Side”). Like those middle-class suburbanites of the 1960s, who, until provided with the opportunity to compare their suburban enclave to Mayberry, may have felt like country bumpkins, removed from the multicultural, cross-class contact of urban life, the faction of rural reality’s audiences that Broderick represents are tuning in comparatively, reveling in the comfort of never seeing themselves reflected on screen. 35 YouTube comments on popular scenes from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo validate Broderick’s claim: “they put this on the wrong channel, its meant to be on animal planet” (MlgChickenElite); “literally every video I watch of these people, I have a huge lump rising in my throat. Note to everyone- don't eat or drink anything for at least 2 hours before you watch these people” (Original Lilly); “She saw her dad shaving the mom's vagina?! Jesus Christ, this family is fucked up” (cheesecake134). 36 Given these critiques of the family’s “fucked up” bodily and gender comportment, the remainder of this chapter will explore the reasons that HCHBB’s ratings remained strong up until the show’s cancellation, when paparazzi captured family matriarch Mama June having contact with her daughter’s sexual abuser, Mark McDaniel, who was recently released from prison. 35 The difference between 1960s scripted rural programming, with its saccharine sweetness, and 2000s rural reality with its shock and awe aesthetics, causes a shift in the audience demographic interested in watching rurality. Ratings for rural reality are not only strong overall, but also in the adults 18-34 demographic—the exact demographic that turned away from scripted rural programming decades prior, causing advertisers to look elsewhere for their commercial spots and sponsorships. Katherine Lonsdale Waller’s paper at the 2016 SCMS conference titled “CMT, MTV, and Viacom’s Homogenization of Regional American Identities” sheds some light on the reasons that a younger demographic has taken interest in rural reality programming. Waller demonstrated the manner by which Viacom has created slick, urbane flow between its channels, rather than simply through the daily programming timeslots within them, collapsing any ideological or aesthetic differences between rural reality programs like MTV’s Buckwild or CMT’s Party Down South and more urban-oriented programming such as MTV’s Jersey Shore. 36 The episode selection and commentary I refer to here can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H9a4iomcBM. These larger points about transmediated continuity are crucial to thinking about HCHBB’s cancellation, the topic of this chapter’s final section. 203 As insignificant as YouTube comments might seem, in a post-network era, comments like those of “MlgChickenElite,” “Original Lilly,” and “cheesecake 134” become a crucial part of shows themselves. Jennifer Jones and Brenda Weber describe “transmediated continuity”— the event of a media object finding a coherent cultural narrative beyond its original airing— which “occurs simultaneously among multiple cultural producers with diverse roles in the circuit of media production, from television executives, magazine editors, and union shops to cultural critics, fan bloggers, and anonymous commenters” (14). Through this process of transmedition, the original media object shifts, but it does not simply accrue more meaning: “transmediated continuity denotes a transformation at the atomic level, meaning that the system itself intrinsically alters” (Jones and Weber 15). We cannot think our way back to a show that existed before its mediations, and audience reactions to the show become part of the show itself. Despite its place within the history of rural “authenticity genres” that this project has detailed, this chapter considers rural reality television as a highly mediated form: both the transmediation of the televisual text, and the ways that audiences mediate their encounters with the show and its numerous “perversions.” Audiences were able to take pleasure in HCHBB’s blatant exploitation of rural poverty and backwardness because its strict adherence to the sensational reality format, and its mediations, makes the show’s fabrication obvious, thus reducing the anxiety that audiences might otherwise feel, in our economically precarious present, when there is occasion to identify with downward mobility. Subsequently, in the event of HCHBB’s cancellation, the show’s transmediated content spilled over its form, becoming too “real” for reality television, particularly in regards to audience reactions to the threat of rural sexual perversion. 204 Reality television—particularly programming such as The Biggest Loser or American Idol that prompts its stars to become something other than their current selves—exaggerates an always already ongoing and extensive project of neoliberal self-fashioning, which Foucault aptly described in his 1979 lectures as “the entrepreneurial self” (226). 37 Reality TV lifestyles—from Redneck to Jersey to Kardashian—are available for consumption. Although rural lifestyling, such as sharing a Honey Boo Boo meme on Facebook or purchasing a Duck Dynasty cookbook, allows viewers to participate in a “redneck” lifestyle in their own realities, viewers do not necessarily embody an identity by consuming it. That said, being a “Netflix person” or a “cord cutter,” a millennial identity marked by the refusal to rely on live television for entertainment, is an important class and cultural marker, given that higher brow content with high production value is streaming endlessly on the former, while network cable continues to proliferate lowbrow, low budget reality TV. 38 For upper and middle-class white viewers, tuning in to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo on network cable becomes a form of televisual “slumming.” Scott Herring describes the ways that this form of cultural consumption became a means of knowledge production in the “slumming” literature of the early twentieth century: “Through these literatures of exposure, knowledge about ‘social life’ in the U.S. metropolis was realized through 37 “In practice, the stake in all neoliberal analysis is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as a partner of exchange with homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (Foucault 226) Reaching this neoliberal “entrepreneur of the self” through Chicago School economist Gary Becker, Foucault goes on to claim that “The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well, quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. And we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction” (226). Opposite the liberal model that would bifurcate the individual’s practices—consumption and production—the neoliberal model brings forth a self-produced individual, one that produces the self through the act of consumption, the two economic acts inseparable. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 38 Sarah Banet-Weiser theorizes the significance of our culture’s obsession with branding, to the point of brands becoming identity markers, i.e. “I am a Coke person” or a “Mac user.” She writes, “Brands become the setting around which individuals weave their own stories where individuals position themselves as the ventral character in the narrative of the brand” (4). For a report on the number of households cutting their ties to cable, see Brendan James, “Forget Cable Cord-Cutting: 83 Percent Of American Households Still Pay For TV,” http://www.ibtimes.com/forget-cable-cord-cutting-83-percent-american-households-still-pay-tv-2081570. 205 sensationalism, reproduced through spectacularization, and contained through generic formula” (10). In our contemporary TV culture, rurality is experienced similarly: through sensation, spectacle, and the reality genre. 39 And yet, clearly, rural reality’s viewership is not made up entirely of middle-class urbanites seeking a sensational look at the otherwise unseen, or validation for their own lifestyles in the easily demeaned lifestyles of rural others. For instance, big box empire Walmart, associated with a low income, rural and Middle American customer base, sells an array of Duck Dynasty products. Sarah McKinney, the Director of Communications at Walmart, claims that “Duck Dynasty T-shirts are [their] best-selling licensed graphic shirts across the men's, boys' and ladies' departments.” McKinney continues, “Walmart currently sells Duck Dynasty products in six different departments, from apparel to home goods to sporting gear and Band-Aids” (E! News). While critics and the media obsess over revelations such as Johnny Depp’s attraction to the Boo Boo Clan, 40 and despite the fact that critics overwhelmingly find the show demeaning to rural Americans, millions of working class and working poor television viewers are tuning into HCHBB, and in turn buying rural reality products from their local Walmart stores. In The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant theorizes the ways that minoritarian subjects like the rural poor react to and identify with rural poor representations: “a variety of nonprivileged subjects circulate through intimate publics to engender kinds of insider recognition and cultural self-development that, while denigrated in the privileged publics of the United States, provide an experience of social belonging in proximity to the technologies that make the nation itself a site of affective 39 Herring’s larger argument in Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History is that “a handful of U.S. writers and artists in the first half of the twentieth century queered the popular genre, turned the slumming narrative against itself, used it to manipulate homosexual identifications, and frustrated the compulsion to reveal underworld sexual knowledge” (3). While this chapter will not make a similar argument about reality television, its argument about documentary film demonstrates how that form allows its subjects to manipulate a filmmaker’s compulsion to sensationalize and reveal. 40 Michael Rothman, “Johnny Depp: I'm Mesmerized by Honey Boo Boo,” ABC News, 6 July 2013. 206 investment and emotional identification” (xi). While it is difficult to ascertain their feelings about the show, given that they are not the ones writing opinion pieces for Time and The Atlantic, it is clear that rural TV works differently for populations with different relationships to rural poverty. While the rural poor may, structurally, have animosity toward the nation-state that fails to provide them material well-being and then televises that failure, there remains an affective identification with the nation and these extraordinary types of representations that make up rurality’s participation in the US cultural public. 4.9 Transmediation and Audience Reactions to Rural Backwardness Bill Nichols’ work on early reality television is useful for thinking though the form’s appeal, as well as its distinction from another authenticity genre: documentary film. Nichols claims that while documentary film grew out of a political tradition, one that appeals to audiences who are made to feel responsible for taking action when the film ends, reality television assimilates its referent into a different kind of substance, one that, even if initially shocking, is made digestible through the televisual form itself. As such, there is no impetus to act off screen according to what one has seen on screen. He claims that “these shows tend to emphasize a compelling mixture of what Levi-Strauss called… the raw and cooked” (45). Here, the raw is the spectacular, “situations and events of startling horror, intense danger, morbid conduct, desperate need, or bizarre coincidence” (45). The cooked are the “cover stories that reduce such evidence to truism or platitudes” (45). For instance, on Toddlers and Tiaras (the show from which Here Comes Honey Boo Boo spun off), audiences watch Alana Thompson, supposedly unmediated by the production crew, spinning in circles backstage, guzzling her “GoGo Juice,” an unhealthy combination of Red Bull and Mountain Dew, in preparation for her 207 on-stage pageant performance. A formal interview with the show’s production crew interrupts the scene, prompting Mama June to explain the “Go-Go Juice” recipe to the audience. According to Nichols, this combination of unmediated “reality” and the televisual reality format “reduces potential subversion and excess to a comestible glaze (Nichols 45). 41 In other words, the introduction of the reality format—i.e. the staged interview, manufactured events, the production team’s introduction of drama into the everyday, and the memes circulating online after each episode—reduces the shock audiences might otherwise experience if simply watching a child consuming a combination of Mountain Dew and Red Bull for the entertainment of adult onlookers at a beauty pageant. Unlike documentary film with its sense of social purpose, reality television fails to represent an absent referent off screen, for which viewers are responsible when the viewing ends; rather, we are left with the impression that the family is satisfied with their lives, despite their health issues and humiliation of the show itself. 42 The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia exhibits queer debasement with which audiences must grapple, while HBHBB allows for the shock of rural debasement to be glossed over with familial affect and a fiercely individualistic tone, communicated through Mama June’s oft-quoted insistence that “You either like us or you don’t. We just don’t care.” 43 Their particular brand of rurality is orchestrated for reality television, and as such does little to no work toward untangling the social and economic structures that have positioned the family at the bottom of a cultural hierarchy. As a prime 41 Nichols writes about reality TV through early 1990s programs such as COPS and Rescue 911. The program on which this chapter focuses—Here Comes Honey Boo Boo—does contain elements of shock and danger, although they are more so in the cultural realm than the physical (at least until the series cancellation, which I will address). While the domestic and occupational are far more prevalent in reality TV of the 2000s, this chapter also considers MTV’s Jackass, which conforms more closely to Nichols’ early definition of reality television. 42 While this chapter focuses on specific reality television formats—mainly the “lifestyle” program and the reality stunt comedy—I must, at times, generalize about reality television as a broad genre. 43 Allison Yarrow, “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is a Fabulous Cultural Ambassador for America.” The Atlantic 22 May 2013 http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/-i-here-comes-honey-boo-boo-i-is- a-fabulous-cultural-ambassador-for-america/276102/ 208 example of contemporary rural reality television, HCHBB “offers a therapeutic ritual for encounter with what lies beyond the law” (Nichols 56). However, it is not a subversive medium, drawing those who would also lie beyond the law into its practices. By providing a negative example of normative rural living, the genre and the show itself ultimately “patrols borders and affirms the law” rather than working to change it (Nichols 56). 4.10 The Clichés are in on the Joke: Compensation, Exploitation, and Rural Reality TV While audiences may have gotten a laugh at rural poverty on HCHBB, these particular reality stars were laughing back, all the way to the bank. Industry scholar June Deery is correct, that reality television overwhelmingly fails to compensate its participants: “Employing nonprofessional actors is a commercial rather than a deliberately political strategy, the aim being to attract viewers and cut production costs, not give voice to the powerless” (12). However, as mentioned in this chapter’s introduction, the HCHBB family have received infamously high levels of compensation for a reality program, thus allowing viewers to gawk at their backwardness without having to grapple with that which contributes to it: rural poverty. Hollywood Reporter critic Tim Goodman claims that compensation diminishes the entertainment value of rural backwardness: “Once the clichés are in on the joke, they start pandering to the camera, and some of the joy is lost. They just become annoying because now they’ve taken the power we had over them—laughing at their pathetic lives—and are turning it into cash” (The Hollywood Reporter). On HCHBB, the “clichés” are quite obviously in on the joke, which becomes clear in the ways the subjects react to the crew’s presence in their home. Scenes such 209 the often-memed “Mama June on personal hygiene” make the crew’s presence apparent; rather than shooting in a cinema vérité style, capturing conversations between Mama June and her daughter “Pumpkin” from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, their conversation is clearly staged, almost like an interview. June and Pumpkin react to the camera and prompts from the crew, with June asking if they should call her sister, “Chubs,” to verify the accuracy of their conversation. When they reach her, “Chubs” clearly asks if “they,” i.e. the crew, could hear her on speakerphone, making sure the shot is successful, allowing audiences to see the ways that the family cooperates with the crew in the staging of their lives. This is different from the WWWWV subjects’ reactions to the camera, which are to clearly state “fuck that camera.” 44 Although the filmmakers are acknowledged, viewers do not get a sense that the Whites perform for them. In the case of HCHBB, mediation is apparent and we get a clear sense that the reality stars are aware that the more they perform for the camera, the more they will be able to cash in on their fame. Rural reality TV’s transformation of the “pathetic” into “cash” is precisely what allows audiences to continue laughing, all the while enduring the collective experience of downward mobility that defines our precarious present. Rurality’s payday becomes empowering for audiences who desire the contact with rural authenticity that reality television provides. And yet, there is a limit to that power, which rural reality extends to its audiences. While rural reality stars may be cashing in on the spectacle of their humiliation, the threat of sexual abuse and perversion is a symptom of country life and remains that which simultaneously titillates and repulses non- rural viewers. HCHBB draws audiences into a country lifeworld of suspect parenting, and then it forces those audiences away when the “reality” of the situation becomes overwhelming. 44 Mamie utters this line while explaining her drug run route for the documentary, a revelation that could obviously incriminate her. 210 4.11 Rural Perversion and the Limits of Reality Television It's different in the country. By that point, we were already kind of like hot to trot, you know what I'm saying? Like, girls, we weren't afraid to talk to them; I wasn't afraid. So, at eight, being able to do it, it kind of preps you for the long run, so you can be a beast at it. You can be the best at it. —R&B star Chris Brown, on “losing his virginity” at 8 years old From Duck Dynasty’s Jep Robertson recounting his childhood molestation by an older female schoolmate, to TLC’s immediate cancelation of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo upon accusations that family matriarch “Mama June” reunited with former boyfriend and convicted child molester Mark McDaniel, sexual abuse and perversion in the country is a paramount concern for producers of rural reality programs (fig. 4-9). Perhaps most infamously, Josh Duggar of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting—a rural lifestyle program featuring a family of “Quiverfull” conservative Christians in Arkansas—was discovered to have sexually abused six girls, including two of his sisters. In July 2015, two months after InTouch magazine released police statements documenting these abuses dating back to 2006, TLC cancelled 19 Kids and Counting. 45 I opened this chapter with the claim that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo became the most successful amongst a host of popular rural programming because it provides the schadenfreude to which reality viewers have become accustomed, paired with the authenticity of rurality, while the adherence to form and publicized compensation masked the actuality of rural American poverty. In closing this chapter, I will consider these cancellations as an occasion to make final claims 45 For a timeline of the Duggar sexual abuse scandal, see USA Today’s account: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2015/05/28/timeline-josh-duggar-19-kids-and-counting-tlc-sex-abuse- scandal/28066229/. Because TLC failed to immediately cancel 19 Kids and Counting upon announcement of the Duggar sexual abuse scandal, “Mama” June Shannon threatened lawsuits against TLC, despite the fact that the network compensated the family for an entire third season they had previously taped, which will, ostensibly, never air. 211 about class, region, and reality television as it approaches the limits of what is bearable—and indeed, what is pleasurable—to rurality’s wide audience. In their work on pleasure and the unbearable, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman describe the unbearable as relations that both overwhelm and anchor, sites of relationality that we invest with expectation and anxiety. 46 As one mode of attachment to a bearable life, Americans invest in the sustained and sustaining fantasy that the kind of backward perversion that produces the child molester is somehow bred deep in the backwoods of rural America, which Chris Brown (raised in rural Virginia) describes as a place where sex is “different.” The specter of incest and abuse in rural America has been titillating urban and suburban Americans for a century.47 From social scientists’ curious interest in the combination of “imbecility” and “fecundity” that they found deep in Appalachia, to the immense popularity of staged incest in Jack Kirkland’s 1933 Broadway adaptation of Tobacco Road, American audiences have been drawn toward the scandal of rural sexual perversion, and even rural sexual abuse. HCHBB is no exception. The casting of sexual abuse as a regional and class-based problem becomes clear upon HCHBB’s cancellation, when Mama June tells Entertainment Tonight reporter Brooke Anderson that she has never been sexually molested, although she recounted a story of having sex with men in their 20s and 30s when she was as young as twelve. Anderson asks the reality star if her experience with early sexualization may have contributed to her lack of attention when Mark McDaniel, June’s then-boyfriend, sexually abused her child, Anna “Chickadee” Caldwell. June’s avoidance of the issue, and the line of questioning itself, implies that the inheritable perversion of backward rurality makes June unfit for motherhood, unable to protect her child. This scandal, and June’s inability to address it—hoping instead to bury the past and continue on with the 46 Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex; or the Unbearable, Durham, NC: Duke UP 2013. 47 James Kincaid works on this problem in Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, Durham, NC: Duke UP 2000. 212 family’s fame and fortune—exacerbates the critiques of her parenting style that had been circulating in the media since her appearance on Toddlers and Tiaras. Media scholar Shelly Cobb explains the reasons that reality TV motherhood is subject to such scrutiny: “a woman's identity as a mother and as a working person are perceived to be mutually exclusive, as opposed to the masculine ideal in which having a job means being a good father” (4). June has made a job of humiliating herself as a means to providing for her family: she details her hygiene, her weight, and even her sexual history in order to stage a lucrative reality show. When June tells Entertainment Tonight audiences that she had not read the court documents detailing the sexual abuse of her eight-year-old daughter and that she had “told Anna not to bring up the past,” Mama June’s inability to put her responsibilities as a mother before her responsibilities as a reality star are indeed disturbing. However, we should not find June’s actions shocking. We live in a culture that simultaneously imagines the sexual endangerment of children on every urban playground, but invests in a spatial (il)logic that this threat is mostly “out there,” where parents like June Shannon and the Duggars, burdened by ignorance and their own histories of abuse, fail to protect their children from the predators they love. 48 Despite her insistence that she is innocent of any ongoing relationship with McDaniel, Mama June’s media indictment reveals the quickness with which our culture locates Alana Thompson’s endangerment in this particular configuration of class and rurality. 49 Salon staff writer Mary Elizabeth Williams reacted to Mama June’s incrimination by reminding us that 48 The rural/urban and lower/upper class double standards of public reactions to the potential for sexual abuse and exploitation are put into stark relief by the public’s relative acceptance of Kylie Jenner’s relationship with rapper Tyga, despite the fact that she began a relationship with him when he was twenty-five and she sixteen (two years short of the age of consent in California). Kloe Kardashian defended the relationship, based on the “special case” it warrants, given Kylie’s “maturity” and business savvy. These qualities are clearly a product of her class and access. For a critique of the public and Kardashian acceptance of the relationship, see Zeba Blay, “How Excusing Tyga And Kylie Jenner’s Relationship Validates The Sexualization of Young Girls,” Huffington Post, 29 July 2015. 49 See “Mama June's 2 Big Reasons for Reuniting with Child Molester.” Entertainment Tonight. Interview with Brooke Anderson. 13 Nov. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ny3MBIM6nc 213 “Individuals of all social classes, education levels and economic statuses can commit sexual abuse, and they can be the victims of it.” 50 But our readiness to cast Mama June as a monster, despite her denial of the allegations, persists. Jennifer Lynn Jones and Brenda Weber claim that “While reality TV serves up many female models of excess—from ‘biggest losers’ to hoarders, plastic surgery junkies to bridezillas—it saves a special invective for mothers whose desires for fame drive them to ‘prostitute’ themselves and their children to the voracious appetites of fame” (12). This insistence on persecuting Mama June, the woman who had been “failing” her children by cultural parenting standards on reality television every week for two years, is a defensive maneuver, enacted to mask audience attachments to the scintillating threat of rural perversion, as well as the inverse mythology that this perversion is contained in the country. While TLC’s decision to cancel the show suggests that the network, understandably, finds the idea of a pedophile in contact with Alana Thompson to be unbearable, the specters of incest, abuse, molestation, and endangerment have lingered around the show, and Toddlers in Tiaras, since their respective debuts. For instance, critiques of the young girls’ sexualization on these programs peaked in 2009 when a stage mom dressed her three-year-old as Julia Roberts’ depiction of prostitute “Vivian” from Pretty Woman, and public outcries for the show’s cancellation quickly followed. The cancellation of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is an instance in which a relation that seems unbearable—the threat of child sexual abuse—has actually proven quite bearable to millions of viewers who returned to the show, mesmerized by the humiliation and sexualization of the show’s children, but ashamed that they finally got caught in the act when these perverse relations moved from “reality” to reality. The show’s intertextual elements, i.e. the paparazzi photographs of Mama June and Mark McDaniel, and the online commentary 50 Mary Elizabeth Williams, “The Class War Over Sexual Abuse Accusations,” Salon 27 October 2014. <http://www.salon.com/2014/10/27/the_class_war_over_sexual_abuse_accusations/> 214 that followed, began to supercede reality television’s “comestible glaze.” Suddenly, the program was thrust outside the reality television genre, where individualist zeal and familial affect, along with a host of formal elements such as staged interviews, glaze over the structural violence that makes the prevalence of sexual abuse in the country all too “real.” 51 The show’s cancellation— the network’s reaction to the Boo Boo clan’s reality—suggests that TLC finds the prospect of lawsuits unbearable, and yet the safety of the child remains in question, particularly when the cameras stop rolling and the film crews leave isolated McIntyre, Georgia. The stability of the cultural narrative of child protection itself comes undone, at least in the case of the poor, rural, child, who renders the rest of the nation’s children safe with her own vulnerability. A recent Salon column called Honey Boo Boo “a tiny, dimpled monster,” and claimed that seeing her in the flesh is “like watching a cartoon come to life.” 52 This is an apt description of rural reality television itself. Rural realities—such as economic depression, isolation, and frustration with state policies, combined with poor education and healthcare—pull rural communities backward, as they often fail or refuse to strive toward normative ideals. The HCHBB family, like the White clan, fails or refuses to strive toward normativity, but their participation in the reality genre makes these failures and refusals “cute,” “like watching a cartoon [coming] to life,” rather than like watching the often nightmarish reality of poverty, violence, and death that marks disposable rural populations. Thompson’s cartoon “cuteness” is what appeals to viewers of these programs. But, as Sianne Ngai writes, “cuteness” is “anything but precious or safe,” and Thompson’s cuteness appeals precisely in its proximity to danger, a 51 I refer to rural sexual abuse as a structural violence rather than individual incidence. Emma Eisenberg’s article on Orange is the New Black’s representations of rural sexual violence contains various studies of the topic. See “We still don’t know how to talk about Pennsatucky: The reality of rural sexual assault and how class plays out in ‘Orange Is the New Black,’” Salon, 5 July 2015. 52 Christy O’Shoney, “The real Honey Boo Boo: What reality TV did to the pint-sized pageant queen,” Salon 19 June 2014. 215 danger we have told ourselves time and again exists in perverse rural elsewheres. 53 When danger approaches, as it did in 2014 when paparazzi captured Mama June holding hands with her daughter’s abuser, the proximity of rural reality impinged upon the genre of reality television, forcing audiences, suddenly, to invest in that referent off screen: the territory not of reality television, but of documentary film. At that moment, the reality show imploded, no longer able to function as the network intended, its perverse backwardness slipping rather into the realm of “reality,” where the authenticity genre of rural reality television, ironically, does not belong. 53 Ngai’s description of the often violent feelings that can arise in the confrontation with cuteness, which often takes the qualities of “blobbishness,” “helplessness,” and “malleability” (all of which certainly factor into Alana Thompson’s particular brand of cute), are instrumental to thinking about the reasons that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo has encountered such charged reactions: “We can thus start to see how cuteness might provoke ugly or aggressive feelings, as well as the expected tender or maternal ones. For in its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle” (816). Which is not to say that I think Alana Thompson invites sexual abuse, but rather that critics of the show and its exploitation of her “cuteness” get to say “I told you so!” now that accusations of her endangerment have come to light. 216 Conclusion Dolly Parton is certainly the cultural icon that bridges rurality and queerness: the down and out Appalachian and the down and out gay man, brought together over a shared affection for rhinestones and wigs. And the urbanity of a gay camp sensibility allows gay men to strike the rural pose of Dolly, or to see themselves in Dolly’s self-fashioning, which the icon describes as decidedly trashy. Parton described her trashy ideal of glamour, queer in its embrace of sexualized debasement, on British talk show Parkinson in 2007: “You know they have them in a mountain town, there’s always a few loose women. But this woman—I thought was beautiful. She had this beautiful peroxide hair piled on her head, and red nails, high-heeled shoes. And I just thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. And mama said, ‘Oh, she ain’t nothing but trash!’ So, I thought, ‘that’s what I wanna be, Mama! I wanna be trash!’” 1 And yet, the gay celebration of Dolly Parton—itself backward in its less-than-gay-prideful reminiscence about “the good old days when times were bad”—is decidedly urban and urbane in its camp sensibility. 2 While a nod must be given to Dolly in any project attempting to yoke together queerness and the country, to conclude, I wish to set camp sensibilities aside and instead circle back to where I began: with Orange is the New Black’s spirit of multiculturalism, its rural “white trash” character Pennsatucky, and the ways the show asks audiences to collapse the distinctions between diverse populations, supposedly leveled by incarceration. In Jenji Kohan’s made-for-TV prison, fundamentalist Christian Pennsatucky forges an unlikely alliance with an unabashedly 1 This Parkinson interview is quoted in Michael Doshier’s “Dolly Parton is the South's Queer Matriarch (And We Need Her),” which also serves as a primer on Parton as gay camp icon. TCBP 20 April 2015. http://www.thingscreatedbypeople.com/zine/dolly-parton-is-the-souths-queer-matriarch 2 While Heather Love and many others have written about camp as a backward art in its tenderness for that which is outmoded and refusals to let go of the past, its backwardness does not typically signal rurality. Indeed, Sontag wrote about the likelihood that camp objects are urban, despite their backward qualities: “Nothing in nature can be campy… Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban. (Yet, they often have a serenity—or a naiveté—which is the equivalent of pastoral. A great deal of Camp suggests Empson's phrase, ‘urban pastoral.’)” (“Notes on Camp”). 217 butch, white lesbian, Carrie “Big Boo” Black, who has a bad attitude and big appetite for women. Toward the conclusion of the second season, after months of listening to Counselor Sam Healy’s white male rage, channeled into a fear of lesbians taking over the world, Pennsatucky approaches Big Boo to ask her about this plan for queer apocalypse (S2 E12). Big Boo weaves an intricate fantasy for Pennsatucky, explaining the lesbian plan to enslave all men, a scheme that appeals to Pennsatucky, as long as she is assured that she would not be required to do anything “disgusting,” i.e. engage in lesbian sex. As their friendship develops in Season 3, Big Boo’s aversion to men and ability to imagine a world without them makes her the ideal character to help Pennsatucky work through the trauma of her sexual abuses, both past in Appalachia and present in Litchfield Prison. Despite their shared anger at sexual violence and the men perpetrating it, the alliance between Pennsatucky and Big Boo is fraught with difference. When newly-hired prison guard Charlie Coates rapes Pennsatucky in the back seat of a prison van, Big Boo’s strategy for revenge, a radical concept given the power differential between guard and inmate, involves returning to the act of rape: drugging Coates and sodomizing him with a broom stick. While she agrees to go along with Big Boo’s revenge plot, Pennsatucky’s anger, sadness, and trauma manifest differently. She cannot go through with the act of revenge, and Coates is left relatively unscathed when a new inmate (Maritza Ramos) emerges to replace Pennsatucky on van duty with the predator. The cycle of violence continues, pushing toward the show’s next season. The unlikely alliance of Big Boo and Pennsatucky mirrors the sort of pairing that this dissertation asked its readers to follow. The formations that comprise the alliance—sexualized queerness and backward rurality—have been culturally opposed, and yet exist on similar affective registers, stretching from the early twentieth century’s cultural and economic crises to 218 the precarity of enduring neoliberalism today. Shame, humiliation, violence, and anger mark both rural and queer communities, and through this shared affective register, rurality itself emerges as backward and, as I have shown, disruptively queer, particularly in its ability to exceed the popular cultural forms that have attempted to contain and discipline it from the early twentieth century through today. And yet, like Big Boo and Pennsatucky, queerness and rurality resist differently. Overwhelmingly, rurality has turned toward the Right, with reactionary anger defining generation after generation of rural poor (white) folks, wrongfully blaming the federal government, immigration, and, indeed, queers, for their (often legitimate) complaints: the loss of industry, rampant poverty and drug use, a dearth of health and education resources in rural America. This project’s yoking together of the rural and the queer did not disentangle those differences and disavowals, nor did it produce the properly queered rural subject, one city queers can imagine living lives “out there” in the country, without turning their backs to a queer politics: radical impulses toward the embrace of perversion, anti-racism, economic redistribution, and the troubling of the nation. Instead, the rural queers who populated these pages demonstrated the manner by which rurality exceeds the various forms meant to contain, discipline, and normalize it. And in that excess, that backward drag upon a mythos of national progress, this dissertation located the queerness of rurality. 219 Figures Fig. I-1. Screenshot, OITNB S1 E12. Figure 2-1. Walker Evans. “Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.” July 1935. FSA. 220 Figure 2-2. Earl Mayan, cover artist. Avon Books, 1947. Figure 2-3. James Avati, cover artist. Signet Books, 1950. 221 Fig. 2-4, Carrie Buck and Emma Buck, 1924, the Lynchburg Colony, Lynchburg, VA. State University of New York at Albany. Fig. 2-5 “Migrant Mother,” 1936 (Dorothea Lange). Library of Congress FSA/OWI Collection. 222 Fig. 2-6. Ben Shahn, Wife and child of a sharecropper, Arkansas, 1935. Fig. 2-7. Walker Evans, Sharecropper's family, Hale County, Alabama, 1935 223 Figure 2-8. Walker Evans. “Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.” July 1935. FSA. Fig. 2-9. Walker Evans, General store interior, Moundville, Alabama (1936), LC-DIG-fsa- 8c52415 224 Fig. 2-10. Walker Evans, Railroad Station, Edwards, Mississippi (1936), LC-USF342-T01- 001295-A 225 Fig. 4-1 “White Family Tree.” WWWWV. Julien Nitzberg. 2010. 226 Fig. 4-2. Intertitle screenshot. The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. Fig. 4-3. Garrett, Henry Edward. General Psychology. New York: American Book Co. 1965. 227 Fig. 4-4. Jesco and Annie Mae “shotgunning” a joint. Screenshot. WWWWV. Fig. 4-5. Mamie exposing her brother’s nude body at their mother’s birthday party. Screenshot. WWWWV. 228 Fig. 4-6. Mousie simulating fellatio on a beer bottle as Charles protests, hiding his face. Screenshot. WWWWV. Fig. 4-7. Cheyanne, after witnessing her mother’s sexual advances, explaining that “[she] will never get married.” Screenshot. WWWWV. 229 Fig. 4-8. Derek demonstrating the “Boone Country mating call.” Screenshot. WWWWV. Fig. 4-9. Mama June and Mark McDaniel, TMZ. 230 Bibliography Abraham, Julie. Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of City. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Ahmed, Sara. “Some Striking Feature: Whiteness and Institutional Passing.” Feminist Killjoys. 14 June 2015. ---. “Willful Parts: Problem Characters or the Problem of Character.” New Literary History 42.2 (2011): 231-253. All in the Family. Prod. Norman Lear. Perf. Carroll O’Connor, Jean Stapleton. Bud Yorkin Productions. CBS Television. 1971-1979. “Alley Dwellers from South do North Injury: Chicago Infested with Undesirables who attempt to Destroy Morals.” The Chicago Defender. 17 June 1925: 2. Altman, Dennis. Global Sex. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2002. Alvey, Mark. “‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies’: Quality Demographics and 1960s U.S. Television.” Television: The Critical View. 2 nd ed. Horace Newcomb. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Anderson, Paul Allen. Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. Aronowitz, Alfred. “The Beginnings of the Band: Getting Started, Meeting Bob Dylan, and 'Music From Big Pink.’” Rolling Stone. 24 Aug. 1968. Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. U of California P, 2004. Baldwin, Davarian L. Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2013. 231 Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic: The Politics of Authenticity in Brand Culture. New York: NYUP, 2012. Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. 2nd Ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Beaver, Patricia Duane. Rural Community in the Appalachian South. Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky P, 1986. Bedell, Sally. Up the Tube: Primetime in the Silverman Years. New York: Viking, 1981. Belcher, Christina. “There’s no such thing as a post-racial prison: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the White Savior Complex on Orange is the New Black.” Television and New Media Forthcoming. April 2016. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. ---. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. ---. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. Bethune, Mary McLeod. “The Problems of the City Dweller.” Opportunity 3.26 (1925): 54-55. “Bill to drug test welfare recipients on its way to governor,” WSAZ, 10 March 2016. Blair, Sara. “Against Trauma: Documentary and Modern Times on the Lower East Side.” Trauma and the Documentary Photography of the FSA. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2012. Blay, Zeba. “How Excusing Tyga And Kylie Jenner’s Relationship Validates The Sexualization 232 of Young Girls.” Huffington Post. 29 July 2015. Bond Stockton, Kathryn. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer." Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. ---. The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. Borstelmann, Thomas. The 1970s: New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012. Bowerman, Mary. “Timeline: Duggar sex abuse scandal.” USA Today. 20 Aug. 2015. Broderick, Ryan. “The Dark Side of America’s Redneck Reality TV Obsession.” Buzzfeed. 27 Oct. 2014. Braithwaite, William Stanley. “The Negro in American Literature” (1925). The New Negro. Ed. Alain Locke. 1925. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Bronstein, Phoebe. “Comic Relief: Andy Griffith, White Southern Sheriffs, and Regional Rehabilitation.” Forthcoming in Camera Obscura 89 (September 2015). Brown, Les. Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971. Brown, Willa. “Lumbersexuality and its Discontents.” The Atlantic. 10 Dec. 2014. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. “Racial Violence, Lynchings, and Modernization in the Mountain South.” Appalachians and Race: The Moutain South from Slavery to Segregation. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. 233 Burley, Dan. “Declares Southern Race Man Determines Status in North.” The Chicago Defender. 6 Mar. 1937. Byrd, Rudolph, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Introduction to the Norton Critical edition of Cane. Jean Toomer. Cane. (1923). New York: Norton, 2011. ---. “Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 6 Feb. 2011 Caldwell, Erskine. Georgia Boy. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1995. ---. Tobacco Road. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1995. Caldwell, Lindsey and Brett Malec. “Inside Duck Dynasty's Multimillion-Dollar Fortune: Duck Calls, T-Shirts, a Cruise and $1.4 Million Per Season.” E! Online. 15 Aug. 2013. Calo, Mary Ann. Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-1940. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. Carby, Hazel. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 738-55. ---. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” New Essays on ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God. ed. Michael Awkward. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Carter, Bill. “Is this the Sourest Lemon of All?” The Baltimore Sun. 31 July 1977: TV2. ---. “There’s still enough stupidity in Kallikaks for viewers to get the message.” The Baltimore Sun. 3 August 1977: B3. Carter, Julian. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. Cartwright, Ryan. “Peculiar Places: A Queer History of Rural Nonconformity.” Dissertation. University of Minnesota. 2013. 234 Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2001. Cieply, Michael and Ben Sisario. “Film on Abu Ghraib Puts Focus on Paid Interviews.” New York Times. 26 Apr. 2008. Clare, Eli. “Yearning Towards Carrie Buck.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 8.3 (2014): 335-44. Cobb, Michael. “Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance’s Impolite Queers.” Callaloo 23.1 (2000): 328-51. Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3.4 (1997): 437-465. Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (Documenting the Image). ed. Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson. New York: Routledge, 2004. Conn, Steven. Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. Cooper Jr., Michael. “A Message from Trump’s America.” US News. 16 March 2016. Corner, John. “Finding data, reading patterns, telling stories: issues in the historiography of television.” Media, Culture and Society 25.2 (2003): 273-80. Country Life Commission. Report to the U.S. Senate. 1909. Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: The New Press, 2010. Curtin, Michael. Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. 235 Daniel, Pete, and Sally Stein. Introduction. Official Images: New Deal Photography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1987. Davis, Kenneth, and Joann Giusto-Davis. Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America. New York: Mariner Books, 1984. De-centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis. ed. Richard Phillips, David Shuttleton, Diane Watt, New York, NY: Routledge, 2000. Deery, June. “Mapping Commercialization in Reality Television.” A Companion to Reality Television. Ed. Laurie Oullette. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: NYUP, 1999. Demby, Gene. “The Truth Behind the Lies of the Original Welfare Queen.” NPR. 20 Nov. 2013. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. (1993) New York: Routledge, 2002. Dixon, P. Photographers of the Farm Security Administration: An Annotated Bibliography, 1930-1980. Ann Arbor, MI: Garland P, 1983. Doshier, Michael. “Dolly Parton is the South's Queer Matriarch (And We Need Her).” TCBP 20 April 2015. “DP/30: The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.” Interview with Julien Nitzberg, Johnny Knoxville, and Jeff Tremaine. 28 Aug. 2011. The Dukes of Hazzard. Prod. Gy Waldron. Perf. Tom Wopat, John Schneider. CBS Television. 1979-1985. Dunne, Sean. Dir. Oxyana. Cadillac Hash, Prod. 2013. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke UP 2004. Eilperin, Juliet. “Here’s how the White House plans to address rural America’s struggle with 236 heroin.” 15 Jan. 2016 The Washington Post. Eisenberg, Emma. “We still don’t know how to talk about Pennsatucky: The reality of rural sexual assault and how class plays out in ‘Orange Is the New Black.’” Salon. 5 July 2015. Eller, Ronald. Uneven Grounds: Appalachia Since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Ellison, Julie. “A Short History of Liberal Guilt.” Critical Inquiry (1996) 22.2: 344-371. Estabrook, Arthur, and Ivan McDougale. The Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe. Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkens, 1926. Estabrook, Arthur, and Charles Davenport. The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics, Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Eugenics Record Office, 1912. Farr, Brittany. “Reproducing Fear Amid Fears of Reproduction: The Black Maternal Body in US Law, Media, and Policy.” Dissertation. University of Southern California, 2016. Fender, Stephen. “Poor Whites and the Federal Writers’ Project: The Rhetoric of Eugenics in the Southern Life Histories.” Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture. Ed. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Toward A Queer Of Color Critique. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Feuer, Jane. “‘Quality Reality’ and the Bravo Media Reality Series.” Camera Obscura (2015): 30.1 88: 185-195. Finnegan, C.A. Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2003. Fob, Review of ‘The Kallikaks.’ Variety 288.1 (Aug 10, 1977): 46. 237 Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics; Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York) Palgrave Macmillan: 2008. ---. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. ---. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Life. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: The New Press, 1994. 135-40. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Gitlin, Todd. Inside Primetime. 2 nd ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2000. Goddard, Henry Herbert. The Kallikak Family: A Study of the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. New York: Macmillan Company, 1912. Goldsby, Jacqueline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Goodell, Jeff. 7 Apr. 2010. “Why Do We Still Have Mining Disasters?” New York Times. 5 Dec 2011. Goodman, Tim. “'Honey Boo Boo': That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore.” The Hollywood Reporter. 22 Aug. 2012 Gopinath, Gayatri. “Queer Regions: Locating Lesbians in Sancharram.” A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Gould, Stephen. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1981. Graham, Allison, and Sharon Monteith. “Southern Media Cultures.” The Encyclopedia of Southern Cultures 18 (2011): 21. 238 Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. 2nd ed. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Griel, Marcus. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975. Grossman, James. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYUP, 2005. ---. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. Harlow, Marie Gossett. “Our Race in the South: Views of a White Writer After an Extensive Tour Through the South.” The Chicago Defender. 7 Feb. 1925, A1. Hamill, Pete. “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” New York Magazine. 14 April 1969. Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. Oxford: Oxford, UP, 2004. Harkins, Gillian. Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2007. ---. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Hedegaard, Erik. “Johnny Knoxville: The King of Pain.” Rolling Stone. 1 Feb 2001 Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977. 239 Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Doug Mirabello, Creator. TLC Network. 2012-14 Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. “Mama June on Personal Hygiene.” YourTube. 22 March 2014. “‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ Breaks Ratings Records When Mama June Kinda Ties The Knot,” Deadline, 12 Sept. 2013. Herring, Scott. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: NYUP, 2010. ---. “‘Hixploitation’ Cinema, Regional Drive-ins, and the Cultural Emergence of a Queer New Right.” GLQ 20.1-2 (2014): 95-113. ---. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Hobson, Laura. “As I Listened to Archie Say ‘Hebe.’” The New York Times 12 September 1971. Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hughes, Langston. “Our Wonderful Society: Washington.” Opportunity (Aug. 1927): 226-27. Hurley, F. Jack. Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties. New York: De Capo, 1972. Hutchinson, George. “Jean Toomer and the ‘New Negroes’ of Washington.” American Literature 63.4 (1991): 683-92. Ignatiev, Noel and John Garvey, eds. Race Traitor. New York: Routledge, 1996. Inscoe, John. “Olmstead in Appalachia: A Connecticut Yankee Encounters Slavery and Racism in the Southern Highlands, 1854.” Appalachians and Race: The Moutain South from Slavery to Segregation. U of Kentucky P, 2001. Jackass. Spike Jonez, Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine, Creators. MTV Productions. 2010-12. James, Brendan. “Forget Cable Cord-Cutting: 83 Percent Of American Households Still Pay For TV.” International Business Times. 3 Sept. 2015. 240 Jenkins, Candice. Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Johnson, Charles S. “The New Frontage on American Life.” The New Negro. Ed. Alain Locke. 1925. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Johnson, Charles S., Edwin Embree, and W. W. Alexander. The collapse of cotton tenancy: Summary of Field studies & statistical surveys, 1933-35. (1935) Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2013. Johnson, Colin. Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2013. Johnson, E. Patrick. Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001. Johnson, Victoria. Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity. New York: NYUP, 2008. Jones, Jennifer Lynn and Brenda R. Weber. “Reality Moms, Real Monsters: Transmediated Continuity, Reality Celebrity, and the Female Grotesque.” Camera Obscura (2015): 30.1 88: 11-39. The Kallikaks. Prod. Stanley Ralph Ross and Roger Price. Perf. David Huddleston, Bonnie Ebsen. NBC Productions. 1977. Keely, Karen. “Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road.” Journal of American Studies 36.1 (2002): 23-42. Kehl, D.G. “Portrait of an American Primitive: A Conversation with Erskine Caldwell.” South Atlantic Quarterly 83 (1984): 396-404. Kelly, Robin D.G. Forward. Black marxism: the making of the Black radical tradition. Cedric 241 Robinson, Ed. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1983. Kincaid, James. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, Durham, NC: Duke UP 2000. Kipnis, Laura, with Jennifer Reeder. “White Trash Girl: The Interview.” White Trash: Race and Class in America. ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newlitz. New York: Routledge, 1997. 113-30. Kitman, Marvin. “NBC Goes for the Bottom.” Newsday. 24 Aug. 1977: 71A. Klein, Paul. “Why you watch what you watch when you watch.” TV Guide (July 24, 1971) 6-9. Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Lear, Norman. “As I Read How Laura Saw Archie…” The New York Times 10 Oct. 1971. Levin, Josh. “The Welfare Queen.” Slate. 19 Dec. 2013. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Rev. Ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2015. Lombardo, Paul. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2008. Lonsdale Waller, Katherine. “CMT, MTV, and Viacom’s Homogenization of Regional American Identities.” Conference paper. Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Atlanta, GA: 2016. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Manalansan, Martin F. “Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City.” Social Text 23.84-85 (2005): 141-155. “Mama June Lost Virginity at 12, Dated Men in Their 20s and 30s as a Teen.” Entertainment Tonight. Interview with Brooke Anderson. 13 Nov. 2014. 242 “Mama June's 2 Big Reasons for Reuniting with Child Molester.” Entertainment Tonight. Interview with Brooke Anderson. 13 Nov. 2014. Markham, Lauren. “Gentrification and the Urban Garden.” The New Yorker. 21 May 2014. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737-48. McCarthy, Amy. “A Night of Racism, Patriotism, and Homophobia with Hank Williams Jr.” Dallas Observer. 19 May 2014. McCoy, Clyde, and Harry Dillingham, eds. The Invisible Minority: Urban Appalachians. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ed. Dirk J Struik, trans. Martin Milligan. New York: International Publishers, 1964. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture. 15.1 (2003): 11-20. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995. Melamed, Jodi. “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism.” Social Text 24.4 (2006): 1-24. Minow, Newton. “Television and the Public Interest.” 9 May 1961. National Association of Broadcasters. Washington, DC. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1989. 243 Morgan, Paul A. and Scott J. Peters. “The Country Life Commission: Reconsidering a Milestone in American Agricultural History.” Agricultural History 78.3 (2004): 289-316. Mosely, Rachel, and Helen Wheatley. “Is Archiving a Feminist Issue? Historical Research and the Past, Present, and Future of Television Studies.” Cinema Journal 47.3 (2008): 152- 58. Mukherjee, Roopali. The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Mumford, Kevin. “Homosex Changes: Race, Cultural Geography, and the Emergence of the Gay.” American Quarterly 48.3 (1996): 395-414. ---. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYUP, 2009. ---. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Natanson, Nicholas. The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992. Nealon, Christopher. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. “Negro Who Wed White Writer Sees New Race.” Washington Telegram, 18 Mar. 1932. (Schomberg Collection, New York Public Library). Newitz, Annalee, and Matt Wray. White Trash: Race and Class in America. New York: Routledge, 1996. 244 Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2 nd Ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2010. ---. “The Voice of Documentary.” Film Quarterly 36.3 (1989): 17-30. Nitzberg, Julien. Dir. The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. Dickhouse Productions. 2010. DVD. Nussbaum, Emily. “The Great Divide: Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rise of the bad fan.” The New Yorker. 7 April 2014. N’yongo, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Nystrom, Derek. Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2009. Olin, Margaret. Touching Photographs. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Orange is the New Black. Jenji Kohan. Netflix, 2013-15. Ordover, Nancy. American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. U of Minnesota P, 2003. O’Shoney, Christy. “The real Honey Boo Boo: What reality TV did to the pint-sized pageant queen.” Salon. 19 June 2014. Oullette, Laurie. Introduction. A Companion to Reality Television. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. ---. Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Ozersky, Josh. Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change, 1968-1978. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. Pakulski, Jan. “Postmodern Social Theory.” The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Ed. Bryan S. Turner. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 245 Pfeiffer, Kathleen, ed. “Toomer to Frank” 12 Dec. 1922. Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, ed. Kathleen Pfeiffer, Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2010, p. 85-86. Puar, Jasbir. “Israel's gay propaganda war.” The Guardian. 1 July 2010. “Queering the Middle: Race, Region, and a Queer Midwest.” eds. Martin Manalansan, Chantal Nadeau, Richard Rodriguez, Siobhan Somerville. GLQ (2014): 20.1-2: 1-12. Rakes, Paul. “A Combat Scenario: Early Coal Mining and the Culture of Danger.” Culture, Class and Politics in Modern Appalachia. Ed. Jennifer Egolf, Ken Fones-Wolf, and Louis Martin. Morgantown, WV: WVUP, 2009. Reagan, Ronald. Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Towns and Townships. 12 September 1983. Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. ---. “The Numerous.” Roundtable on Queer Studies and Class. Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association. 9 Nov. 2014. Retman, Sonnet. Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. Review of Cane, Minneapolis-Minnesota Journal. 14 Oct. 1923. Reynolds, Edna. “Whither Are We Drifting and At What Port Will We Land?” The Chicago Defender. 3 Nov. 1917. p. 11. Ring, Natalie. “The ‘New Race Question’: The Problem of Poor Whites and the Color Line.” The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. ed. Stephanie Cole and Natalie Ring. Arlington, TX: The University of Texas Press, 2012 246 ---. The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2012. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage, 1998. Roediger, David. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness. New York: Verso, 1994. ---. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 2007. Roddy, Dennis and Vivian Nereim. “A history of violations at Upper Big Branch mine.” Pittsburgh Post Gazette. 6 Apr. 2010. 5 Dec. 2011. Roosevelt, Theodore. “On Motherhood,” 13 March 1905. Rosenberg, Eric. “With Trauma: Walker Evans and the Failure to Document.” Trauma and the Documentary Photography of the FSA. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2012. Rosenberg, Jordana, and Amy Villarejo. “Queerness, Norms, Utopia.” GLQ 18.1 (2001): 1-18. Rothman, Michael. “Johnny Depp: I'm Mesmerized by Honey Boo Boo.” ABC News. 6 July 2013. Online. Sandell, Jillian. “Telling Stories of ‘Queer White Trash:’ Race, Class, and Sexuality in the Work of Dorothy Allison.” White Trash: Race and Class in America. ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newlitz. New York: Routledge, 1997. 211-30. Scherer, James A.B. Cotton as World Power: A Study in the Economic Interpretation of History. New York: Frederick A Stokes, 1916. Sedgwick, Eve. “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1. 1 (1993). 247 Shah, Nayan. Stanger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West. U of California P, 2012. Silber, Nina. “‘What Does America Need So Much As Americans?’ Race and Northern Reconciliation with Southern Appalachia, 1870-1900.” Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation. Ed. John Inscoe. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2001. P. 245-58. Smith, Cecil. “Homely Hokum of the Kallikaks.” The Los Angeles Times. 3 Aug. 1977: H18. Sollors, Werner. “Four Types of Writing Under Modernist Conditions.” Race and the Modern Artist. Ed. Heather Hathaway, Josef Jarab, and Jeffry Melnick. New York: Oxford UP, 2003: 42-53. ---. "Jean Toomer's Cane: Modernism and Race in Interwar America." Cane. 1923. New York: Norton Critical, 2011. 18–37. Somerville, Siobhan. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. New York, NY: South End Press, 2011. Spears-Stewart, Reta. Remembering the Ozark Jubilee. Springfield, MO: Stewart, Dillbeck & White Productions, 1993. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1992. ---. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. 248 Stange, Maren. “‘The Record Itself’: Farm Security Administration Photography and the Transformation of Rural Life.” Official Images: New Deal Photography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1987. Staiger, Janet. Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era. New York: NYUP, 2000. Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Stewart, Kathleen. A Space at the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America: Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the education of desire: Foucault's History of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. “Teen Burned Imitating MTV Stunt.” Associated Press. 29 Jan. 2001. Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Depression. New York: Pantheon, 1970. Tharpe, Jac. Interview with Erskine Caldwell. The Southern Quarterly. XX (Fall 1981): 64-74. Tongson, Karen. “#Normporn.” Public Books. 1 Aug. 2015. ---. Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York: NYUP, 2011. Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. New York: Norton, 2011. ---. Caromb. First Draft, Apr-June 1932. Box 26, Folder 613. Beinecke Rare Book Room of the Yale University Library. 249 ---. "Incredible Journey" Notes Ch VI The Book of Searching and Finding, 1919-1924. Box 17, Folder 482, Autobiographical Writings. Beinecke Rare Book Room of the Yale University Library. Transparent. Season 2, Episode 6, “Bulnerable.” Dir. Silas Howard. Writ. Jill Solloway. Amazon Prime: 11 Dec. 2015. Tremaine, Jeff, Dir. Jackass: The Movie. 2002. Dickhouse Productions. DVD. Turner, Darwin T., Ed. The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1980. Webster, Brian. Jackass: The Movie (film review). Apollo Movie Guide. Online. 2010. Wescott, Alex. “Arrested development: Neoliberalism and the rise of the slacker in the 20th and 21st century United States.” Dissertation. University of Southern California, 2014. Whiston Spirn, Anne. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and reports from the Field. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008. Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.” Review. IMDB. 5 May 2010. 6 Dec. 2011. Williams, Jennifer. “Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Erotics of Mourning.” Cane. 1923. New York: Norton Critical, 2011. Williams, Mary Elizabeth. “The Class War Over Sexual Abuse Accusations”. Salon. 27 Oct. 2014. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973. ---. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 250 Woodson, Carter G. “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachia America.” The Journal of Negro Life 1.2 (1916): 132-50. Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. Wharton, Edith. Summer. New York: Appleton, 1915. Work, Monroe. “Research with respect to cooperation between urban and rural communities.” Opportunity 1.2 (1923): 7-9. Variety. Reviews. The Beverly Hillbillies. 3 Oct. 1962, p. 35; Petticoat Junction. 28 Sept. 1966; p.35. The Beverly Hillbillies. 13 Sept. 1967, p. 56. Villarejo, Amy. Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Vogel, Shane. The Scene of Harlem Cabaret. Chicago, IL, U of Chicago P, 2009. Von Doviak, Scott. “How ‘redneck reality’ became the new rural working-class sitcom.” The A.V. Club. 11 Apr. 2013. Yarrow, Allison. “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo Is a Fabulous Cultural Ambassador for America,” The Atlantic. 22 May 2013. Zulkey, Claire. “Some Honey Boo Boo Related Confessions.” WBEZ Chicago Public Media. 26 Sept. 2012.
Abstract (if available)
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
Deviant futures: queer temporality and the cultural politics of science fiction
PDF
Unraveling countrysides: provincial modernities in contemporary popular Indian cinema
PDF
Arrested development: neoliberalism and the rise of the slacker in the 20th and 21st century United States
PDF
Reorienting Asian America: racial feeling in a multicultural era
PDF
Imperial injuries: race, disease, and disability in North American narratives of resistance, 1908-2006
PDF
The motley tower: master plans, urban crises, and multiracial higher education in postwar Los Angeles
PDF
Cinematic activism: film festivals and the exhibition of Palestinian cultural politics in the United States
PDF
To be seen: transsexuals and the gender clinics
PDF
AIDS and its afterlives: race, gender, and the queer radical imagination
PDF
Tentacular sex: Gender, race, and science in American speculative fiction
PDF
Worthy of care? Medical inclusion from the Watts riots to the building of King-Drew, prisons, and Skid row, 1965-1986
PDF
'Such weight': Obesity, life insurance, and masculinity in mid-Victorian culture
PDF
Roguish femininity: gender and imperialism in the nineteenth‐century United States
PDF
Agents of war: Cambodian refugees and the containment of radical opposition
PDF
Towards a politics of perfect disorder: carceral geographies, queer criminality, and other ways to be
PDF
Existential surplus: affect and labor in Asian diasporic video cultures
PDF
Speaking out of turn: race, gender, and direct address in American art museums
PDF
Marks of the fetish: twenty-first century (mis)performances of the black female body
PDF
Reproducing fear amid fears of reproduction: the Black maternal body in U.S. law, media, and policy
PDF
The out field: professional sports and the mediation of gay sexualities
Asset Metadata
Creator
Belcher, Christina Renee
(author)
Core Title
Backward: queer rurality in American popular culture from 1920 to the present
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Publication Date
08/04/2016
Defense Date
05/02/2016
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
American cultural studies,class,gender,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,rural America,sexuality
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Tongson, Karen (
committee chair
), Halberstam, Jack (
committee member
), Keeling, Kara (
committee member
), Modleski, Tania (
committee member
), Shah, Nayan (
committee member
)
Creator Email
belcher.261@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-296509
Unique identifier
UC11281164
Identifier
etd-BelcherChr-4741.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-296509 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-BelcherChr-4741.pdf
Dmrecord
296509
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Belcher, Christina Renee
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
American cultural studies
gender
rural America
sexuality