Description
Book SynopsisExposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. This book reveals how various models of queer egalitarianism attempt to reconcile the plantation's regional legacies with national debates about equality and democracy, particularly during the eras of the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement.
Trade ReviewThrough deft textual analysis, relevant historical and literary research, and a firm grasp of the implications of queer theory for this subject, Michael Bibler makes a strong case for the capacity of same-sex relations in plantation novels (relations which may be homosocial, homoerotic, and/or homosexual) to undermine the rigidities of those perspectives that represent this literature exclusively in terms of ideologies of racial, sexual, and class difference. Cotton's Queer Relations serves as the foundation for a new and effective approach to the problem of social inequalities in southern literature. - Barbara Ladd, Emory University, author of Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty ""Michael Bibler opens - I should say pries open - a new door in southern studies. Behind this door is a body of writing that presents homosexuality as both a fact of nature and a construct that works to maintain the South's hierarchical power structures. With its focus on the southern plantation and its ongoing representations in literature and popular culture, Cotton's Queer Relations illuminates a crucial but often ignored irony: The South's seemingly official desire to make homosexuality disappear actually speaks to the region's inability to stifle the expression of homosexual desire."" - Will Brantley, Middle Tennessee State University, author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir
