Plantation affections: Hierarchy, race, and homosexuality in mid-twentieth century southern literature
Description
This project examines the structural relation between homosexuality and the southern plantation by focusing especially on the literary representations of the plantation published between 1936 and 1968. Combining literary with historical analysis, I argue that both the antebellum and postbellum plantations joined the discourses of patriarchy and paternalism to define every interpersonal relation as a heterosexual relation that locked individuals into a highly reified and oppressive hierarchy according to their race, class, and gender. But while the plantation used this discourse of heterosexual differences to subordinate individuals, these literary texts indicate that homosexual relations disrupt those hierarchies whenever they deploy a counter-discursive model of sexual, racial, and social sameness. Marking a dramatic shift from the nostalgic literature that preceded it, the plantation literature of the mid-twentieth century offers a more critical reassessment of the plantation myth and engages the complex ideologies and hierarchical structures that define it. And by focusing especially on the discourse of sexuality, these texts also explore the links between homosexuality and homo-relationality, between sexual sameness and the larger model of social sameness it implies. In this way, race becomes crucial to the construction of homosexuality by determining whether it will replicate the power structures of domination and submission or rupture them through the creation of a distinctly anti-hierarchical relational system that insists on absolute equality. At the same time, race also can restrict this utopian model by creating a serious anxiety about differences and prompting a greater subordination of them through a relational system akin to fascism. Finally, by privileging homosexual sameness as the main axis of inquiry, this project departs significantly from the recent body of Queer Theory, for if a discourse of queerness enables a study of all sexual relations that resist what counts as normative, it inevitably falls short in a study of the plantation because of the queer deployment of even heterosexual relations. This project thus offers a new understanding of the way that object-choice remains important in any discourse of homosexuality, despite its apparently narrow scope, and can create a better understanding of the plantation's uniquely regional construction of homosexual identities