Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality and Sociality in Literary Productions, 1974-1997

Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality and Sociality in Literary Productions, 1974-1997, considers how queer and feminist theories illuminate and complicate the intersections between canonical and obscure, queer and normative, and regional and national narratives in southern literary representations produced during a crucial but understudied period in the historical politicization of sexuality. The advent of New Southern Studies—and its nascent emphasis on sexuality as an organizing principle of social relations—has focused almost exclusively on midcentury texts from the Southern Renascence, largely neglecting post-1970 queer literatures. At the same time, despite these developments in southern studies, most scholarship in women’s and feminist studies continue to ignore the South, or worse, demonize the South as backward, parochial, and deeply homophobic. My dissertation redresses these scholarly lacunae with the first book-length study devoted to southern lesbian literary productions across multiple genres, including fiction, small press newspapers, poetry, plays, and cinematic representations. Analyzing works by some of the most prominent names in American women’s writing and feminist politics since the 1970s, including Dorothy Allison, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Jane Chambers, Doris Davenport, Fannie Flagg, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Shay Youngblood, and the editors of Feminary, this project argues that late twentieth-century southern lesbian writings not only reveal, but also worked at the cutting edge to drive virtually all the major shifts in the discourses and theoretical underpinnings of sexuality studies and in lesbian and gay politics and culture in the nation. Many of the women fighting on the national level for women’s liberation and what we now call LGBTQ rights have either hailed from the South, spent long periods of their lives in the South, or settled in the South. Through both surface and close reading techniques, Southern Sapphisms argues that we cannot understand expressions of lesbianism and feminism in post-Stonewall era American literature without also understanding the explicitly southern dynamics of those writings—foregrounding the centrality of sexuality to the study of southern literature as well as the region’s defining role in the historiography of lesbian literature in the United States

Put a Taste of the South in Your Mouth: Carnal Appetites and Intersextionality

Despite all the attention paid to the pleasure of food, and food’s usefulness as a critical node for analyzing southern sociality, sexuality is largely neglected in those discussions. Nevertheless, food and sex are intimately linked.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studythesouth/1020/thumbnail.jp

[Expletive Deleted]: Some Thoughts of Teaching Queer Theory at Ole Miss

This presentation will consider the Ole Miss’s multi-year unfavorable ranking in the Princeton Review as an LGBTQ unfriendly institution. I question: is it possible to explore our negative past and critique our present climate without becoming consumed by it? Overwhelmingly, Ole Miss has come out and acknowledged its fraught past. We’ve taken visible steps toward ensuring equality and inclusiveness in LGBTQ student life, housing, and curriculum. Following Obergefell, Ole Miss acted swiftly to offer health insurance coverage to married employees’ same-sex partners. Just last year Ole Miss established an LGBTQ alumni group within the existing alumni organization, and I know alumni are interested in working toward developing scholarships specifically to attract LGBTQ students and allies. I’ve been both challenged and honored to be an integral part of the university’s recent decision to add a sexuality studies emphasis to their Women’s and Gender Studies undergraduate minor. My students are brave and generous in sharing their perspectives on LGBTQ studies; their viewpoints are deeply and powerfully informed by regional, racial, and ethnic identities. Students have collectively voiced their own desires for more transformational, coalition politics that value the specific lived experiences of distinct communities—theirs—as queer-identified (many) first-generation college students from the South. As a lesbian and first generation college graduate, I share their concerns. However, I am less apt to consider this institutional support with rose-colored glasses; indeed, this “proliferation of events and classes” have begun to illuminate the very injustices, prejudices, and ill-fitting sutures that have traditionally kept queer lives, bodies, and identities marginalized within academia

Cantrell, Jaime

Dr. Jaime Cantrell joined the English Department faculty at the University of Mississippi in 2014. She also serves as the LGBT Program Coordinator in the Center for Inclusion and Cross Cultural Engagement and is responsible for advising two undergraduate LGBT groups-UM Pride Network and Queer People of Color (QPOC). In this interview she discusses her background and childhood in Biloxi, Mississippi. She describes her experiences with financial insecurity and about her time in high school as being difficult because of bullying. She discusses the jobs she worked in high school and all the time she spent on the beach reading true crime novels. In recounting her time as an undergraduate at the University of Southern Mississippi, Dr. Cantrell describes disaffiliating from her sorority after a sorority sister was the target of bullying and/or hazing by other members. She talks about this being a formative moment for her in developing her consciousness of injustice. She describes her move to Alabama to attend the University of Alabama as also being a formative time in developing her consciousness around issues of social justice. In discussing sexuality, she gives some historical and contemporary context to butch-femme sexualities; Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism; Gender identity and expression. Dr. Cantrell discusses the Louisiana Forum for Equality and her first year at the University of Mississippi; The Laramie Project; The Center for Inclusion and Cross Cultural Engagement. This interview was conducted as part of an assignment for the oral history seminar (SST 560) taught by Dr. Jessica Wilkerson in the spring of 2018

Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories

The first book to focus on the experience of LGBT archival research. Out of the Closet, Into the Archives takes readers inside the experience of how it feels to do queer archival research and queer research in the archive. The archive, much like the closet, exposes various levels of public and privateness—recognition, awareness, refusal, impulse, disclosure, framing, silence, cultural intelligibility—each mediated and determined through subjective insider/outsider ways of knowing. The contributors draw on their experiences conducting research in disciplines such as sociology, African American studies, English, communications, performance studies, anthropology, and women’s and gender studies. These essays challenge scholars to engage with their affective experience of being in the archive, illuminating how the space of the archive requires a different kind of deeply personal, embodied research.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/1020/thumbnail.jp

LGBTQ Caucus Panel: “Whither LGBTQ Studies Now?

Please click the links below to view more information about each presentation. “Whither LGBT Studies at SLACs in Neoliberal Times?” Barbara L. Shaw, Allegheny College “I Don’t Think of You as Gay:” Repositioning Lesbian Identity in Tolerant Places” Sarah Boeshart, University of Florida “[Expletive Deleted]: Some Thoughts on Teaching Queer Theory at Ole Miss” Jaime Cantrell, The University of Mississippi “Recognizing Our Potential: Making Our Voices Heard and Advocating for Continued Progress as LBT Women Graduate Students” Mary T. Guerrant, North Carolina State University -Raleig