In my thesis, I have studied how Southern identity is formed through Southern leisure magazines, specifically Garden & Gun. I chose to narrow my focus by choosing to look only at the 2014 editions of the magazine, and I also looked primarily at the food, alcohol, homes, and hunting sections in order to be concise. Through my research, I have discovered that the magazine, although trying to be inclusive for race and gender, struggles to accurately depict the South. Instead, the magazine focuses on the primarily white, upper classes of the region, which creates and imagined reality for the reader. But, while race is not represented in sections of the magazine, gender representation (for white men and women) is always equal While researching, I discovered that in the food section of the magazine, Garden & Gun allows the kitchen to become an inclusive domain by representing men and women, white and black, equally alongside one another. So, this means that Garden & Gun, while trying to be inclusive for everyone, is unable to expand the acceptance to other sections of the magazine
