“The Queerness of White Trash”

Description of Session

The problem of the white working class (and the white poor) has taken on new relevance in the U.S. as of late for its decisive role in the 2016 presidential elections. Post-2016, journalists, political pundits, and academics have theorized the slow dispossession of poor whites in the wake of globalization and post-industrial capitalism. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: a Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016), Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: the 400 Year Untold History of Class in America (2016), all published before Donald Trump’s divisive election, are only a few representatives of the current investment in and political capital of poor whiteness in American socio-political culture.

Whether or not their actual influence was as decisive in the 2016 presidential election as the political narrative would have us believe, the hypervisibility of the white working class and white poor deserves consideration. As critical race scholars, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison, and critical whiteness studies scholars, such as David Roediger, have long posited, understanding the consolidation of (poor) whiteness is essential to understanding constructions of “blackness and anti-blackness” and the ways in which hegemonic (middle/upper class, heteronormative) whiteness sustains legitimacy and ascendency. Thus, while the existence of “poor white trash” may signal the (ultimate) failure of total white domination, the familial skeleton in the closet, it also provides a location from which to understand the queer machinations of race and class.

White trash subjectivity, as an analytic, offers particular insights into processes of queerness and the complex ways in which race and class are co-constituted. Part of what makes “white trashness” queer, suggests sociologist Matt Wray in his 1997 edited collection White Trash: Race and Class in America and his 2006 monograph Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, is the ways in which it eludes identification. In the socio-historical contexts of the U.S., a context ordered/segregated by (presumed) clear racial boundaries, the white trash subject, like the “mulatto” and the “mestizaje,” destabilizes hegemonic notions of racial purity and hierarchy. In this way, ‘queerness’ is an adjective--describing a quality or characteristic of white trash identity--a slipperiness of identification. On the other hand, the white trash subject has been made queer through processes of racialization, medicalization, and economic insularity, an identity consolidated through processes of exclusion.

While white trash literature (“grit lit” or “working-class literature”) and cultural production wrestles with the fraught legacies of race/racism, the poverty of places decimated by a plantation economy dependent on free labor and abandoned by globalization, the heredity of sexual violence, it also takes up the mantle of its own bastardization. In such formulations white trash subjectivities provide a mode of ‘speaking back,’ of disindentification, and of reclamation.

The panel will consider white trash subjectivity (specifically in southern Appalachia) from a number of perspectives: in terms of representations of poverty, representations of racialized illegitimacy, and representations of place and home. Approaching ‘white trashness’ from the perspective of sexuality, class, and ecology, the three presentations will explore how white trash subjectivities produce and critique discourses of race and class.

Joy Hayward-Jansen’s presentation “A Question of Class: White Trash Locationality in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina” considers the literary production of the (poor) white trash subject in the crosshairs of two moments of racial upheaval--the Family Eugenic Studies of the 1890’s-1930’s and the civil rights era of the U.S. South--in which whiteness was under siege. They argue that Bastard Out of Carolina defines “trash” as the queer product of ‘bad sex.’ Looking at the bastard character “Bone” and the albino character “Shannon Pearl,” Joy contends that ‘bad sex’ is an ambivalent dialectic between privation and excess.

Continuing this formulation of white trash as privation and excess, Kate Adler and K. Allison Hammer’s presentation, “ Invisibility and Excess: Resisting the “The Poverty Gaze” and the Dehumanization of the Poor Through Storytelling” analyzes what they call the “poverty gaze,” beginning with the 1970s War on Poverty, through the frameworks of disability theory and whiteness studies. They consider what Michael Harrington calls the “New Poverty” rendered “the poor” invisible and erased, and at the same time loud, uncouth, and excessively visible, often through humor. Demonstrating how both the optics of invisibility and parody strip “the poor” of their humanity and their power within racial capitalism, Adler and Hammer show how fiction writers such as Dorothy Allison, community organizers, and filmmakers locate their own voices to displace these dehumanizing discourses.

Finally, Andrew Menrisky’s presentation “Hicks, Homos, and Home Cooking: Queer Appalachia Literary Transmission” considers how marginalized Appalachian writers have cultivated queer, place-based communities through representations of food. Works such as Jeff Mann’s Loving Mountains, Loving Men, a collection of poetry and autobiographical essays about growing up queer in a West Virginia holler, speak to a double-bind in which Appalachians often find themselves: on the one hand, dismissed as coal-loving “white trash” by urban environmentalists; on the other, subjected to right-wing violence at home. Mann’s writing negotiates this tension through poetic engagement with the “hillbilly” gustatory traditions—foraging and sharing wild greens, roots, and fruits—that sustainably supported Mann’s childhood. Mann’s poetic engagements with ramps, creecy greens, pawpaws, and other indigenous foodstuffs serve a threefold purpose that illuminates how such an aesthetic contributes to community formation and social justice among “white trash” queers.