7/25/2019 MWW Dissertation Abstract

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Tomboys & Sissies: Queer Childhood in the Fiction of the Southern Renaissance, 1929-

1961

Matthew W. Walker (Dissertation Abstract)

Directors: Dr. Colleen Lamos and Dr. Scott Derrick

Interdisciplinary Reader: Dr. Cymene Howe

This project constitutes the first sustained examination of the role of children in a range

of southern literary texts. In a challenge to traditional criticism, I work to demonstrate the

empowering implications of the queer adolescent boy, as represented in the literary production

of the Southern Renaissance. It was during this period, which I locate from approximately the

mid-1920s to mid-1960s, that many American critics and authors effectively quarantined the

South as one of the few allowable sites of fictionalized deviancy. Southern writers were

therefore provided tremendous freedom to explore representations of gender, racial, and sexual

deviance as they came to constitute the regions social matrix.

While my dissertation focuses on writers often consigned to the margins Southern

Renaissance criticism, such as Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote, I situate their work in

dialogue with the more canonical fiction of William Faulkner. My analysis also examines these

subjects through the psychoanalytic paradigms, such as Mikhail Bahktin, and Julia Kristeva,

which I occasionally revise to facilitate a queer reading of the text. Considered in context with

the historical realities of the early to mid-20th

Century South, these theories offer a unique

perspective as to the implications of the queer child in southern culture. In an age when

modernity had begun to erode the patriarchal ethos of the ancien regime, the adolescent existed

at the nexus of societys fantasies and deepest fears. This study considers representation of

queer childhood which challenge such deeply entrenched myths as benevolent paternalism,

compulsory heterosexuality, female chastity, and white male supremacy.