Overview
Speaking on June 25, 2009 at Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse in Atlanta, Georgia, Michael Bibler discusses same-sex relationships in twentieth century literature about southern plantations—the subject of his book Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968. He considers the ways in which same-sex character couples offer these authors vehicles to explore modes of equality in the intensely hierachial plantation structure.
Same-Sex Intimacy in the Fiction of Southern Plantations
Part 2: Bibler refers to Gaines’s novel Of Love and Dust, focusing on how same-sex relations can disrupt plantation hierarchies
Part 3: Bibler explores three frames: queer black fraternity, elite white planter homoeroticism, and “southern kitchen romance”
Part 4: Bibler discusses the plantation and related literary social spaces and describes teaching his work
About Michael Bibler
Michael Bibler received his PhD from Tulane University and is associate professor at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968 and the co-editor of a new scholarly edition of Arna Bontemps's 1939 novel Drums at Dusk and of the collection of essays Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the US South.
Cover Image Attribution:
Balzamine Plantation, 1857. Gouache painting by Marie Adrien Persac. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Image is in public domain.Recommended Resources
Bibler, Michael. Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.
Gaines, Ernest J. Of Love and Dust. New York: Dial Press, 1967.
Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Jones, Suzanne. Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Poteet, William Mark. Gay Men in Modern Literature: Ritual, Initiation, and the Construction of Masculinity. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
Richards, Gary. Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
