Date of Award

Spring 5-3-2024

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Open-Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Advisor

Rosalie Purvis

Second Committee Member

Elizabeth Neiman

Third Committee Member

Hollie Addams

Abstract

Southern Queers are under attack, but that’s not news. Despite the fact that LGBTQ youth in the South are 9% more likely to have attempted suicide in just the past year than their peers across the country (The Trevor Project). A statistic that The Trevor project correlates to is a lack of acceptance and access to affirming spaces. Yet, despite these horrific statistics, inquisition as to what makes the South so harmful/dangerous is often surface level. The Queer South is the oxymoron that defines a group of people, myself included, who have to cope under the weight of the hyper-religious evangelism that dominates The Queer South. This thesis argues that “The South” is an area of hyper-religious dogma that seeps into the lives of individuals from all walks of life. This gives background to the pained realities of a Queer life lived in the religious, specifically Christian evangelical, culture of the Southern USA. In order to do so, I put the work of Southern Queer writers under an auto-ethnographic lens to identify and address common themes across the genre. Gloria Anzaldúa and TC Tolbert provide deep insight into the religious South as a border space for its queer inhabitants. Julia Koets's essay collection, The Rib Joint, is the ideal space for an inquisition into the function of religion and Southern culture on coming out and its religio-cultural link to damnation and contagion. The uber-Southern Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, from Fannie Flagg, portrays an option that contradicts the notion that Southern-ness and Queerness are contradictory concepts by portraying a space low on evangelical beliefs and high on the Southern cultural values of community and compassion. This text extends well beyond the proclamation, “We are Here, We’re Queer, Get used to it.” and questions what it means to be here and Queer in The Religious South.

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