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This chapter explores the central role of transgressive sexuality in the literary creations of Southern lesbian feminists, both in their embrace of grotesque sexual southernness and their critiques of the intersection of sexuality and power. Most Southern feminist writers embraced the Southern grotesque to explore a wide range of hitherto unspeakable sexual practices.

This chapter draws from the works of Dorothy Allison to track class and queer discourses in cultural reception and how those discourses are mediated by gender, race, and trauma. Allison's works inspire a discourse about social class that exposes the layered, recursive language and experience of class difference, hierarchy, and mobility in contemporary United States. The chapter argues that several values of studying class in terms of recognition arise from Allison's works: one finds a conversation and a will to speak that so many critics miss. Another one sees the ways that class moves through social and cognitive space, through time and narration, as a dominant category at some moments and a more oblique one at others, but at all times in relations that are neither scattershot nor fixed, but patterned and creative. Class, again, is queered by recognition in this form, revealing the political potential of culture made public.

This chapter discusses the life and work of Dorothy Allison, who knows about growing up “white trash.” Born on April 11, 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison was “the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family.” Poverty forced Allison's family to leave South Carolina for central Florida in search of a better life. In 1983, Allison published a collection of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, followed by a short story collection, Trash, in 1988. In 1992, Allison published Bastard out of Carolina, a largely autobiographical novel about growing up in the Rough South. Allison's other works include chapters and a memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995). The term “white trash” and its prevalence demonstrate society's tolerance of stereotyping poor whites. Such stereotypes not only portray to outsiders a false image of the working class, but are reinforced within the working class itself. Allison writes to combat this myth and these prejudices.

This chapter examines poetry and fiction of Southern lesbian writers using the lens of food. Drawing on the works of Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Doris Davenport, the author explores how Southern lesbian writers transform the obvious, making lesbian eroticism and desire manifest through the vehicle of Southern food. These and other Southern writers have not only been at the center of important debates about feminism and identity, but also have created a sense of unity and sociality through a love of food and region.

This chapter explores the spatial reimaginations of Southern lesbian feminists, from communes to queer contact zones. This chapter uses geography to reassess the landyke movement and its role in lesbian feminism literature, which reimagines and queers space.

This chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of southern writers who are giving voice to a different group of southerners, forcing their readers to reexamine long-held stereotypes and beliefs while challenging the literary roles traditionally assigned poor whites. According to Linda Tate, “traditionally, southern literature has been understood to be that written by white men and, on rare occasions, by white women—and, in almost all cases, by and about white southerners of the upper middle class.” This chapter looks at three new voices who write about the Rough South and the southern poor whites from within the class: Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Timothy Reese McLaurin. The term “Rough South” refers to as the world of the redneck or white trash. The terms “redneck,” “white trash,” “cracker,” and “poor white” have all been used to describe certain white southerners.

Although Appalachia and its authors resist political definition and economic category, one can say that twenty-first century Appalachian writers attempt to define what changes and what endures in a rapidly globalizing world. As Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Manning has noted, at the core of Appalachian literature is a tension between an appreciation of the region and an “anxiety for legitimacy”; this observation reflects the challenges facing authors from a region still often seen as “other” by the broader American culture. Some contemporary Appalachian authors explore which traditions are worth preserving and which ones should fall by the wayside, while others consider how to preserve and expand their Appalachian identity, a process that they sometimes connect with preservation and innovation in literary style. In short, many twentieth-century Appalachian authors cultivate in their readers an appreciation of Appalachian perspectives from a self-aware otherness that is sometimes tradition tethered yet is willing to go far beyond received notions about the region.