Advanced Search
Southern Spaces
A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections

Same-Sex Intimacy in Fiction about Southern Plantations

Louisiana State University
Published July 8, 2009

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.

Similar Publications

https://doi.org/10.18737/M7D60B