Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

By Michael P. Bibler

Finally breaking through heterosexual clichés of flirtatious belles and cavaliers, sinister black rapists and lusty "Jezebels," Cotton’s Queer Relations exposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. Focusing on works by Ernest J. Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps, Michael P. Bibler shows how each one uses figures of same-sex intimacy to suggest a more progressive alternative to the pervasive inequalities tied historically and symbolically to the South’s most iconic institution.

Bibler looks specifically at relationships between white men of the planter class, between plantation mistresses and black maids, and between black men, arguing that while the texts portray the plantation as a rigid hierarchy of differences, these queer relations privilege a notion of sexual sameness that joins the individuals as equals in a system where equality is rare indeed. Bibler reveals how these models of queer egalitarianism attempt to reconcile the plantation’s regional legacies with national debates about equality and democracy, particularly during the eras of the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement. Cotton’s Queer Relations charts bold new territory in southern studies and queer studies alike, bringing together history and cultural theory to offer innovative readings of classic southern texts.

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9780813929842

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I first became interested in studying queer sexualities in southern literature, I thought it would be mostly a matter of tracking down marginal or neglected works that depicted gay or lesbian characters or encounters. What I found is that such a project actually requires a different way of reading both within the canon and at the margins. Alternative forms of gender and sexuality in southern texts do not always resemble the kinds of sexual expression we may be typically more used to seeing. We must train our eyes to recognize the subtle presence of deviant, different, and non-normative forms of gender and sexuality embedded within works that, on the surface, might not seem to include much that is overtly queer, let alone gay or lesbian. Reorienting my own perspective has not always been easy, and I have had a lot of help along the way. Rebecca Mark, under whose direction I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation at Tulane University, has been an invaluable friend, coach, confidante, champion, and advisor. Felipe Smith and Gaurav Desai challenged and encouraged me with their close attention to detail, their critical insights, and their indispensable advice. Molly Rothenberg helped me strengthen and refine my ideas and my writing, especially in my chapter on Styron. And I was fortunate to benefit more broadly from the advice and guidance of Joseph Roach, Molly Travis, Teresa Toulouse, Richard Rambuss, Janice Carlyle, Barry Ahearn, and others. Thanks also to friends who aided this project in a variety of ways from my time in New Orleans to the present: Allys Dierker, Elizabeth Lewis, Maureen Riddle, Kore Alexis, John Kelly, Michael Rosa, John Searles, Ben Finley, Dale McDaniel, and Richelle Munkhoff.

The University of Mary Washington made it possible for me to work on this manuscript with a professional development grant. But I owe so much more to Mara Scanlon, Claudia Emerson, James Harding, and Jeffrey McClurken for their friendship, inspiration, and support. Cheers also to Kevin McCluskey, Jeff Edmunds, Bill Templin, and Terry Kennedy.

Jessica Adams has been a priceless friend and colleague—a tireless reader, critic, conspirator, and compatriot. Cécile Accilien has been a superb collaborator academically and spiritually. Special thanks to Monica Pearl for her comments on the manuscript (and for helping me adjust to Manchester), to the anonymous readers at the University of Virginia Press, and to everyone in the United States and the United Kingdom who read and commented on drafts of chapters, responded to conference papers, and otherwise indulged me in conversations on the topic, including Barbara Ladd, Richard Godden, Gary Richards, John Howard, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Patricia Yaeger, Maria Lauret, Sharon Patricia Holland, Barbara Ewell, and probably many others I’m forgetting. Cathie Brettschneider at the University of Virginia Press deserves a medal for her unflagging patience, assistance, and faith. Thanks also to Ellen Satrom and Angie Hogan at the Press, to Tim Roberts with the American Literatures Initiative, and to Susan Murray for her much-needed thoroughness and expertise as copy editor.

My parents and family have been a solid source of inspiration and support. But really I owe everything to my partner, Allan Edmunds, who has been with me through every stage of this project, as well as so much more. His patience and support have been nothing less than heroic. I could have done none of this without him, and I dedicate this book to him with love and gratitude.

Some sections of this book were published previously, and I am grateful for the permission to reprint that material here. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as "‘A Tenderness Which Was Uncommon’: Homosexuality, Narrative and the Southern Plantation in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," Mississippi Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 381–400. An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared with the title "‘As If Set Free into Another Land’: Homosexuality, Rebellion, and Community in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner," in Perversion and the Social Relation, edited by Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster and Slavoj Žižek, 159–86, copyright 2003, Duke University Press, all rights reserved, used by permission of the publisher.

Introduction: In the Kitchens and on the Verandas

For some people, the image of the southern plantation might call to mind genteel belles and cavaliers flirting on the veranda of a stately mansion. For others, it might signify a sadistic white slave-master systematically raping his black concubine in one of the cabins out back. Yet these are simply different inflections of the same plantation mythology, and together they reveal the extent to which that mythology operates as a powerful and elaborate discourse about race, sex, and sexuality in American culture. The contemporary artist Kara Walker forces us to confront this sexual dynamic of the plantation myth with her nightmarish silhouettes depicting all kinds of eroticism and sexual violence. In one piece, a white man strangles a small black girl while she rides his knee. In another, a belle and her beau kiss demurely on a riverbank while a black child presents a dead duck or goose (or perhaps a severed head?) to a black woman whose body, remade literally into a vessel, floats on the water like a canoe. And in yet another piece, a black woman straddles a white man wearing a top hat, possibly having intercourse with him as she cuts off his head; a white girl pulls off one of the man’s shoes while a woman in a hoopskirt swoons nearby. A second pair of legs juts out from beneath the white women’s hoopskirts in the latter two pictures, pushing us to imagine what is happening under the crinoline literally and on a more symbolic level. For all the ways that Walker’s work might shock and even horrify, she is merely adding to a long tradition in which sex and sexuality are central to representations of the southern plantation.

From as early as the 1820s and 1830s, when John Pendleton Kennedy and others began publishing what are generally considered the first major plantation novels, literary narratives about the plantation have typically revolved around issues of marriage and reproduction, whereby the continuity of the entire plantation system depends on the continuity of the white, slaveholding family. Not surprisingly, slave narratives and abolitionist tracts offered starkly different accounts of sexual and familial relations on southern plantations. And from Reconstruction to the present, countless writers have used the plantation to work through regional and national legacies of, and anxieties about, sexual exploitation and racial mixing. But where are the queer versions of the plantation myth? Where are the narratives of erotic or sexual encounters between men or between women in plantation settings? Given the almost exaggerated emphasis on heterosexual relations in most plantation narratives, it follows that depictions of same-sex relations would be inevitable. Yet any queer representations that do exist are much less visible than their straight counterparts. In this book, I try to heighten the visibility of the plantation myth’s queer side by examining a collection of literary texts from the mid-twentieth century that effectively refashion the plantation into an intrinsically queer cultural space—a space where queer southerners appear to live, sometimes freely and openly, as central players in the story of the South.

If it seems surprising that writers of this period would make homo relations integral to their imaginings of the southern plantation, this is probably because the historical scholarship on this topic is severely lacking. We simply do not know how many homoerotic or homosexual relationships might have flourished between men or women living and working on a plantation before or after the Civil War.¹ Unfortunately, studies of same-sex relations in southern literature are similarly scarce, with only a few articles devoted to homoeroticism in works of plantation literature.² Yet a full understanding of the plantation’s legacies and mythologies is not possible without a full understanding of the regional discourses surrounding sexuality in all its forms. And, conversely, we cannot make sense of the shapes and meanings of same-sex desires and queer identities, either in the South or in America, without also considering the cultural and historical influences of the South’s most iconic institution, the plantation.

I want to help fill these gaps in our knowledge about same-sex relations in southern literature by examining nine texts published between 1936, the year Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind transformed the southern plantation into a piece of American mythology that no one could ignore, and 1968, when the explosive politics of the civil rights movement prompted most southern writers to turn away from the plantation as a subject or a setting for their work. The authors I study are Ernest J. Gaines, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps, although they are by no means the only ones who wrote about the plantation during these years. I have chosen these texts because I feel that they all demonstrate a similar conceptual engagement with the shapes and meanings of same-sex relationships in the South as part of a similar, rather liberal political engagement with the South’s plantation past. My purpose is not to impose a model of plantation queerness that would somehow unlock the meanings of every queer image appearing in plantation literature. Nor do I mean to suggest that these nine texts reveal the truth about same-sex desires or relationships on historical plantations. Rather, I want to show how these texts actively consider varying constructions of same-sex intimacy within their depictions of the southern plantation—which they also consider in a wide variety of forms—for one remarkably consistent purpose: to imagine the possibilities for social equality in the South.

The queer relationships in these works occur mainly between white men of the planter class, between white plantation mistresses and black maids, and between black men. Although the texts do not always explicitly identify these relationships as homosexual, this project aims to explain how, in every case, these forms of same-sex intimacy are part of a larger nexus of queer relations specific to the plantation mythologies being invoked. On one level, I shed light on the nature of the same-sex bond shared by these various partnerships to show how even the ones that may seem least sexual are still integrally bound to homosexuality in ways that mark the individuals as literally queer relations, queer relatives, in the extended, multiracial household of cavaliers, belles, landlords, tenants, butlers, mammies, maids, and field hands. On another level, I examine the ideological structures of the plantations represented in these texts to determine exactly when, how, and why these relationships should sometimes be permissible, or at least not a cause for panic and censure. I show how the very networks of familial and social relations that define these literary plantations can be read as queer for the ways that they not only tolerate these suggestive, and sometimes overtly sexual partnerships, but even strangely enable them. Finally, I am interested in what these queer relations can reveal about how these eight writers used the plantation myth to respond to the massive social and political changes affecting the South during the middle decades of the twentieth century—particularly the shifts toward greater economic and racial equality prompted by the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement. I argue that the same-sex bonds depicted in these texts produce an egalitarian social relation between individuals that ironically places them at odds with the hierarchical structures of the plantations they call home. Each of these examples of queer egalitarianism thus marks the limits of the plantation myth by presenting an image of interpersonal relations not distorted by any kind of power differential—an image that is more in line with the democratic ideals being espoused by the progressive and anti segregationist movements challenging the southern establishment during these decades. Through these models of queer relations, the writers I study try to reconcile the South’s plantation past with the rapid modernization going on around them by also trying to envision, some more fully than others, what a truly equitable and democratic system of relations—that is, social equality—might look like for the region as a whole.

Given the expansiveness of the term queer, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that sexual sameness always forms the core of those relations. Many critics have seized on the way queer defines itself in opposition to the normal rather than the heterosexual, providing a framework in which to challenge the racist, misogynist, and other oppressive discourses/norms, as well as those that are heterosexist and homophobic.³ Yet, focusing too intently on broader questions of normativity could distract theorists and critics from mapping the specificity of same-sex desires, relationships, and identities, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s praise of the term suggests: "a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality all criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses.⁴ Working from a grounding in queer theory, I explore the ways that other discourses of identity intersect with gender and sexuality in these texts—particularly race, caste, and class. But I insist on paying close attention to the dynamics of sexual sameness because the complex hierarchies of the southern plantation make queer," by itself, altogether too slippery.

In the most basic mythology of the white-columned plantation and its multiracial household, and surely in many historical plantations as well, opposite-sex relations do not fully equate with the normal because the hierarchies of race and class render some forms of heterosexual contact illicit. For example, the rape of a black woman by her white owner or overseer could be construed as queer because it violates the model of the racially and sexually pure Victorian family that domestic slavery and its postbellum counterpart were supposed to imitate. But the entitlements built into slave ownership or postbellum white dominance might still, and often did, render this kind of sexual coercion as a normative sexual practice. Similarly, a white woman’s affair with a black man might be considered queer because it violates the strictures for that particular kind of heterosexual segregation of the races. Relationships like these may be perversions of the kind of heterosexuality deemed normal within the culture of the plantation, the region, or even the rest of the United States. Yet a very broad analysis of plantation queerness might examine these relationships without also taking into account the ways that homosexuality inevitably defines and supports notions of sexual normativity as well. Thus, when I talk about the queer relations present in these texts, I focus specifically on representations of same-sex relations, whether they are explicitly homosexual, suggestively homoerotic, or superficially homosocial. For it is only once we understand these relations that we can then spin outward to build a more accurate analysis of all forms of sexuality, normativity, and identity in the literature and culture of the U.S. South.

Hierarchy and Homo-ness

These nine texts engage with and comment upon different historical forms of the plantation, ranging from antebellum slave plantations, to tenant plantations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to one somewhat modernized plantation of the 1950s. They also explore the meanings and structures of same-sex relations and queer identities in a variety of ways by focusing—sometimes obliquely, sometimes overtly—on men and women, whites and blacks from all levels of status within the plantation household. But even with such variety, these texts share two basic similarities. First, no matter what the plantation setting in a text may look like, the defining characteristic for all of them is a hierarchical system of social relations in which every person is bound together through the blatantly heterosexualized rhetoric of paternalism. As I explain in chapter 1, using Ernest J. Gaines’s novel Of Love and Dust (1967) as an example, the writers I study derive this model of social relations from the paternalistic ideologies and practices that evolved with the institution of the plantation, even after the Civil War. Historically, this patriarchal paternalism reinforced the already rigid hierarchies of racial, class, and gender differences by defining every relationship between individuals as a familial bond that symbolically implied some form of heterosexual contact. That is, this system of hierarchical relations ensured that a power differential always existed between two members of the plantation household by assigning them specific roles corresponding to the identities defined within the heterosexual family unit: father, child, heir, wife, mistress, rival, mother, mammy, uncle, aunt, etc. As Richard H. King has argued, the plantation in the early nineteenth century was conceived of as structured like a family and gave rise to a widespread association in which the entire region of the South was conceived of as a vast metaphorical family, hierarchically organized and organically linked by (pseudo-) ties of blood. Even into the twentieth century, this association between region and family—whose linchpin remained the image of the plantation itself—inspired what King calls the family romance that he sees as present in much of southern literature.⁵ Although I do not analyze these texts from the mid-twentieth century in terms of King’s southern family romance, I argue that they all still draw from the historical model of patriarchal and paternalistic social structures to make that system of pseudofamilial relations—that rigidly vertical arrangement of differences defined in terms of heterosexuality—the fundamental component of the various plantations they portray. When I talk about the meta-plantation in this book, I use the term simply as an abbreviation signifying this vertical system of paternalistic and patriarchal hierarchies that constitutes the core social structure of every individual plantation—whether it be slave or tenant, antebellum or modern—represented in these texts.

Secondly, within these hierarchies of heterosexualized differences, these texts consistently define any egalitarian social relationship between two people of the same sex as being integrally connected to homosexuality. Where representations of homosexual relations are overt, they sometimes take on competing forms, whereby some modes of contact or attraction appear mutual, equitable, and loving, and others appear exploitative or even coerced. I am especially interested in the first type of homosexual relations because, as I read them, these texts structure those relations in terms of a desire that privileges the sameness of the other to the self. And by doing so, these texts also conflate those same-sex relations with a horizontal model of egalitarian social relations that competes with the hierarchical order of the meta-plantation even as it exists as part of the meta-plantation. These types of homosexual and homoerotic relations are most prominent in Gaines, Faulkner, Williams, and Styron. And in every case, this emphasis on a desire for sexual sameness joins with the concomitant egalitarianism produced by sameness to constitute what Leo Bersani calls homo-ness. Bersani proposes that while heterosexual desire is rooted in the traumatic discovery and subsequent privileging of difference—the desire for an other who is different from the self—homosexual desire is a desire to repeat, to expand, to intensify the same, a desire in others of what we already are.⁶ Departing from the predominant psychoanalytic model that perceives all desire as being based on lack, Bersani argues that homosexual desire is structurally unique because it is grounded in the identification with an other who is perceived as the same as the self.⁷ And because this desire privileges sameness above all else, the eroticization of sameness works to equalize any other social differences that might exist between the two individuals. Sexual sameness joins with egalitarianism to create a field of homo-ness that redefines difference as simply a non-threatening supplement. This seductive sameness creates a model of homo-relationality, in which individuals would relate to each other identically, with each person socially the same like points along a transversal network of being in which otherness is tolerated as something of only secondary importance. ⁸ Thus, while I use the term sameness to refer to the specific basis on which two people can be defined as identical to each other in terms of race, class, gender, sex, or any other category of identity, homo-ness refers to the effect produced when sexual sameness supercedes all other factors of identity to establish, however provisionally, an egalitarian social bond between individuals.

Such a departure from the idea that homosexual desire is based on lack is, Bersani admits, controversial.⁹ And where these texts present images of a homosexual desire oriented toward the fact of another person’s difference, such as when a white man threatens to dominate a black man sexually because of the difference in their race or status (something we also see in Gaines’s and Styron’s texts), they certainly reveal that not every homosexual desire is a desire for the same, after all. But Bersani’s theory of homo-ness is still helpful in making sense of the moments when these texts associate homosexuality with the expression of two individuals’ ultimate sameness, primarily because it helps explain the egalitarian mode of relationality embodied within those expressions. Bersani writes: Although there are valid grounds for questioning the assumption that desire between men, or between women, is the desire for ‘the same,’ it is also true that because our apprenticeship in desiring takes place within that assumption, homosexuality can become a privileged model of sameness—one that makes manifest not the limits, but the inestimable value of relations of sameness, of homo-relations.¹⁰ David M. Halperin reinforces this notion when he remarks that within the taxonomies of modern homo- and heterosexuality, [e]ven the most asymmetrical behaviors can get trumped for the purposes of sexual classification by the sameness or difference of the sexes of the persons involved.¹¹ The widespread association of homosexuality with sameness proposes a unique model of relations in which other factors of individual difference could fail to produce any kind of power differential between people. That potential for homo-ness makes homosexuality a powerful site for rethinking the hierarchical networks of relationality that dominate culture. ¹² Homo-ness shares with queerness its resistance to the regimes of the normal, but it does so even more specifically from the location of sexual sameness. This particular form of resistance marks the central concern of my analysis, for where these texts define homosexuality as the realization or expression of the other’s fundamental sameness to the self, they also represent it as existing at odds with the social hierarchies of the meta-plantation because it joins two people as equals in a system where equality is rare indeed.

Moreover, this association between homosexuality and egalitarian relations exists in all of the texts that I examine, even when the intimacy shared by people of the same sex seems strictly homosocial. As Sedgwick has shown, homosocial relationships do not necessarily incorporate any erotic or sexual component. But where the homosocial relationships in these texts assert the fundamental equality of the participants on the basis of their sameness to each other—rather than depicting, say, sexual rivalry or competition—these relations are clearly coextensive with more blatantly erotic forms of homosexuality.¹³ I do not mean to imply anywhere in this book that these homosocial relationships are really homosexual at their core, or that the characters involved in these relationships are really homosexuals. But as I read them, these texts still code those characters as part of the nexus of queer relations because they occupy the same theoretical position within the meta-plantation as their more overtly homosexual counterparts. By defining both relationships in terms of a profoundly egalitarian dynamic that defies the heterosexualized, paternalistic logic of the plantation setting, these texts create a seamless continuity between the homosocial and the homosexual in these instances and fail to impose any of the usual prohibitions that would otherwise typically split them apart. In other words, these texts give these particular forms of homosociality and homosexuality an identical structure rooted in the expression of sexual sameness that brings them both into the domain of homo-ness and thus makes it impossible to talk about the one without also considering its fundamental connection to the other. This more expansive form of homo-ness characterizes the homosocial relationships depicted in Hellman, Porter, Walker, and Bontemps. And it clarifies the second basic similarity that all nine of these texts share, for while their depictions of the plantation connect all forms of differential relations with heterosexuality, they also connect all relations of sameness and equality—of homo-ness—with homosexuality, even when those relations are not explicitly sexual in and of themselves.

This continuity between the homosocial and the homosexual within homo-ness suggests that the patriarchal and paternalistic cultures represented in these texts can actually tolerate certain forms of queer intimacy. Indeed, except for a few instances when these texts represent homosexuality as a form of dominance or exploitation, they offer no indication that homosexuality is or should be considered inappropriate or unacceptable in that setting. Whereas Sedgwick and others after her have shown that homophobia and homosexual panic usually work to police the borders of homosociality by prohibiting and vilifying homosexuality, especially for men, no such discourse exists in these texts.¹⁴ The reason for this, I believe, lies in the structural difference between homo-ness—in which I am grouping all egalitarian forms of homosociality and homosexuality—and the meta-plantation’s primary modes of power. Homo-ness shifts the pattern of social relations away from a hierarchical arrangement of individual differences to a horizontal and equitable relation grounded in mutual exchange. But it does so only in localized contexts that do not pervert or distort the existing power structures that reify differences. Consequently, the meta-plantation has no real cause to treat homo-ness as forbidden or taboo. For example, a black man’s sexual relationship with a white woman perverts the meta-plantation’s power structures because it symbolically puts him into a position of power over the white woman and undermines the authority of white men—a power shift white men have historically resisted through terror, violence, and lynching. But a same-sex relationship that is defined by its profound mutuality incorporates a horizontal structure that does not implicitly alter the positions of others outside of that relationship. Where a black man might take pleasure in the equality found with other black men, their relationship does not directly affect the position, status, or power of women or of white men. Homo-ness disrupts the meta-plantation’s power structures by introducing a patently democratic form of relations between individuals, but it does not automatically set into motion any kind of systemic change, leaving the dominant modes of power at least temporarily intact.

At the same time, the egalitarian relations that these texts align with homosexuality still create a rupture in the meta-plantation’s ideological order that can become threatening to the stability of that order. Although the meta-plantation might accommodate homo-ness, the horizontal structure of that queer relation exposes the meta-plantation’s pernicious inequalities and offers a contrary vision of what could be possible in a system of widespread social equality. The localized relations of homo-ness do not directly challenge the social order that produces them, yet they constitute a destabilizing force that opens the door for revolutionary change by proposing a radical alternative to that social order. Some of the characters in these texts seize on this transformative impulse, while others do not. But in every case, homo-ness forces these characters to confront the ideological limits of the meta-plantation and reconcile their experience of sameness and equality with the hierarchical social systems in which that experience takes place. Moreover, sexual sameness is not the only factor determining the extent to which homo-ness works as a destabilizing, disruptive, and potentially revolutionary force. As it does with everything in the South, race heightens the degree to which other forms of sameness and difference matter and helps influence the extent to which these characters might treat homo-ness either as a palliative for the plantation’s inequalities or as an inspiration to destroy those inequalities. Just as numerous critics have pointed out the ways that racial identities in the South inform the structures of gender identities, and vice versa, a further aim of this book is thus to show how race influences the shapes and meanings of southern sexualities and sexual identities. Without perpetuating the mistaken notion that the South is an isolated region within the United States, I want to show how these texts raise the possibility that queer sexual identities may take on some attributes that are unique to the South—and perhaps even the greater plantation region that extends outside the South—because of the way that race operates within their constructions.

Social Equality

Predictably, race also shapes how that these texts imagine the possibilities and limits of social equality. When I talk about social equality, however, I am not referring to the threat of miscegenation that many white southerners associated with that term during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. White southerners in that period who opposed efforts to treat African Americans as social and political equals tried to reinforce white solidarity, in Nell Irvin Painter’s words, by equating social equality with the idea of rampant, and often forced, sexual relations between black men and white women.¹⁵ Jacquelyn Dowd Hall explains: Nowhere were the ethics of living Jim Crow more subtle and treacherous than when they touched on the proper conduct of black men toward white women…. Any transgression of the caste system was a step toward ‘social equality’; and social equality, with its connotations of personal intimacy, could end only in interracial sex.¹⁶ Whites would make these claims about interracial sex even when discussing issues where sex was a marginal concern, as David Letwin has observed: the singular power of the social equality charge flowed from its formidable capacity to link African American empowerment and interracial activity in wide-ranging endeavors—schooling, worship, casual recreation, political campaigns, social movements—to the lurid imagery of interracial sex.¹⁷

Besides simple white racism, at the heart of this conflation is the assumption, I believe, that while social equality might obliterate the paternalistic race relations that make African Americans social inferiors, it would create a more rigid polarization of power along the lines of patriarchal gender differences and thus make the power struggle between whites and blacks more volatile and precarious. Where the supremacy of white men in the South depended on the networks of both paternalism and patriarchy, the elimination of only one of those networks would theoretically shift the entire field of power to the other—like an electrical circuit whose one power source must now do twice the work because its other power source has been shut off. Dismantling paternalism might neutralize racial differences on the social plane; but with patriarchy left intact, racial equality would place, for whites, an even greater significance on differences in gender and prompt a much more intense fixation on difference in the sexual arena. That is, in this white-supremacist logic, black men would rise to become the social equals of white men, and the greatest guarantee of their newfound superiority as men would become the renewed subordination of white women—a power that many whites believed black men would seize by dominating white women physically. Moreover, whites who fought against social equality also feared that a pervasive and violent reassertion of the different statuses assigned to male- and female-gendered bodies would have a more lasting effect in the proliferation of mixed-race offspring.¹⁸ To them, the products of interracialism would become visible across the South in a new breed of people produced by racial amalgamation (as if white men weren’t already largely responsible for the presence of mixed-race people throughout the region). Opponents of social equality bolstered their appeals to prejudice and fear against blacks with the paradoxical logic that eliminating the social differences between black and white would lead to a more extreme erasure of difference—the creation of an all-out racial sameness—through the contrary reification of sexual hierarchies between male and female via rape.¹⁹

In contrast to this conservative panic about interracial heterosexual sex, the authors I study here invoke a much more liberal notion of social equality that at least remains open to the idea of change. Although none of these texts actually includes the term social equality in its pages, I use that term because it best describes the system of relations that each text places in contradistinction to the hierarchies of the meta-plantation—a system in which all individuals exist on the same social level regardless of differences in race, class, gender, or any other factor of identity. In Iris Marion Young’s words, this modern notion of social equality refers primarily to the full participation and inclusion of everyone in a society’s major institutions, and the socially supported substantive opportunity for all to develop and exercise their capacities and realize their choices.²⁰ Social equality in this sense represents a democratic ideal in which both paternalism and patriarchy have ceased to operate. And in it, the differences between people would not necessarily break down or disappear through amalgamation, but would simply cease to matter in the public sphere.

While this democratic notion of social equality may not be a concept that people usually associate with sexuality, these texts make that association because the heterosexualized structure of the meta-plantation implicitly joins the alternate model of social relations with a corresponding model of alternate sexual relations simply by virtue of their shared alterity. This is true even when sexuality does not appear to be an obvious concern—when the relations in question seem nothing more than homosocial—because the meta-plantation conflates all forms of sociality with the discourse of sexuality. The absence of a prohibition or taboo separating the homosocial from the homosexual (when both are fundamentally egalitarian) defines them as coextensive with each other. The horizontal structure of the homosocial bond places homosociality in diametric opposition to the meta-plantation’s heterosexually identified hierarchies of power, thereby marking it as structurally joined to homosexuality even when the bond seems nonerotic. Whether we want to say that writing about homosexuality and other homo-relations led these authors to consider the egalitarian dynamic of social equality, or vice versa, these representations of the southern plantation consistently interlink sexuality with sociality so completely that it is simply not possible to read the two apart from each other.

It is true that the definition of two people’s sameness on any grounds depends on the hierarchical power structures that differentiate and enforce the dominant categories of identity. A black man’s sameness to another black man does not make sense unless there is already an established field of differences defining what it means to be both black and a man. But the equalization that takes place within the social/ sexual continuum of homo-ness destabilizes those categories of identity by neutralizing the axes of difference that support definition. With both paternalism and patriarchy held at bay, the differential relations implied by, in this case, the dominant constructions of blackness and masculinity fail to describe anything significant about the individuals inside this bubble of homo-ness, and the categories of identity lose their power, at least provisionally, to define and control those individuals’ places within society. Any other differences that might exist between the individuals also become irrelevant or insignificant, and the larger social effect of homo-ness produces not the mixed-race offspring of heterosexual contact, but a metaphysical ideal in which all individuals share an equal status in society as individuals—not hybridity or amalgamation, but universalism. I should stress that these authors do not all explore this notion of social equality fully or directly, or with equal enthusiasm. Faulkner, for example, imagines a South that could tolerate queer white masculinities, but that tragically cannot expand that tolerance to accept blacks and women as white men’s equals. Yet, in one degree or another, homo-ness consistently functions as the primary basis through which these authors imagine some form of a more progressive and equitable southern society.

The Southern Context

These representations of homo-ness parallel the universalist assumptions used to support the arguments for racial integration during the civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Explaining this integrationist ideal, Gary Peller writes: The aspiration for racial integration confirms our sense of the possibility of true and authentic relations that transcend racial status and other forms of cultural distance and difference. And integrationism appeals to the utopian ideal that these moments could be translated into organized institutional practices because, at the core, we are all the same, ‘regardless of race.’²¹ While these texts appear to give at least some space to integrationist ideology, I want to hold back from suggesting that the arguments for integration are their main concern. Rather, the ways that these texts focus on the networks of sameness and difference correspond more generally with the broader discourses of this period regarding the South’s status as a region within the United States. As I argue in chapter 1, many southerners during the middle decades of the twentieth century tried to delineate and celebrate a regional culture that they defined as being patently different from the cultures of other regions and