White Masculinity in the Recent South

Trent Watts

LSU Press, 2008 - History - 280 pages

From antebellum readers avidly consuming stories featuring white southern men as benevolent patriarchs, hell-raising frontiersmen, and callous plantation owners to post--Civil War southern writers seeking to advance a model of southern manhood and male authority as honorable, dignified, and admirable, the idea of a distinctly southern masculinity has reflected the broad regional differences between North and South. In the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, the media have helped to shape modern models of white manhood, not only for southerners but for the rest of the nation and the world.
In White Masculinity in the Recent South, thirteen scholars of history, literature, film, and environmental studies examine modern white masculinity, including such stereotypes as the good old boy, the redneck, and the southern gentleman. With topics ranging from southern Protestant churches to the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, this cutting-edge volume seeks to do what no other single work has done: to explore the ways in which white southern manhood has been experienced and represented since World War II. Using a variety of approaches -- cultural and social history, close readings of literature and music, interviews, and personal stories -- the contributors explore some of the ways in which white men have acted in response to their own and their culture's conceptions of white manhood. Topics include neo-Confederates, the novels of William Faulkner, gay southern men, football coaching, deer hunting, church camps, college fraternities, and white men's responses to the civil rights movement.
Taken together, these engaging pieces show how white southern men are shaped by regional as well as broader American ideas of what they ought to do and be. White men themselves, the contributors explain, view the idea of southern manhood in two seemingly contradictory ways -- as something natural and as something learned through rites of initiation and passage -- and believe it must be lived and displayed to one's peers and others in order to be fully realized.
While economic and social conditions of the South changed dramatically in the twentieth century, white manhood as it is expressed in the contemporary South is still a complex, contingent, historicized matter, and broadly shared -- or at least broadly recognized -- notions of white southern manhood continue to be central to southern culture. Representing some of the best recent scholarship in southern gender studies, this bold collection invites further explorations into twenty-first-century white southern masculinity.

Contents

• Telling White Mens Stories: 1
• Evangelical Males and Christian Primitivism 1920s1970s: 30
• Interstate Rest Areas the Creation of Gay Space and the Recovery of a Lost Narrative: 46
• College Social Fraternities Manhood and the Defense of Southern Traditionalism 19451960: 63
• Attitudes and Environment at a Southern Deer Camp: 86
• Masculinity and Massive Resistance to Integration: 99
• Manhood Race and Authority in Post1970 Mississippi: 121
• The League of the South and the Crusade against Southern Emasculation: 146
• Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Cult of Southern Masculinity: 172
• An Interview with Kate Davis: 186
• Doctors Son: 206
• Traumatized Masculinity and White Southern Identity in Contemporary Family Memoirs: 220
• Faulkners Snopes Trilogy and Cold War Masculinity: 234
• Lynyrd Skynyrd and White Southern Manhood: 251
• Contributors: 267

Popular passages

Page 10 - Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.‎

Page 10 - A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.‎

Page 250 - man" within this logic requires repudiating femininity as a precondition for the heterosexualization of sexual desire and its fundamental ambivalence. If a man becomes heterosexual by repudiating the feminine, where could that repudiation live except in an identification which his heterosexual career seeks to deny? Indeed, the desire for the feminine is marked by that repudiation: he wants the woman he would never be. He wouldn't be caught dead being her: therefore he wants her. She is his repudiated...‎

About the author

Trent Watts is Assistant Professor of American Studies in at Missouri University of Science and Technology. is in at.

Bibliographic information

• Title: White Masculinity in the Recent South; Making the Modern South
• Editor: Trent Watts
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: LSU Press, 2008
• ISBN: 0807137677, 9780807137673
• Length: 280 pages
• Subjects: History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV); Social Science / Gender Studies; Social Science / Regional Studies