‘Now You’re The Only One For Me Jolene’: Queer Reading and Forging Community in Country Music
When Nadine Hubbs wrote an additional verse to Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ with the lyric: ‘It’s true that my man found you first / You awakened such a thirst / Now you’re the only one for me, Jolene’, the song’s homoerotic and queer subtext became explicit. [i] This was one example of queer reading where ‘contrary use of what the dominant culture provides’ can be a way for an ‘oppressed group [to] cobble together its own culture’.[ii] Perhaps in no other place is this more necessary than the country music industry that continues to marginalise and exclude Black and LGBTQ+ artists. [iii] [iv] [v] Yet as the work of Nadine Hubbs and Francesca Royster remind us, it is important to separate country music as an aesthetic genre from the country music industry and avoid reinscribing homophobia and racism back into the genre, furthering these impulses within the industry and contributing to […]
Continue Reading“Your Name is Safe”: The Ladder as lesbian literary community
This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. In the second issue of the Ladder – the San Francisco-based lesbian literary magazine that circulated between 1956 and 1972 – Ann Ferguson published an article intended to reassure nervous subscribers, titled ‘Your Name is Safe.’ Ferguson acknowledged readers’ fears that “names on our mailing list may fall into the wrong hands.”[1] This was a euphemistic reference to the FBI, and lesbian subscribers had reason to be cautious. The first issue of the Ladder appeared three years after Dwight D. Eisenhower barred queer workers from federal employment, initiating a nationwide anti-gay witch hunt known as the Lavender Scare. Members of the Ladder’s parent organisation, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) had been under state surveillance since DOB’s founding in 1955. Accessing their FBI files in 1981, DOB founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were surprised to […]
Continue ReadingMA Graduate Teaching Assistantship Award in Southern Studies at University of Mississippi: Lily-Pearl Benn’s testimony
As the deadline for BAAS’s MA Graduate Teaching Assistantship Award in Southern Studies at University of Mississippi nears, read the testimony from Lily-Pearl Benn about her time at the University of Mississippi. I first heard about the BAAS award via email when I was an undergraduate in English and American Literature and Culture at the University of Hull. To complete an MA and have it funded through invaluable work experience in such an interesting place seemed a dream! I was surprised and over the moon when I got the place. I had never heard of an MA in Southern Studies before, but it is similar to the American Studies component of my undergraduate degree in its framework and interdisciplinary nature, just more ‘zoomed in’. This is not to say the programme isn’t expansive: the American South encompasses every kind of place, from vast cities like Atlanta to the Appalachian mountains […]
Continue ReadingThe Afghanistan Effect: Isolationism in US Foreign Policy
On September 28th 2021, General Mark Milley, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the US Senate Armed Services Committee regarding the end of US military involvement in Afghanistan. The general responded to Senator Hawley’s question on the evacuation of US citizens: “Strategically, the war is lost. The enemy is in Kabul so you have a strategic failure while you simultaneously have an operational and tactical success by the soldiers on the ground.”[i] Admitting defeat for the US military, Milley nevertheless recognized the successful evacuation of over 100,000 people from Afghanistan on US aircraft. The conflicting notions of defeat and success evident in Milley’s testimony speak to a broader uncertainty about the developing shape of US foreign policy. Biden’s advisors at the White House, along with the top brass, knew that the Afghan armed forces would likely collapse without US support, however the speed with which the […]
Continue ReadingSampson Selig: the 1896 election and children in American political history
Children remain disenfranchised. They are formally divorced from political participation and are unable to directly influence who is elected to their local board of supervisors, never mind who enters the White House. But American political history is incomplete without considering the nation’s youngsters. Firstly, children wield immense soft political power due to common adult perceptions of childhood innocence and vulnerability. In most elections, the question of what type of America should be inherited by the next generation is prominent. Adult campaigners frequently lean on ideas of childhood to support their cause. But children seek to intervene in political discourse too. They have proven themselves capable of influencing local and national politics including as speechmakers. Thirteen-year-old Brayden Harrington’s contribution to the 2020 Democratic Convention may have seemed unusual but the use of a child orator is nothing new. The Biden campaign facilitated his speaking as it was of political benefit, but […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Understanding Jennifer Egan by Alexander Moran
Understanding Jennifer Egan by Alexander Moran is the first book-length study to provide critical analysis of all of Jennifer Egan’s published fiction to date. Arriving in the same year as Ivan Krielkamp’s A Visit from the Goon Squad REREAD,[i] the rising critical attention to Egan’s work is a welcome sight, correcting the tendency to overlook Egan’s constant and significant presence in contemporary fiction.
Continue ReadingTim Galsworthy on the 2021 BAAS Peter Parish Award
In March 2021, I was fortunate enough to be the recipient of a Postgraduate Research Assistance Award from BAAS. Receiving this award, especially one named after the great Peter Parish, was humbling. This award was also invaluable for my doctoral project. After initially considering the possibility of a visit to the United States, I quickly decided, due to the ongoing pandemic, that the award’s funds would be better used supporting remote research. I was interested in using BAAS funds to access important archival materials from the Library of Congress. My PhD analyses the relationship between American Civil War memory and the Republican Party during the 1960s. The Library holds an array of useful collections, but I was particularly interested in materials concerning leading Black Republicans – an important group here was voices and perspectives I had not yet adequately investigated. A number of scholars, notably Leah Wright Rigueur and Joshua […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism: The American Right and the Reinvention of the Scottish Enlightenment by Antti Lepisto
Why were historians of conservatism shocked by Donald Trump’s rise? Antti Lepistö, an intellectual historian at the University of Oulu, Finland, seeks to answer this question in his first monograph, The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism: The American Right and the Reinvention of the Scottish Enlightenment. The work is split into six chapters each focusing on a different element of neoconservative thought. The first- and second-chapters study journalist Irving Kristol’s use of ‘common man’ rhetoric in the late-1970s and early-1980s, and how social scientist James Q. Wilson built upon this.
Continue ReadingTaking Notice: Nature and Climate Change Deniers in American Climate Fiction
Climate change is no taboo topic as in recent years, figures and organisations such as Greta Thunberg and WWF have brought the on-going environmental crisis to the media’s forefront, presenting us with frankly terrifying statistics about our planet’s future if radical changes to our destructive behaviours are not made. Literature is a global entity which responds to culture and often reflects its most pressing issues. Thus, it has had no choice but to engage with the topic of climate change and has done so through a genre called climate fiction, also known as ‘cli-fi’.[i] In such texts, the protagonists are often enlightened to climate change, while climate change deniers are represented as being ‘too blind’ – and often wilfully so – to see the truth. Such a focus on sight highlights the irony of the deniers’ stance in not seeing the bigger picture, as they often believe that they understand […]
Continue ReadingMeditations on Critical Race Theory and 21st Century Anti-Communism
In recent months, there have been ongoing public discussions about Critical Race Theory (CRT).[i] With Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts backing a resolution to combat the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the state’s universities, and other states responding to crowds of parents and protestors calling for the ‘removal of CRT from schools’, it may be difficult for the layman to understand where the explosive protests surrounding CRT have come from. This article will explain some of the history regarding the modern application of CRT, arguing that the contemporary discourse surrounding CRT invokes right-wing propaganda and political messaging, whose roots lie in the anti-communist ‘red-baiting’ techniques of the twentieth century. It will also explore how anti-CRT discourse is currently used to argue against any measures to further ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ in academic spaces which, by in what spacesteaching an alternative to mainstream right-wing discourses, directly threaten the status quo. Put simply, […]
Continue Reading