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Vol. 4 No. 2 Queer Ruralisms

Vol. 4 No. 2 (2024): Queer Ruralisms

"Be the red worm in the dirt. Be the honeysuckle on the vine": Queer Southern Place-Making in A Dirty South Manifesto (2020)

DOI
https://doi.org/10.25364/27.4:2024.2.6
Submitted
July 12, 2023
Published
2024-10-03

Abstract

In light of homonormative narratives that privilege the urban as a future place of freedom, A Dirty South Manifesto (2020) by L. H. Stallings represents the manifesto's function of disrupting hegemonic narratives in its reconfiguration of thinking futurity and its spatial dimensions for marginalized Southerners. I read Stallings's manifesto as employing a place-making practice that condemns moral authority and aims at dismantling narratives based on Christian white heteropatriarchy and settler colonialist chronotopic social orders. Queer narrative temporality is the pivotal point through which linear progress can be countered. The manifesto's case studies of sexual resistance in Southern hip-hop and activism create a queer archive of the South which merges artistic and political imaginations and rural and urban spaces into Southern places. A Dirty South Manifesto invalidates hegemonic linear progress narratives such as metronormative narratives and instead can be read to follow Judith Roof's call for story systems. By prioritizing long-form discourse and literacy while embracing "obscene" sexual expressions, the text aims at utopian radical reinterpretations of what it means to be situated in the South.