All Y'all

Book excerpt: The South is often perceived as a haunted place in its region’s literature, one that is strange, deviant, or “queer.” The peculiar, often sexually charged literary worlds of contemporary writers like Fannie Flagg, Monique Truong, and Randall Kenan speak to this connection between queerness and the South. Heidi Siegrist explores the boundaries of negotiating place and sexuality by using the concept of Southernness—a purposefully fluid idea of the South that extends beyond simple geography, eschewing familiar ideas of the Southern canon. When the connection between queerness and Southerness becomes apparent, Siegrist shows a Southern-branded queer deviance can not only change the way we think about literature but can also change Southern queer people’s lived experiences. Siegrist gathers a bevy of undertheorized writers, from Kenan and Truong to Dorothy Allison and even George R. R. Martin, showing that there are many “queer Souths.” Siegrist offers these multiverses as a way to appreciate a place that is often unfriendly, even deadly, to queer people. But as Siegrist argues, none of these Souths, from the terrestrial to the imaginary, would be what they are without the influence and power of queer literature.