Cotton's Queer Relations

Michael P. Bibler is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Manchester in England.

Through deft textual analysis, relevant historical and literary research, and a firm grasp of the implications of queer theory for this subject, Michael Bibler makes a strong case for the capacity of same-sex relations in plantation novels (relations which may be homosocial, homoerotic, and/or homosexual) to undermine the rigidities of those perspectives that represent this literature exclusively in terms of ideologies of racial, sexual, and class difference. Cotton's Queer Relations serves as the foundation for a new and effective approach to the problem of social inequalities in southern literature. - Barbara Ladd, Emory University, author of Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty ""Michael Bibler opens - I should say pries open - a new door in southern studies. Behind this door is a body of writing that presents homosexuality as both a fact of nature and a construct that works to maintain the South's hierarchical power structures. With its focus on the southern plantation and its ongoing representations in literature and popular culture, Cotton's Queer Relations illuminates a crucial but often ignored irony: The South's seemingly official desire to make homosexuality disappear actually speaks to the region's inability to stifle the expression of homosexual desire."" - Will Brantley, Middle Tennessee State University, author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir