Promotional Information

A cultural studies reading of white southern femininity as seen in a range of popular sites including novels, television, and tourist attractions

Table of Contents

Index 311
Acknowledgments ix
Dixie Then and Now: An Introduction 1
1. Romancing the South: A Tour of Lady’s Legacies, Academic and Otherwise 39
2. “Both Kinds of Arms”: The Civil War in the Present 95
3. Steel Magnolias, Fatal Flowers, and Designing Women: On the Limits of a Politics of Femininity in the Sun Belt South 149
4. Feeling Southern: Home, Guilt, and the Transformation of White Identity 205
Notes 257
Bibliography 293

About the Author

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. She is a coeditor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"Reconstructing Dixie is a wonderful book-feisty, original, filled with insights into the circulation of the South in contemporary consumerist and feminist space. With real aplomb Tara McPherson leaps into the fracas surrounding globalization, the new geography, the racialization of 'whiteness,' and the controversies about the uses of gender analysis. The result is a book that could release 'southern' studies from its limited academic terrain." Patricia Yaeger, author of Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing "Reconstructing Dixie is theoretically sophisticated in its view of Southerness as a discursive construct and cultural fantasy, and in analyzing what work regional nostalgia performs." Laura Kipnis, author of Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America "I was absolutely blown away by this book. Tara McPherson's readings of individual texts, ranging from Gone With the Wind to the Captain Confederacy comic-book series and Octavia Butler's Kindred, are original, precise, and utterly convincing. She pulls to the surface the radically different ways each work deals with the critical nexus of regional, racial, class, and gender identities."-Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture