"Step Right Up, Come On In . . ."

Over the past decade some very exciting things—and some very queer things—have been happening in U.S. southern studies. Invigorated by a wholesale reassessment of the region's place in the world, the "New Southern Studies" offers novel approaches to the U.S. South's histories and mythologies. Part and parcel of this reassessment has been an increased attention to "sexual otherness" in southern lives and letters.¹ Michael P. Bibler's superb new book, Cotton's Queer Relations, makes a significant and deft contribution to these scholarly conversations, in no small part because it addresses forthrightly same-sex intimacy in one of the South's most important and most troubling cultural institutions, the plantation. Too long steeped in the sentimental muck of "moonlight and magnolias" (think Gone with the Wind's opening, prewar scenes at Twelve Oaks), the southern plantation is, Bibler helps us to see, a more complicated imaginative space, one whose perverse logics may paradoxically give rise to progressive social ends.

At the heart of this earnest book is an argument about power differentials. Bibler reads a series of mid-twentieth-century texts as refashioning the plantation "into an intrinsically queer cultural space—a space where queer southerners appear to live, sometimes freely and openly, as central players in the story of the South" (2). Over some three hundred pages, Bibler posits and pursues three figurative models of same-sex intimacy: among white men of the planter class, among plantation mistresses and African American maids, and among black revolutionaries. Because such intimacies subvert the "heterosexualized, paternalistic logic of the plantation setting," they allow both characters and readers to imagine alternative, egalitarian souths (8).

Cotton's Queer Relations focuses on the years 1936 to 1968 and examines an impossibly diverse group of writers: Ernest Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps. Despite their many differences, Bibler reads these strange bedfellows as sharing a relative "openness to the possibility of social change across the region" (15). Although same-sex intimacy may not be the "primary subject" of their plantation texts, Bibler argues persuasively that it is an essential part of their "engagement with the legacies of the southern plantation" (46).

As the above redaction suggests, Bibler's study has a strongly utopian cast. Central to his project is an elegant repurposing of Leo Bersani's concept of "homoness," which Bibler redefines as "the effect produced when sexual sameness supersedes all other factors of identity to establish, however provisionally, an egalitarian social bond between individuals" (7). For Bibler, homo-ness encompasses all egalitarian forms of homosociality and homosexuality. By recasting homoness in these broad terms, Bibler is able to emphasize those issues Bersani has been criticized for neglecting, namely, issues of class, race, and ethnicity.

Another signal strength of the book is Bibler's judicious attention to the texts at hand. Across all of his readings, Bibler is careful not to codify sexual acts or identities. Although he sustains a strong, methodical argument, he rarely misses an opportunity to underscore moments of fluidity, ambivalence, and indeterminacy in the literature he treats. Thus, in lovely reading after lovely reading, the study traces the complex dynamics of individual texts and their characters and plots. While Bibler's attention to the "high canon" of southern literature—Porter's The Old Order, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—ensures that southernists will read this important book, it is his attention to less-studied texts that sets the book apart. For instance, Bibler's bravura reading of "queer black fraternity" in Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner and Bontemps's Black Thunder is alone worth the price of admission. Brushing aside the pieties and provocations of Styron's critical reception, Bibler offers an original and wholly convincing interpretation of this incendiary novel and its vexed relationship with Bontemps's earlier Black Thunder.

If Cotton's...