Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968 (review)

Since queer studies crystallized in the 1980s and transformed the ways that literary scholars read sexuality, gender performance and performativity, intimacy, and the nexus of power relations that cohere (and often unravel) around the body, many have turned South to interrogate the scenes of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. This southward turn in queer studies of nineteenth-century American literature is perhaps best exemplified by Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture and Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s “’The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African Slave Narratives” published in African American Review. The most recent monograph in this trend, Michael Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968, analyzes same-sex intimacy on the Southern plantation of twentieth-century American literature, entering the emerging discourse on sexuality, literature, and the regimes of slavery and segregation by centering various examples of what Bibler calls “queer versions of the plantation myth,” narratives in which “queer southerners appear to live, sometimes freely and openly, as central players in the story of the South” (2). Bibler argues that representations of same-sex intimacies—whether they are “explicitly homosexual, suggestively homoerotic, or superficially homosocial”—destabilize the vertical systems of oppression and assert a horizontal relation of homo-ness as the basis for an egalitarian social relation. Bibler departs from the conventional psychoanalytic equation of desire with lack to argue, citing Leo Bersani’s notion of homo-ness, that “homosexual desire is structurally unique because it is grounded in the identification of an other who is perceived as the same as the self” (7). More importantly, homosexuality and various forms of homosociality represent for Bibler “a form of resistance to the regimes of the normal” organizing plantation life in twentieth-century Southern literature: “where these texts define homosexuality as the realization or expression of the other’s fundamental sameness to the self, they also represent it as existing at odds with the social hierarchies of the meta-plantation because it joins two people as equals in a system where equality is rare indeed” (8). A bold undertaking, Bibler’s study raises important questions and presents many provocative readings for scholars of Southern literature, gender and sexuality studies, and race studies.

Cotton’s Queer Relations is most successful in its sweeping yet detailed historical view of the period it analyzes, its engaging close readings, and its courageous theorizations of homo-ness within what Bibler calls the meta-plantation: the use of the “meta-” prefix calls attention to the system of hierarchies that “constitutes the core social structure of every individual plantation” (6). The seven chapters of Cotton’s Queer Relations present lucid close readings of nine texts variously positioned within World War II- and post-World War II-era U.S. literary culture: William Faulkner’s 1936 Absalom, Absalom!; dramas such as Tennessee Williams’s 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Lillian Hellman’s 1946 Another Part of the Forest; short stories such as those collected in Katherine Anne Porter’s The Old Order (1944); African American novels such as Gaines’s Of Love and Dust (1967), Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), and Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936); and William Styron’s controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).

The book is organized into three parts, each corresponding to a particular “queer” figuration. Part I, “Planters and Lovers,” analyzes the fraught homosocial and homosexual relations among white male planters in Absalom, Absalom! and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, discovering a “loophole” in plantation patriarchy: if Faulkner’s novel depicts the foreclosure of white male-black male intimacy, “homoeroticism is clearly a component of the homo-social bonds joining elite white men to elite white men” (92). And in Cat, Williams makes “homosexual and openly homoerotic relations between white men so readily accepted...