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  • Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon by Tison Pugh
  • Phillip Gordon (bio)
Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon.
By Tison Pugh. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. 240 pp.

The difficult task that Tison Pugh sets himself in Precious Perversions is made clear by his subtitle. His goal is to carve a coherent category from three distinct areas: humor studies, LGBT studies, and southern literary studies. Each of these areas independently encompasses more than cottage-industry-sized fields of inquiry, and each are rife with internal disagreements about what constitutes inclusion in their discrete canons. Connecting two fields to bring into focus a new reading of literary works is a necessary part of any scholarly project—for example, gay writers who are also southern, southern writers who are also humorists, or humor writers who are also gay—but adding a third field can threaten to disrupt the whole project. Pugh’s study attempts such a triple connection, and were it not for the flaw of excluding nonwhite voices, it would succeed.

The most immediate alignment for Pugh’s study is the growing canon of studies documenting gay life and expression in the “South,” a contested term delineating a space of uncertain borders. He cites historians and sociologists such as John Howard, E. Patrick Johnson, and Bernadette Barton to foreground his argument that “the discrimination, often accompanied by physical, mental, and spiritual violence, that queer men and women have faced” (2) in the South has given rise to unique strategies for humor as a means of confronting the challenges of this life and as a means of formulating communal shibboleths recognizable to gay people because of their shared queer southern experiences. One could also read Pugh’s study as a companion to Gary Richard’s Lovers and Beloveds (2007) or Michael Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations (2009), both of which focus on southern queer literary production and share with Pugh’s work the anchor of the Southern Renaissance as the starting points for their larger canon constructions. Pugh begins his study by considering the arch-queer southern writers Tennessee Williams and [End Page 107] Truman Capote before branching out to take up post-renaissance lesbian writers Florence King, Rita Mae Brown, and Dorothy Allison. He concludes with a chapter on David Sedaris in order to question what “postsouthern” gay humor might entail.

The chapters devoted to each writer undeniably offer important insights into their individual works. For example, Pugh’s aligning Williams and Capote with camp to suggest that one could read them for their over-thetop style is, by itself, novel. To make Williams’s and Capote’s camp visible, Pugh cannot speak of camp by itself. Rather, he accesses its appearance through sadomasochism in Williams and gothic traditions in Capote. He views the humor of the other writers in the study through similar mitigations: Pugh approaches King’s humor through gender politics and conservatism, Brown’s through gender politics and feminism, and Allison’s through “humor’s ambiguity” and trauma (116). Including Sedaris allows Pugh to expand on who has claims to being southern, and he relies on Sedaris’s established reputation as a gay humorist to lay the groundwork for his innovative addition here.

The consecutive chapters on Williams and Capote highlight the broader tensions and possibilities of the study. One troubling tension in the study emerges in Pugh’s reading of A Streetcar Named Desire, which traditionally belongs to the canon of dramatic tragedy. Pugh suggests that “it would be challenging (though by no means impossible) to stage Blanche’s rape scene as camp” because Williams’s “depiction of female protagonists suffering from the “southern belle complex” frequently evinces their masochistic tendencies, even when this masochism is not expressed as a manifestation of their erotic desires” (37). Apparently, if an actor were to play Blanche as asking for it behind the guise of her prim southern manners, the rape scene could have humorous potential—or so this tethering together of erotic desire, masochism, and rape seems to imply. On the other hand, he offers an insightful account of Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms by reading it...

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