Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968. By Michael P. Bibler. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. xii, 298 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-2791-6. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-2792-3.)

Abstract

In seven chapters addressed to eight writers and nine texts, Michael P. Bibler argues the interpretive centrality of seemingly marginal characters and subplots to the fashioning of mid-twentieth-century southern plantation literature. Set on antebellum slave plantations, postbellum tenant tracts, and a modern family estate, these novels and plays are shown to revolve around issues of race, gender, and sexuality—often marriage and progeny—and to invoke the threats, variously perceived, of nonprocreative couplings. With deft close readings and skilled contextualizations, Bibler demonstrates that the racist, paternalist hierarchies of plantation life are repeatedly constructed against intimacies that are not only homosocial and possibly homosexual but also egalitarian and potentially transformative. Creatively periodized, Cotton's Queer Relations analyzes the contours of a liberal, progressive, antisegregationist genre between the moonlight-and-magnolias formula and the plantation burlesque—that is, after Gone with the Wind (1936) and before the advent of black power. Bibler begins with a lesser-known Ernest Gaines novel from the end of the period, juxtaposing taboo black-white heterosexual liaisons against ostensibly peripheral homosexual intercourse, both consensual and not, proving the fundamental import, in the Gaines title, Of Love and Dust (1967)—with eroticized struggles over reproduction and inheritance played out on the very land and region at stake. For Bibler, “the homosexual partnership of two field hands, John and Freddie … destabilizes the plantation's power structures and shields them from its dehumanizing effects” (p. 26). Still, Bibler carefully delimits the critique of this and related fictional texts: “The localized relations of homo-ness do not directly challenge the social order that produces them, yet they … open the door for revolutionary change by proposing a radical alternative to that social order” (p. 10).