“Redneck Woman” and the Gendered Poetics of Class Rebellion

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2004 Gretchen Wilson exploded onto country music scene with The blockbuster single led to early release of her first CD, Here for Party, and propelled it to triple platinum sales that year, highest for a debut in any musical category. shot to No. i faster than any country track in previous decade and held top spot for five weeks. Wilson garnered a raft of distinctions, including a Grammy for best country song and best female vocalist honors from both Country Music and American Music Awards. (See video at http://www.cmt.com/videos/gretchen-wilson/30774/redneck-woman.jhtml.) The record a milestone in country music and in career of Wilson, who went in a few weeks from struggling Nashville unknown to top-selling Nashville star. In process, she had created with co-writer and MuzikMafia crewmate John Rich became not only her signature song but her star persona. Redneck Woman was tag line that served to introduce Wilson in public appearances and media features. The neck of her guitar even proclaimed REDNECK in mother of pearl inlay. More than a nickname, handle keyed to a network of images, attributes, and attitudes that Wilson represented and that, for fans, represented her in an essential way. Loretta Lynn was Miner's Daughter, Johnny Cash in Black, and now Gretchen Wilson was Redneck Woman. Anyone curious about meaning of any of these monikers could simply listen to eponymous song. All three songs have served as identity totems for their singers and fans who have embraced them. All are first-person narrations on themes that have been prevalent in postwar country music, including an identification with humble folk--both materially impoverished and socially scorned. Coal Miner's Daughter (#1 1970) poignantly chronicles singer's hardscrabble family origins in a Kentucky holler. Its message is familiar to country fans: We were poor, but we had love--of God and each other? The narrator in Man in Black (#3 1971) explains that he shuns color in his dress to protest poverty, hopelessness, and lives lost to war and imprisonment. That song's lyrics invoke another champion of downtrodden, Jesus. The persona in acknowledges her own scorned status but frames it with neither poignancy nor righteous protest. Her statement is a defiant apologia for herself and her redneck sisters and their trashy social position. Wilson's breakthrough single and its extraordinary reception remakes white working-class female identity through language, sound, and images and in relation to middle-class/working-class, male/female, and individual/communal affiliations. It is an identity bereft of cachet, or exchange-value, according to Beverley Skeggs, a British sociologist whose work powerfully illuminates cultural terrain on which song is produced and received. Skeggs offers a theory on workings of contemporary Western political and symbolic economy--a cultural system that elevates stories of individual and rewards those who can access, use, and display right identity attributes. The winners here are those who are positioned to access other subjects' properties. These powerful actors can classifications and characteristics of race, sexuality, class, and gender as by borrowing them, fluidly and according to circumstances, from subject positions to which they are seen to belong. Such self-resourcing takes place in a modern neoliberal context of propertized personhood. Here, exchange-value attaches, not only to objects or labor that transforms them into possessions (as in Marx), but to the cultures, experiences, and affects of others that entitled subjects use as resources for middle-class self-construction. Less entitled subjects, however, are limited in their ability to trade and convert their characteristics and classifications because they are positioned as those classifications and are fixed by them. …