Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture ed. by Trent Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture ed. by Trent Brown Keira Williams Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture. Edited by Trent Brown. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 326. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6762-5.) Southern distinctiveness has long been a subject of study, leading to the overarching questions of Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture: "Is there a distinctive southern way of sex? Is there a distinctively southern history of sex and sexualities?" (p. 22). This edited volume opens with a juxtaposition of the South as repressed and as a "land of sexual license" (p. 3). The contributors seek to explore the varied histories of sexual expression and representation in this region known for its bifurcated imagery and treatment of sexuality. "In the American imagination," writes editor Trent Brown, "the South has been represented as both sexually open and sexually closed, as sometimes outwardly chaste and inwardly sultry" (p. 13). While this simplistic, "Janus-faced" reading of the sexual South is, of course, socially constructed, it has had and continues to have real-world implications for regional representations and "the experiences of southern sexual subjects" (pp. 15, 17). The contributors thus examine both in twelve chapters that span World War II to the late Barack Obama era. While age-old stereotypes of southern sexuality, such as [End Page 796] the pure white lady or "'the black beast rapist,'" make frequent, referential appearances in Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture, the book's wide-ranging chapters are dedicated to analyses of more recent sexual subjects (p. 7). These include interracial, activist partners in 1960s Mississippi; white middle-class golfers hitting strip clubs after a day on the links in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; LGBTQ tourists on the Redneck Riviera; African American female victims of harassment and assault at Freaknik in Atlanta; and Southern Baptist girls in abstinence-only sex education programs. The volume has a loosely chronological structure that begins with Claire Strom's examination of federal, state, and local efforts to control venereal disease in wartime Florida, which ably demonstrates the sexual double standard of policing "dangerous" women (p. 30). From there, the chapters proceed somewhat unevenly. Stephanie M. Chalifoux's research on prostitution in Phenix City, Alabama, is primarily descriptive, while Francesca Gamber's deep dive into interracial intimacy in the early years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is a key addition to several strands of historiography, including sex and the civil rights movement, relationships between activists and locals in the Deep South, and the development of black nationalism in the 1960s. Whitney Strub's investigation of "Memphis Heat," the antipornography legal crusade of the 1970s, as a portent of "Reaganism rising" unpacks an opening salvo in the "culture wars" to come (p. 107). It is worth reading, if only for the unexpected entertainment of the "ironic postscript" at the end of the chapter (p. 108). Other chapters have potential, but they do not quite hit the mark, including Richard Hourigan's entry on Myrtle Beach tourism, "Creating the Perfect Mancation: Golf, Sex, and the Grand Strand, 1954–2010," which ranges from the sexual objectification of white women to white middle-class masculinity and segregated motorcycle culture without clearly connecting these various strands. Krystal Humphreys's chapter on Christian girl culture is a detailed look into reported experiences that offers little evidence for her claims about the positive influence of feminism. Riché Richardson's explication of Steve Harvey's stand-up comedy special Steve Harvey: Still Trippin' (2008) makes a good case for the continued salience of racist, sexualized representations of Africa, although one is left wondering if there is a regional argument to be made here. Other chapters, such as Abigail Parsons's work on Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987) and Trent Brown's essay on Larry Brown's Fay (2000), are tightly focused and self-contained snapshots of specific ways that sex and sexuality have been represented in southern popular culture. By far, and not surprisingly for a book on sex in the South, the volume's best chapters deal explicitly with representations and experiences of...