All Y’all: Queering Southernness in U.S. Fiction, 1980–2020

This dense debut study from Siegrist, director of the Sewanee Young Writers Conference, examines how fiction by Fannie Flagg, Randall Kenan, and others depicts queerness in the American South. Exploring the theme of “appetites” in Flagg’s 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, about a Depression-era lesbian couple who run an Alabama eatery, Siegrist contends that Flagg draws parallels between queer love and hunger for “decadent” Southern food as stigmatized desires. Siegrist argues that Kenan’s 1992 short story “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,” which chronicles how fugitives from slavery built the fictional town of Tims Creek “in the swampy wilderness,” regards the Southern swamp as a “symbol of deviance” and possibility, similar to how queerness serves as a “‘structuring antagonism’ of normative institutions and practices.” Elsewhere, Siegrist posits that George Saunders’s 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo “structures the ‘bardo’ as an implicitly southern and queer space, one affectively organized by melancholy and the backward glance,” and that Southern vampire fiction is “monstrously queer.” The academic prose can make it difficult to parse Siegrist’s nuanced analysis, but readers who stick it out will be rewarded. Siegrist gives literary scholars plenty to chew on. (Nov.)