How to Love Your Local Homophobe: Southern hospitality and the unremarkable queerness of Truman Capote's 'The Thanksgiving Visitor'

Bibler, Michael (2012) How to Love Your Local Homophobe: Southern hospitality and the unremarkable queerness of Truman Capote's 'The Thanksgiving Visitor'. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 58 (2). pp. 284-307. ISSN 0026-7724

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

This essay shows how Truman Capote's story about homophobic bullying opens rich avenues for reconsidering the structures of queerness and normativity. Instead of presenting queerness as an antirelational force opposed to sociality, Capote renders it as something unremarkable, even perversely mundane, deflecting attention away from questions of identity to more urgent concerns of ethics and justice. Writing against the homonormative militancy of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, Capote strategically redeploys the notion of southern hospitality to rearrange both regional and national normativities and reaffirm the queer's open inclusion within society.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	Q300 English studies T700 American studies
Department:	Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Depositing User:	Michael Bibler
Date Deposited:	10 Dec 2012 14:49
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 19:24
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/10660

Downloads