Date of Award
8-16-2024
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
Tara Powell
Abstract
When the Agrarians set out to assert their definition of southern in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), they planted roots deep in the ground of the south that slowly wrapped its tendrils around its descendants. In the years that have followed, southern women have had to push back against these limiting boundaries. Their individual stories are linked by the communal lineage of the south, specifically the binary of domestic and wild. Traditionally, southern women have had to stay in the boundaries of the home, cultivating domesticity, ordering the space, and warming the hearth. The land itself, posed as opposite from home, is feminine, as in it is something for men to toil and conquer. In response to these harmful norms, this project asks: what happens when women collapse these boundaries in order to restore a new image of southern femininity? In Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (1999), she explores what it means to belong to home different from one’s expectations and to dwell in natural landscape being infringed upon—one that “owns her body.” Ultimately, Ray collapses boundaries domestic and wild and establishes three tendrils: those who order in the wilderness, those who order within the home, and those who order through storytelling and form. These tendrils become the thread through which the quilt of southern femininity is restitched. This eco-domestic southern project traces Ray’s work and then examines nine of her contemporaries and inheritors from 1997–2019 to explore the ways they collapse and stitch, both as individuals and as a community of southern women. Ultimately, by looking at the memoirs, novels, poetry, and graphic novels from southern women who collapse boundaries of limiting southern identity, I will establish a framework through which a truer crafting of southern femininity is possible. Ultimately, I argue that, as women, we can use homemaking not just in the domestic space but in the ordering of wild and of story to perform excavation of our own histories and locate place within our present bodies.
Rights
© 2024, Christina Xan
Recommended Citation
Xan, C.(2024). Eco-Domestic Femininity: The Collapse of Domestic and Wild in Southern Women’s Writing. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/7755