Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in a working-class family, and was the first in her family to graduate from high school. At Florida Presbyterian College, she became involved in the women’s movement and credits this political activism with her urge to become a writer. During the 1970s and early 1980s in New York City, where she had moved for graduate study in anthropology, Allison wrote for and edited feminist and gay and lesbian publications....

“What I Am Here for Is to Claim My Life”: Life-Writing and Reclaiming the Poor White Self

This chapters examines the work of several poor white life-writers, including Jeanette Walls, Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg and Barbara Robinette Moss. It raises questions about nostalgia, romanticization, and neo-agrarianism as it critically interrogates ideas of the southern community and regional foodways. Through new historicist and postcolonial lenses, it argues that these works often share a counter-historical approach as they seek to talk back against dominant misperceptions about lives shaped by poverty. As it considers representations of welfare and war, it turns to J.D. Vance’s bestselling Hillbilly Elegy to critically interrogate its neoliberal agenda and its place within the poor white sub-genre of life-writing.

Photo-Narratives and the Poor White Self since the FSA

After briefly outlining the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and writers during the Great Depression, the chapter turns to rephotography projects, namely that of Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, to explore the FSA’s legacy. The chapter interrogates the relationship and tension between aesthetics and activism as it examines several contemporary photo-narratives focused on Appalachia. In addition to critically discussing the work of Appalshop, it questions the representation of the poor in photo-narratives by, amongst others, Shelby Lee Adams, Tim Barnwell and Susan Lipper. The chapter focuses on questions of counter-visuality as it presents contemporary life-writing by writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Robinette Moss and Janisse Ray, as a vehicle for producing counter-visual legacies.

The Lesbian South

In this book, Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary renaissance in southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union of women’s liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature. With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space. Including in her study well-known authors—like Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker—as well as overlooked writers, publishers, and editors, Harker reconfigures the southern literary canon and the feminist canon, challenging histories of feminism and queer studies to include the south in a formative role.

L’écriture du trauma : une actualisation au féminin de la violence passée

Je verrai, dans cet article, de quelle manière l’actualisation du trauma passé, par le biais d’écritures au féminin, transgresse aussi bien l’interdit de raconter des agresseurs que le principe répétitif de la violence des hommes contre les femmes. À partir de la notion d’actualité, je réfléchirai aux enjeux d’une telle transgression, qui s’avère être à la fois risquée et jubilatoire. À cet effet, je convoquerai les œuvres de Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, Dorothy Allison et Chloé Delaume.

Down Home and Out

This chapter examines poetry and fiction of Southern lesbian writers using the lens of food. Drawing on the works of Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Doris Davenport, the author explores how Southern lesbian writers transform the obvious, making lesbian eroticism and desire manifest through the vehicle of Southern food. These and other Southern writers have not only been at the center of important debates about feminism and identity, but also have created a sense of unity and sociality through a love of food and region.

Dorothy Allison: Revising the “White Trash” Narrative

This chapter discusses the life and work of Dorothy Allison, who knows about growing up “white trash.” Born on April 11, 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison was “the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family.” Poverty forced Allison's family to leave South Carolina for central Florida in search of a better life. In 1983, Allison published a collection of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, followed by a short story collection, Trash, in 1988. In 1992, Allison published Bastard out of Carolina, a largely autobiographical novel about growing up in the Rough South. Allison's other works include chapters and a memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995). The term “white trash” and its prevalence demonstrate society's tolerance of stereotyping poor whites. Such stereotypes not only portray to outsiders a false image of the working class, but are reinforced within the working class itself. Allison writes to combat this myth and these prejudices.

Rough South, Rural South

This book describes and discusses the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. The book starts by distinguishing Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. Other chapters begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later chapters address members of both groups—the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners.