Over the Hills: Locating the Politics in Redneck Discourse
Abstract
This project offers a critique of popular redneck discourse in the United States from a perspective that draws from Marxism, cultural studies, and whiteness studies. Three individual studies are presented in order to map out the tenor of popular discourse: a content audit of major print media that use the term redneck, a textual analysis of print media that use the term redneck, and a textual analysis of entertainment media that construct and encourage identification with a redneck lifestyle. The redneck construct, it is argued, serves to mark the boundaries of normative whiteness and obfuscate white privilege. As a commodified identity, redneck not only functions to entrench the status quo in terms or racial privilege, but also in terms of class and consumer culture.
