ASA Annual Conference

Participation Type

Panel

Session Title

Mediating Masculinities: Deliverance, Wrong Turn, Buckwild

Session Abstract or Summary

This panel features three scholars of gender and Appalachia examining the social construction of masculinity and whiteness in media texts related to Appalachia. The first presenter considers a reality TV show in the theoretical context of necropolitics. The second presentation examines the banjo boy from the film Deliverance through a lens of disability studies. The third presentation applies reader response criticism to slasher films set in Appalachia. Thus the three presentations together provide a sampling of different methodological approaches to studying media portrayals of Appalachia and focus in particular on the issue of depicting racialized Appalachian manhood.

About the Presenter

Carol Mason, University of KentuckyFollow

Presentation #1 Title

Buckwild Mad Men: Masculinity and Necropolitics in Appalachia

Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary

This presentation examines masculinity in Buckwild, a cancelled reality TV show filmed in West Virginia, in order to explore the relevance of recent images of Appalachia and the cultural work they do in articulating current national anxieties. Those anxieties include class mobility, white privilege, and the dissolving boundaries between men and women, culture and nature, and life and death. I will compare the comic reality show, Buckwild, produced by MTV, with two episodic dramas, Downton Abbey and – especially -- Mad Men, to reveal parallel discourses among the three television programs. All three shows present precarious societies whose ways of life are portrayed as always already dying, a theme worth considering, I will conclude, in light of Rebecca Scott’s analysis of living in the midst of mountaintop removal and Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics.

At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1

Carol Mason is chair and professor of Gender and Women's Studies at University of Kentucky. Her books include Killing for Life (Cornell UP 2002), Reading Appalachia from Left to Right (Cornell UP 2009), and Oklahomo: Lessons in Unqueering America (SUNY Press, 2015).

Presentation #2 Title

Banjo Boy: Disability, Masculinity, and Difference in Deliverance

Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary

"Paddle faster," a popular bumper sticker warns, "I hear banjo music." The "dueling banjos" scene in John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance became an iconic moment in American movie history. In the film itself, the scene launches what will be an increasingly unsteady communion between four overcivilized urban outsiders and a series of increasingly dangerous mountain boys and men. The early "banjo boy" scene has musical echoes in the infamously terrorizing later scene of male-on-male rape. In this way, the "banjo boy" serves as a warning about the dangers of crossing America's cultural divides.To understand this phenomenon, my paper looks more deeply at the signal character of this pivotal scene, the "banjo boy" Lonnie. When Ned Beatty’s character Bobby first glances at Lonnie, he murmurs, “Talk about genetic deficiencies—isn’t that pitiful?” Described in the script as an "inbred ... half-wit" and in the novel as an "albino ... demented country kid," the character of Lonnie was played by Billy Redden, a 15-year-old rural Georgia actor who was neither disabled, nor albino, nor even a banjo player. Drawing together close readings of the "banjo boy" character in the script, the film, and the novel, alongside extensive recent interviews with the actor Billy Redden, this paper analyzes the potency of this iconic "hillbilly" character whose mythic musical prowess is in a tension with a manufactured freakishness and a racialized hyperwhite male otherness.

At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2

Anna Creadick is Associate Professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. Her monograph Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America was published by UMass Press in 2010.

Presentation #3 Title

Backwoods Slashers and the Politics of White Masculinity

Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary

Robin Wood, Carter Soles, and Linnie Blake argue that backwoods horror films pose stringent critiques of US nationalism, capitalism, and inequality, whereas Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich argue that films featuring the working class point to audience admiration for the white ethnic machismo resistance to the challenges of the black, women’s, and gay civil rights movements. By relying on evidence of audience reception posted to online forums, I demonstrate the presence of both politically reactionary and politically progressive uses of backwoods slasher films in the 21^st century. In contrast to scholarship that relies largely on close reading, however, I employ online reviews of recent backwoods slasher to argue that they appeal substantially to viewers who identify with the local villains over the city interlopers as part of a backlash against what they perceive as a decline in the economic and social power of regionalized white males.

At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3

Emily Satterwhite is Associate Professor of Pop Culture Studies at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 (UP of Kentucky, 2011), and is working on a second book project, Hillbilly Horror, which examines urbanoia and backwoods horror films using reception studies methodologies.