All Y'all

234 pp., 6.125 x 9.25

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8281-5
Published: November 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8280-8
Published: November 2024
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-8282-2
Published: November 2024

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Hardcover $99.00
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The South is often perceived as a haunted place in its region’s literature, one that is strange, deviant, or "queer." The peculiar, often sexually charged literary worlds of contemporary writers like Fannie Flagg, Monique Truong, and Randall Kenan speak to this connection between queerness and the South. Heidi Siegrist explores the boundaries of negotiating place and sexuality by using the concept of Southernness—a purposefully fluid idea of the South that extends beyond simple geography, eschewing familiar ideas of the Southern canon. When the connection between queerness and Southerness becomes apparent, Siegrist shows a Southern-branded queer deviance can not only change the way we think about literature but can also change Southern queer people’s lived experiences.

Siegrist gathers a bevy of undertheorized writers, from Kenan and Truong to Dorothy Allison and even George R. R. Martin, showing that there are many "queer Souths." Siegrist offers these multiverses as a way to appreciate a place that is often unfriendly, even deadly, to queer people. But as Siegrist argues, none of these Souths, from the terrestrial to the imaginary, would be what they are without the influence and power of queer literature.

About the Author

Heidi Siegrist is director of the Sewanee Young Writers Conference.
For more information about Heidi Siegrist, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

“All Y’all examines how fiction by Fannie Flagg, Randall Kenan, and others depicts queerness in the American South. . . . Siegrist’s nuanced analysis . . . gives literary scholars plenty to chew on.”—Publishers Weekly

"All Y’all is an exciting and robust study of queerness in the US South and Southern literature from 1980 to the present. Siegrist shows how this body of literature refuses to adhere to any single model of Southernness or queerness and instead presents a multiplicity that both indexes and negotiates the broader complexities of this period."—Michael P. Bibler, Louisiana State University

“This book opens up new ways to think about the intersection of queerness and Southernness without falling into the trap of essentialism or radical disavowals of the importance of tropes and contingencies. The texts the author analyzes are similarly nuanced, expanding the scope of both Southern and queer literature by including genres often excluded from literary histories and authors whose geographic locations extend beyond these boundaries.”—Jaime Harker, University of Mississippi