A Dirty South Manifesto

"In this brilliant, imaginative, and defiant manifesto, Stallings entices the reader into reimagining and rereading the South, specifically the Dirty South. Leaning in on southern hip-hop, Millie Jackson, and other forms of (deviant) southern culture, Stallings makes legible the multiple sites and literacies of sexual politics and resistance found throughout the new South. However, her path to freedom is not limited to public protest, social movements, and electoral politics; it also includes the underground, where strategies of decolonization and magic allow nonnormative joy, intimacy, and sexual pleasure to flourish. Stallings’s unflinching and creative look at the Dirty South challenges our current understandings of moral authority while unveiling a new vision of liberation and freedom."—Cathy J. Cohen, author of Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?

"Always at the vanguard of critical work in sexuality studies, Stallings has produced one of the most important manifestos about queerness and southern-ness, about family and empire. For those familiar with and unsettled by the parameters set forth in Patsy Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire (2000), this manifesto is a necessary intervention. Stallings takes us where we need to go and returns to us our whole southern selves, arguing for renewed attention to the region and its cultural producers and products, and for a whole-scale dismissal of 'settler sexuality' that chokes the lifeblood out of this place we call home and the people we embrace who survive within it. What better place to home in on how to deal with white supremacy’s creep in these United States than the place in the nation where such ideologies flourish in a particular way? In these pages, life is indeed messy and sexy too, but along the way Stallings gives us back our lexicon and its theory to sustain us through what has arrived and is surely, also, yet to come."—Sharon P. Holland, author of The Erotic Life of Racism

"An exceptional and imperative queer feminist analysis of morality and Black sexual politics in the south. Stallings draws from the belowground of Dirty South archives to declare lessons for Black sexual freedom and resistance manifested in fearless illicit literacies cultivated through sensual temporalities, sonic seductions, and sacred energies."—Deborah R. Vargas, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University

“Stallings has a gift of cutting to the chase without sacrificing context or argument. This impressive book holds a mountain of history and insight into the deeply vexing region that is the South—neither vilifying it nor shying away from its warts. I can’t wait to teach it.”—E. Patrick Johnson, author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

"Imploring each of us to become ‘a connoisseur of dirt,’ Stallings launches a call to arms on behalf of scholar-activists invested in contemporary queer studies of the U.S. South. A stellar contribution to the American Studies Now series."—Scott Herring, author of The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture