In this essay I will examine Fannie Flagg’s novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop from a queer perspective. Analyzing Flagg’s novel through close reading and discussing concepts such as stereotypes, heterocentricity and coded erasure will be the main focus of this essay.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2007. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Economics, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2007. / English Department. Includes bibliographical references.

The American South is a rich source of literature that combines the humorous and the horrific in its attempts to explain and expose the region's deep-seated social turmoil. One of the most prolific genres to come out of the South is southern gothic literature that, though not always humorous is known for its use of grotesque imagery and reliance on highly charged melodramatic narratives. When these works are comic, they don't merely reflect the region's strife but attempt to transform it. This dissertation looks at how southern gothic writers Beth Henley, Fannie Flagg and Flannery O'Connor use dark comedy in their works as defiant acts designed to question the status quo and reform the southern landscape by creating ruptures where marginalized people can assert themselves into the norms of American culture. Drawing on several different definitions of comedy, including Barecca's works on female narratives and linguistic theories of jokes, this work defines dark comedy and identifies where humor and horror come together in the works of these southern gothic writers to form particularly dark comic moments. Then, it uses Butler's theory of sites of rupture to explain how dark comedy can be transformative. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler explains Foucault's regime of truth as a system that is always both self-reflexive and social - a system where the norms that govern recognition create boundaries where subjects are formed. She goes on to conclude that ruptures can occur within the "horizon of normativity" whereby those relegated to the margins can gain entry and be encompassed within the governing norms. Dark comedy, then, occurs at or even creates that site of rupture in the individual and in the society that experiences it, and allows for the individual, and by extension society, to change its understanding of what is normal and resides within the margins. Within the text, then, dark comedy changes the governing norms to include the once marginalized oddities.

This thesis explores the psycho-socio-cultural dynamics that surrounded black womanhood in antebellumGeorgia. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how slave narratives, testimonies, and interviews depicted the plight of enslaved black women through a womanist lens and second, to discover what political and socio-cultural constructions enabled the severe slave institution that was endemic toGeorgia. Womanist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and trauma theory are addressed in this study to focus on antebellum or pre-Civil WarGeorgia.

This thesis compares how Lilian Ngoyi of South Africa and Fannie Lou Hamer of the United States crafted political identities and assumed powerful leadership, respectively, in struggles against racial oppression via the African National Congress and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The study asserts that Ngoyi and Hamer used alternative sources of personal power which arose from their location in the intersecting social categories of culture, gender and class. These categories challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries and complicate any analysis of political economy, state power relations and black liberation studies which minimize the contributions of women. Also, by analyzing resistance leadership squarely within both African and North American contexts, this thesis answers the call of scholar Patrick Manning for a “homeland and diaspora” model which positions Africa itself within the historiography of transnational academic debates.

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