Abstracts of Papers
"White Trash", an epithet claiming descriptive qualities, immediately calls to mind images of somewhat nightmarish Americana: trailer parks, blatant racism, sex among cousins. Two major threads structure these representations. In recent movies such as "Kalifornia", White Trash characters have functioned as inherently amoral and scary counterparts to sophisticated urban liberals. On the other hand, there is something like White Trash glamour in which the "trashy" position is taken up and resignified as a space for staging cultural practice, such as in John Waters' "Pink Flamingoes". Even on Berlin's somewhat more Siberian than Middle American thoroughfare Torstrasse, a semisecret restaurant named "White Trash Fast Food" now caters greasy Dixie specialties to slumming bohemians. It seems as if the recent cultural currency of "White Trash" is made possible by the spread of ironic identification in the 1980s and 90s. However, looking at the last 150 years of American cultural history, we find under the label of "White Trash" some surprising continuities in images of hillbilly clans, their supposed genetic and moral "degeneration", exemplified among other things by their undomesticated bodies and sexuality. Situated at the crossroads of racial privilege and culturally coded class humiliation, "White Trash" has continued to present epistemic challenges to discursive systems conflating race, class, cultural value and status. Around the turn of the century, inner colonization and eugenics were some attempts to get rid of the irritation presented by this "white anglo-saxon" group that seemingly showed all the negative attributes the "superior white race" was supposed to lack. As this paper argues, the cultural figure of "White Trash" then shifted from being an unambiguously derogatory label to being a much more ambivalent signifier, but it has not lost the resonance of discrimination. The paper will ask about continuity and discontinuity in the White Trash image and it will address some of the following questions: if there is more to "whiteness" than a pale shade of skin, if "whiteness" is a complex cultural construct based on visibility as a result of institutionalized racial privilege, then does this "White Trash" really fulfill the standards of normative whiteness? Is "White Trash" really "white"? What does the answer to this question tell us about representations of an underclass, and what might it tell us about the flaws of whiteness studies and contemporary academic discussions of identity politics? At the same time, we would like to comment on films like "Deliverance" and musicians like Eminem in order to investigate some of the discontents in American Culture that seem to build the base for fantasies of "social pollution".
This presentation will consist of several short papers by students participating in the two-semester independent study project "The Whiteness of White Trash" at the American Studies department.
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