Event Type
In this roundtable event, panelists will discuss the rendering of purity culture in the Southern Gothic style. The American South has a complicated relationship with women’s bodies as the centers of desire and fear, a theme that often appears in Southern Gothic poetry—and a theme that contemporary women poets twist and unravel to display the underbelly of what it means to define women in terms of abjection, repulsion, and distortion. Poets raised in the multifarious purity cultures of the South wrestle with claiming and queering their sexualities through lenses of race, gender, and class. The poets in this panel will consider questions such as: What does it look like to broach socially transgressive sexualities, such as queer desire, kink, polyamory, or infidelity in our poetry? How can we navigate the subject of spirituality when organized religion has been a sexually repressive, fraught space? How can the Southern Gothic style be an advantage towards exploring these themes? The moderator will provide a critical introduction to the Southern Gothic and thinking surrounding purity culture/s before panelists contextualize their work within the genre and read a selection of poetry. An audience Q&A will follow.