“I Was Born on the Wrong Planet”: Flights of Fancy, Gone With the Wind, and Other Gay Narratives of the South

• In Event: Landscapes of Curriculum: Intersections of Place, Sexuality, and Interdisciplinarity in Curriculum Studies

Abstract

There is much conflict of opinion in literary and sociological circles, as well as in popular culture of both North and South, as to what constitutes the "South." A few limit the South to a geographical division of the United States -- one part of the tapestry that forms the American experience. Others, like the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s at Vanderbilt University, insist that a social cohesion and cultural homogeneity separate the South from the rest of the United States. They would conclude, along with Carl Carmen when speaking of Alabama, that "the Congo is not more different from Massachusetts or Kansas or California" (quoted in Cash, 1941, vii).

The uniqueness of the South, whether geographical, social, cultural, or psychological, does not demand uniformity. On the one hand, there are many Souths as demonstrated by the variety of landscapes: mountains, swamps, and rivers; tobacco, peach, rice, cotton, citrus, and sugar cane crops; high, dry, wind-swept plains, rolling hills, barrier islands, primitive mountain forests, and jungle-like marshes. Gerster and Cords (1989) have commented that it should be no surprise that such a varied environment yields profound social and political dissimilarities to match.

However, there is also one South, roughly delimited by the boundaries of the former Confederate States of America and some border states, notably Kentucky, that courses throughout the region. Cash (1941) describes it as "a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern -- a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values, and association of ideas, which, if it is not common strictly to every group of white people in the South, it is still common in one appreciable measure or another, and in some part or another, to all but relatively negotiable ones" (p. viii).

Contemporary curriculum literature displays a commitment to queering educational spaces so that there will be inclusion, agency, self-reflection, sustainability, understanding, and democracy. Postmodern authors and post-reconceptualization curriculum theorists do not advocate for schools and societies void of ethics and values. Rather, we work for profound commitments to democracy and freedom. The present moment in curriculum studies is certainly contested and fragmented, but this does not diminish the tremendous commitment to justice inherent in our work. The shifting space of Southern narratives and postmodern curriculum literature offers the possibility of creating a productive disequilibrium that will bring understanding – and perhaps even mutual acceptance and compassionate engagement – to the bifurcated forces in the South, as well as schools and society in general. Perhaps, in time, those at the margins will no longer feel that they were “born on the wrong planet,” and be able to more fully embrace the cultural and social context of their lives.

Author

• Patrick Slattery, Texas A&M University