First Book Roundtable ~ "For a Spell: Sissie Collectivism & Radical Witchery in the Southeast"

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In this roundtable, panelists will extend various thematic threads posed by Jason Ezell's book For a Spell (UNC, 2025). The sissie collectivists featured in this history struggled to sustain gay liberation into the late 1970s, doing so in the face of a mounting New Right violence which they sometimes described with apocalyptic tenors. Panelists will draw upon their own work to engage the author, the audience, and each other around questions of how historical sissies improvised praxes of bodies, houses, spirit, and region in order to resist the terror spiking around them. The group will also consider the salience of that late 1970s moment, and its sissie tactics, to the current context, which is often framed as an extended or returned "New" Right.

The narrative of FOR A SPELL traces the proliferation of a set of 1970s gay liberationist households into a regional network synergized by the serial RFD and regular rural events. The book follows how the Ozarks' Mulberry House sparked New Orleans’ Louisiana Sissies in Struggle (LaSIS), which in turn helped to form Short Mountain Sanctuary in Appalachian Tennessee. Ezell argues that these sissies shaped the resulting network as an underground designed to resist the mounting New Right violence around them. The book adds to existing literature by placing historical LGBTQ+ radicalism in the rural South. It describes an early non-binary gender expression formed from intimacies with radical lesbian feminist practices like collectivism, consciousness-raising, separatism, and witchcraft. It also details these sissies’ struggle with the white supremacist, New Right geographies which galvanized and constrained them. In essence, these collectivists improvised a circulation system which would allow them to sustain their liberation movement through a harrowing time and place.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Emily Hobson, University of Nevada-Reno

Panelists

• Marquis Bey

• Jason Ezell, Cornell University

• Jaime Harker, University of Mississippi

• Abram J. Lewis

• Hooper Schultz, University of North Carolina at Chapel H

Comment

• Stathis G Yeros, University of New Mexico

Biographical Information

EMILY HOBSON (Chair)is an Associate Professor of History and Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR); she is also a past chair of UNR’s Department of Gender, Race, and Identity. She received her PhD and Master’s degree from the University of Southern California in American Studies and Ethnicity and her BA from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in History and Literature. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2025-26) and the National Humanities Center (2024-25) as well as the One Archives Foundation, Smith College, the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CUNY), the University of California Santa Barbara, and other sources. Emily is the author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016) and co-editor, with Dan Berger, of Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001 (2020). Articles from her current research, which examines the history of HIV/AIDS activism by, for, and with people incarcerated in the United States, have appeared in the Radical History Review, QED, Sinister Wisdom, The Abolitionist, and Truthout, among other venues. Emily serves the American Studies Association as a member of the National Council (2023-2025) and of the 2025 Program Committee.

MARQUIS BEY is Professor of Black Studies and English at Northwestern University, where they also affiliate with Gender & Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory. They earned their PhD in English from Cornell University, where they also received a graduate certificate in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Humanities New York, Bey is the author of multiple books, most notably The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Black Trans Feminism, and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (both Duke University Press, 2022). Their work has appeared in journals such as Social Text, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and The Black Scholar, and they co-edited a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on queerness and abolition. Currently, they are working on an autotheory collection of essays exploring nonbinary life.

JASON EZELL is an Associate Librarian and the Head of Learning & Engagement at Miami University (OH) Libraries. They received a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park; an MS in Information Science from the University of Tennessee; a masters degree in English from the University of Virginia; and a bachelor’s, also in English, from Maryville College. His research interests focus, broadly, on both U.S. LGBTQ+ history and library instruction–sometimes on their intersections. Their first book is For a Spell: Sissie Collectivism and Radical Witchery in the Southeast (University of North Carolina, 2025). He has also published peer-reviewed articles in The Journal of Academic Librarianship; The Radical History Review; The Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery, and Electronic Reserves; and The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies. A recipient of the New York Public Library’s Martin Duberman Visiting Scholarship, of an ALA Assessment in Action Grant, of a Mary Lily Research Grant to Duke’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture, and of Loyola University New Orleans’ Marquette Faculty Research Grant, Ezell combines his two main scholarly interests, teaching research through LGBTQ+ Studies.

JAIME HARKER is professor of English and the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches American literature, LGBTQ literature, and gender studies. She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars; Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America; and The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. She is the co-editor of The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club; 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage; This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics; and Faulkner and Print Culture.
She is also the founder of Violet Valley Bookstore, a queer feminist bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi.

ABRAM J. LEWIS is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at Williams College and holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. Lewis's writing has appeared in Radical History Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, The American Historian, and anthologies Trap Door: Trans Cultural Representation and the Politics of Visibility and Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. Lewis is also a founder and coordinator of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, and a candidate in psychoanalytic training at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy in NYC.

HOOPER SCHULTZ is an oral historian and PhD candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his MA in Southern Studies and MFA in Documentary Expressions at the University of Mississippi, and his bachelor’s degree in English from UNC-Chapel Hill. His research interests include the queer South, gay liberation and lesbian-feminism, student activism, and queer oral history. His dissertation research focuses on the history of gay liberation era activism in college towns and on university campuses in the U.S. South. He was a founding member of the Queer Mississippi Oral History Project, and is a past instructor of the Southern Oral History Program undergraduate internship at the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC, where he also led the Story of Us, an LGBTQ oral history of the University of North Carolina. He is a current community board member and the lead oral historian of the Durham 1986 Project, a public history effort with the Museum of Durham History supported by a North Carolina Humanities grant that recounts the history of lesbian and gay organizing in Durham centered in the 1980s. The past recipient of fellowships from the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama, Wilson Library and the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Invisible Histories Project, he most recently was invited to participate in the UNC-King’s College London Transatlantic Approaches Graduate Workshop. He recently co-edited the “Queer South” issue of Southern Cultures (2025), a peer-reviewed quarterly of the history and cultures of the U.S. South. Schultz’s essay, “‘Watching the Ferns Uncurl’: Minnie Bruce Pratt and the Building of a Lesbian-Feminist Community in North Carolina” is forthcoming in the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

STATHIS G. YEROS (Commentator)is a 2024-2025 Mellon Fellow in the Democracy and Landscape Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and incoming Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of New Mexico. He received his doctorate from the University of California Berkeley in Architecture (History, Theory and Society), a Master of Architecture from Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Glasgow (UK) in Art History and Theater Studies. He has published a monograph, Queering Urbanism: Insurgent Spaces in the Fight for Justice (University of California Press, 2024), which was supported with a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. His work has appeared in The Journal of Urban History, Architectural Theory Review, The Western Historical Quarterly, and in edited volumes. He is working on his second monograph, tentatively titled Building the Queer South, supported with a grant from the Society of Architectural Historians.