Twentieth-Century White Southern Lesbian Writers & Anti-Racist Praxis
Abstract
This dissertation frames Lillian Smith (1897-1966), Rita Mae Brown (1944-), Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-), Mab Segrest (1949-), and Dorothy Allison (1949-) as a distinct political tradition whose concern with how people are trained to inhabit and (re)produce whiteness radically departs from anti-racist political thought and activism among white southern women of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter reads archival materials alongside of memoirs, speeches, and political essays to explicate forms of anti-racist praxis and theorizations of white racialized genders and sexualities. These forms of anti-racist praxis are, I suggest, methods by which white people can perform psychological healing that—as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others have called for—is one necessary step in abolishing a white supremacist and anti-Black world.