Featured // Vol. 30, No. 3
Captive Maternal
essay by Kennedi Carter
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Essay
State Visions
North Carolina Regional Planning in Richard Saul Wurman’s The Piedmont Crescent (1968)
by Martin JohnsonBy almost any account, North Carolina has undergone dramatic changes in the past half-century. What was once a slow-growing, largely rural state is now a fast-growing, increasingly urban one. While the state used to be known for textiles and tobacco, it is now a center for banking, technology, and medicine. This transformation was not accidental. »
Memoir
White Trash Roots
by Linda R. MonkI come from a long line of people whose lives seemed straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Landless whites, rootless, disposable—“white trash.” It’s hard to create home from contingency, or a feeling of belonging from worthlessness. They say southerners are people defined by place, but I never believed it. At least it wasn’t true »
Dedication
Dorothy Allison and Minnie Bruce Pratt
by Hooper Schultz, Jaime HarkerWith deepest gratitude, we dedicate this issue of Southern Cultures to Dorothy Allison (April 11, 1949–November 6, 2024) and Minnie Bruce Pratt (September 12, 1946–July 2, 2023), two paragons of the queer South. Lesbian artist-activists, Allison and Pratt showed us the power of queers in the region. They questioned power structures, racism, and patriarchy, and fought for »
Art
Beneath the Steely Façade
by RF. AlvarezOn the cover and throughout the issue, we’re pleased to present artwork by Austin-based artist RF. Alvarez (b. 1998, San Antonio, Texas). His figurative paintings are characterized by nocturnal color pallets and evocative scenes that blend personal memory with romantic allegory. Using a process of dry-brushing paint onto raw linen—and borrowing stylistic techniques from Old »
Essay
This Is Just the Beginning
Mapping Queer Southern Scholarship
by Hooper Schultz, Jaime HarkerIn 2017, I was knee-deep in queer southern literature. Unbeknownst to my colleagues and students at the University of Mississippi, I was building a stock list for Violet Valley Bookstore, Mississippi’s only queer feminist bookshop, which I planned to open in November of that year. I was teaching a syllabus I’d developed for a graduate »
Poetry
Something Trans-Happened to My Body When I Crossed the Atlantic
by Honora AnkongI seeped out of a middle-passage wound, a continental Africandescendent of the un-took. Immigrant,in search of lost lineage. I dove into the AtlanticIts unending Blackness—turbulent & queer.
Poetry
Reaching out and reaching out
by Gaby Calvocoressi, Destiny Hemphill“That’s some part of Queerness, isn’t it? Reaching out and reaching out and wondering about and learning from each other.” Yesterday, Sunday, February 7, I was working at a coworking spot here in Durham. My wonderful friends and colleagues at my teaching job got me a subscription to this place for my fiftieth because my »
Essay
God Loves Women, and I Do Too
The Spiritual Communities of Southern Black Queer Women and Nonbinary Folks
by Montia Daniels“Having spaces where Black queer people feel affirmed and safe is essential, and some participants decided to leave their church when they didn’t feel safe and affirmed in them.” My story of queer becoming was a communal affair. After the fallout from coming out, the tears, and the imagined casting out of my queerness, there »
Memoir
Sister, Outsider, or Reflections on My Mother
by Joanmarie BañezDuring my first Thanksgiving away from home since I had moved to San Diego for graduate school, my mother, Lita, called me after she and my stepdad, Mike, returned home from the family Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner was hosted by Annie and Steve, my pseudoparents, and it turned out that year, 2019, was one of »
Memoir
Seeing the Invisible
Asexuality in the South
by Ellie Campbell“I don’t want the only option for committed relationships to be reserved for a two-person sexual and romantic partnership . . . I want to belong to a community that embraces more options.” One evening in March 2024, I attended a cabaret fundraiser presented by the Common Woman Chorus, a Durham, North Carolina LBGTQ+ choir, and hosted by »
Interview
The Queering of Atlanta
A Roundtable Conversation
by Eric Solomon, Joshua Jacobs“I realized that what fascinated me went beyond the historic record to the lifelines—indeed, the life stories of those who made and continue to make queer Atlanta.” I moved to Atlanta from Mississippi in July of 2011 to attend graduate school. In the fall of 2018, I began to teach at nearby Oxford College. My »
Essay
Lesbian Feminism, Grand Juries, and FBI Surveillance in the 1970s
by Rachel Gelfand“She saw seven men in suits and her roommate, who mouthed, “It’s the F-B-I.” In 1973, Vicki Gabriner lived in an Atlanta lesbian collective house at the corner of Euclid Terrace and Euclid Avenue. The house in Little Five Points had an ornate glass window on the front door and was one of a handful of neighborhood »
