violent and dangerous outsiders. As Jim Goad notes in The Redneck
Manifesto, “As a fictional stereotype, the poor white originally entered
the national consciousness with a hillbilly clown puppet on one hand and
a redneck villain puppet on the other, a cultural foreigner with a limited
ability to achieve and a massive capacity to destroy. He walked a
tightrope between amusing the audience and murdering it” (86). Annalee
Newitz also notes the darker side of the poor white stereotype,
particularly in film, where “[...] the hillbilly figure designates a white
who is racially visible not just because he is poor, but also because he is
sometimes monstrously so” (134).
Regardless of any competing notions, the redneck is always cast
as something different, as a form of whiteness that refuses to conform to
accepted notions of whiteness as the established norm. The redneck may
be ridiculed, feared, hated, or even embraced, but it must be accounted
for. Far from signaling the invisibility that is so often assumed to
accompany whiteness, the idea of “redneck,” with all of its
accompanying accoutrements, steps forth imbued with a highly Othered
visibility, and as popular monikers like poor-white trash suggest, the
figure is most often viewed as extraneous, vile, worthless, something to
be discarded.
Duane Carr recognizes this phenomenon in A Question o f Class:
The Redneck Stereotype in Southern Fiction (1996). He surveys works
by writers from William Byrd in the 18* century to Cormac McCarthy in
the twentieth, concluding that Southern poor whites “have been most
often depicted as simple-minded, shiftless, lazy and violent - a
subspecies to be detested and ridiculed or, on rare occasions, felt sorry
for”(3).'^ More recently. Matt Wray considers the concept of “white
trash” in terms that emphasize the incongruity involved in viewing
whiteness and abjection together. For Wray, the concept of white trash
expresses “fundamental tensions and deep structural antinomies: between
the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality,
cleanliness and dirt” (2). He writes:
In conjoining such primal opposites into a single
category, white trash names a kind of disturbing
liminality: a monstrous, transgressive identity of
mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous
threshold state of being neither one nor the other. It
brings together into a single ontological category that
which must be kept apart in order to establish a
meaningful and stable symbolic order. (2)
Like Wray, I am interested in exploring the functional nature of such
identity projections and their importance in structuring a perceived