Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 2014 | Page 18

14 Redneck, this long-repressed secret should convince you” (52). Foxworthy will reveal a story that places him at the center of one of the most consistent and negative cliches surrounding constmctions of the redneck as backward and depraved. “Believe me,” he writes, “I never thought it could happen to me. A long time ago, I was attracted to my cousin." Unlike bodily functions, which are to be withheld inward, sexual relations are supposed to be projected outward, beyond the self and the kin group. A cultural taboo that evokes disgust in mainstream culture, incest and inbreeding has long been one of the deepest and most penetrating stereotypes of poor whites, especially in the American South. And the topic has been a staple of Foxworthy’s redneck one-liners. When the subject relates to his own life, however, Foxworthy scrambles to explain and contextualize: We were only fourteen and we had spent the day at a family reunion. You know the routine: swim and hang out all day, and then eat limch off concrete picnic tables. Afterward, she and I took a walk and pretty soon we were kissing. I don’t know how it happened, but I do know my brain was screaming in my ear, “You idiot. You’re kissing your cousin!” Of course another part of me was also screaming: “Second cousin. C’mon, she’s almost a stranger! Haven’t seen her in six years!” (52) Within this humorous anecdote, Foxworthy dramatizes the psychomachia between two opposing voices, that of societal taboos and respect for decorous forms of sexual behavior and that of a baser form of desire that defies rules of sexual exogamy. So too does he dramatize the inherent slipperiness of identity, the fear that with one misstep one can lapse from the good kind of redneck into the wrong kind of redneck, for the balancing act is always a precarious one. Luckily, for Foxworthy, this intra-familial encounter does not come to full consummation. The guilty parties collect themselves and escape with a degree of their respectability intact: “We cooled down short of sin and went back to our families. We didn’t talk about what happened and have never discussed it since” (52). As Foxworthy’s confession illustrates, there are some behavioral traits that do not fit comfortably in his self-styled redneck persona, that require confession and absolution, that must be excised less one slip into that undesired Other. It is not only Foxworthy who feels this slipperiness. It is often present in his audience. Robert C. Hauhart notes this very phenomenon: Foxworthy, having steeped himself in a world of Dixie low-rent mannerisms, has emerged from the margins to