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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