The following is an article I've recently been working on. I'm still trying to sort out what I am trying to say, and the more I think about some of these issues of reflexivity and the researcher-self, the more complicated/messy things seem to be . . . 

I was born and raised in the South. I grew up deep inside the foothills of the Appalachian mountains in the small town of Cosby, Tennessee. Cosby is situated between Asheville, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee—abutting the northeastern border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For most East Tennesseans, Cosby is best known as the town that served as a crossroads for moonshine bootleggers traversing the winding back roads through to North Carolina during the prohibition era. The remoteness of the town, and the topographic bottleneck created by Mount Camerer and English Mountain, made Cosby the ideal place for inconspicuous passage to the west (and back) for North Carolinian moonshiners (Higgs, Manning, & Miller, 1995; Salstrom, 1996).[i]

Today, Cosby is situated in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the South. Cosby’s commercial modalities have historically revolved around a modest agricultural economy and augmented by an unstable manufacturing sector (Whisnant, 1995). However, during the Industrial Revolution (and post-industrialization thereafter), the geographic remoteness of Cosby and surrounding townships isolated the region from the modernizing American industrial economy (Salstrom, 1996). And a result, today a vast majority of townspeople draw their employ in a panoply of part-time, low-wage, unskilled, no-benefit ‘McJobs’ on offer in neighboring Sevier County (Ritzer, 1998, 2004); home of the oft-visited mega-touristscapes known as Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Sevierville.

Confessions of My Old Self: A Redneck Testimonio

Like my peers—and as a child who grew up on the down-side of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics—I came to understand my own subsistence existence within Cosby’s post-industrial ‘hillbilly’ class as a extension of the natural ‘order of things.’ The story I learned to tell myself about myself went something like this: as a daughter of an egalitarian America, my mother made a series of poor choices in her late adolescent years, and I was born to bear the burden of her ‘misguided’ agency. In spite of the fact that my mother worked two jobs—and eventually married my dad who contributed through the part-time, low-wage construction work he could sporadically secure—my brother and I were made to believe we were the proverbial ‘drain on the system’; children of parents who sometimes relied on welfare, food stamps, and government aid to subsidize an annual household earnings regime that never eclipsed the $20,000 threshold.

Framed by the discursive throws of the Reagan-Bush I [neo-]conservative meritocracy, we were the countercurrent to a resurgent free-market American ethos. We were, as the ‘skin of my yellow country teeth’ constantly reminds me, the embodiments of contemporaneous Appalachian poverty. Throughout my youth, I spent many a winter’s nights endeavoring to bathe myself by siphoning hot water from our kitchen sink and into an animal feeding trough located in the front yard of our mountainside homestead. As a single-car family, my dad, brother, and I made nightly 20-mile midnight pilgrimages to pick-up mom from her job as a waitress in Gatlinburg. Thinking back, I am reminded of how my adolescent social life was stifled by the absence of telephone service in our home; a condition that was further complicated by an intermittent awareness of the American popular due to long periods where our household was without television. While other kids were mesmerized by the consumer cultures of Air Jordan, I was as a 12-year old preoccupied with fitting into the hand-me-down basketball shoes my friends had used the season prior. In short, it can be said that in the 1980s and early 1990s America, our upbringing wreaked of Appalachian poverty.

Over time, my peers and extended family alike taught me to loath my parents for failing to acculturate into the region’s systems of scarce capital. Furthermore, I learned to frame those failings in the epistemes and rhetoric of a pastoral evangelical ascetic: generations before us had realized their place within the South’s iniquitous cultural economy by subjecting their bodies to systems of accumulation, subjecting their everyday experience to the hierarchical thrust of a nation’s manifest destiny, and subjecting their faith to an unwavering faith in God’s plan for true believers. We were, after all, Americans.

More importantly, we were young white men of the South. With Reagan’s early brand of neoliberalism as ideological backdrop, our failing post-industrial identities became contested and negotiated around the subjectification of power and suffering. Like folks in many Southern towns, those of us who grew up in Cosby learned to mobilize a vicious mélange of racism, patriarchy, and fundamentalism in rescuing our collective sense of self in an otherwise subordinated everyday experience. From the outset, we were students to a compulsory, compensatory pedagogy of exclusivity. For Cosby was—and not by accident—an exclusively white town. Local lynch-mob vigilantes and Jim Crow separatists had nurtured, and continue to produce, a culture of white terrorism meant to ensure that my hometown remains, as it is commonly referred to, ‘nigger-free.’

Further, as anyone who has spent an evening at the Three-Way Inn (the town’s only bar in an otherwise ‘dry county’) or the neighboring Newport Speedway racetrack can attest, Cosby is a place where ‘men can be men.’ Paradoxically, it was my experience growing up that those Appalachian patriarchs who spent Saturday night at the Three Way Inn were the first to perfunctorily fill the pews of the area’s multitude of Evangelical churches the following Sunday morning. It was also my experience that the church, perhaps more than any social institution, actively nurtured pedagogies of oppression within the community. As a child, it was not uncommon for me to find myself sitting pulpit-side to a Sunday morning sermon, listening to [white, masculine] pastors evoke a common ‘end-times’ pedagogy for the purposes of proselytizing indoctrination; or to lambaste what they frequently referred to as ‘the disease of miscegenation’; or to draw out a protracted campaign against ‘the threat of homosexuality.’ Looking back, I can see now how incessant promotion of these cultures of intolerance (and ‘tolerance’) made for good spiritual and cultural enterprise—casting dispersions upon the ‘Other’ and congealing solidarity for the visible center, and thus extracting social power over the [mythologized] ‘Other’ in an otherwise disenfranchising late capitalist condition.[ii]

Moreover, and despite my parents’ best efforts, my adolescent tongue reflected this vile ethnocentric communitas. It was my experience growing up that slurs such as “nigger,” “bitch,” “faggot,” and so on were commonly deployed in communal exercises of linguistic and symbolic violence. Such vernacularism was not simply a slippage back to an “Old South” lexicon, but rather a contrived mobilization of a narrative borne of, and reinforcing, dominant notions of difference and a sense of superiority amongst local hetero-masculine whites. Through this bucolic, heteronormative racism, my milieu and I were able to locate our sense of self in relation to the demonized and mythologized ‘Other.’ Building upon the Sartrean (1992) term ‘project’ (projet) and the Heideggerian (1962) notion of ‘throwness,’ I draw upon the work of French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to explain how the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are produced in such powerfully diametric ways:

It’s not for the other that each transcends oneself; one writes books . . . invents machines . . . craved nowhere; nor is it for the self (pour soi) because the “self” (soi) exists only through the same project which throws one into the world . . . we need the other so that our existence becomes established and necessary. . . . My acts, my works, my life: it’s only by these objects that I . . . can communicate with (and through) the other. (qtd. in Fullbrook & Fullbrook, 1994, pp. 96-97)

It is important to note the ways in which de Beauvoir articulates Sartre’s (1992) double notion of the self: both as an ‘objective’ and objected being (soi) ‘thrown into the world’ and as a being that is aware of itself (pour soi). Thus, my own self-location—limited by the economic and cultural frames into which I was ‘thrown’—constricted the pluralistic potentiality of my pour soi; and equally so of the imaginary ‘Other’ against which my sense of self was framed.

And yet as I matured, and availed myself to new and diverse structures of language, ideology, and identity, the more I came to realize how my ‘objective’ and objected being was produced by parochial structures of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. I came to realize, having yet to formulate a deeply Marxist sensibility, that while I had been free to make my own history, I had not done so under conditions of my own choosing.

During my teenage years—as I matriculated through the East Tennessee educational system—I became increasingly aware of the structural forces acting upon my changing sense of ‘self.’ And as such, my discontent with the race-, class-, and gender-based politics of the local festered. As an example of my uneasiness with the ethnocentrism of my home place, and, yet my inability to acknowledge how those same forces shaped by own worldview, I offer the following poem which was written half a lifetime ago:

The Rune Ruin of Two Lives

Black man . . .

struggled through life, trying to survive

no chance to be normal, have a house, a wife

painful to live, it was all that he could do

destruction and bloodshed were all that he knew

White man . . .

family name, labeled the best

admired and loved, some said he was blessed

gracing his peers with all of his knowledge

valedictorian—high school and college

Black man . . .

nothing to live for, world of hell

deaths of friends and stories to tell

alcohol and drugs, world of illusions

no meaning to life, just basic confusion

White man . . .

expectations of greatness, family pride

the world his oyster, feelings aside

he knew his worth, as did others

qualities to uphold, Oh! . . .how they smother

a bullet shot here, a bullet shot there

two lives taken in the midnight air

expectations fulfilled, expectations ceased

both men free at last . . . to rest in peace

I offer this poem not as an example of any sort of enlightenment toward ‘diversity’ that I might have experienced during my formative years, but rather as an insight to my heightened structuralist sensibilities at the time (as constrained by my impressions of ‘different’ ethnic experiences). Up to that point, I had never attended school with anyone from a ‘racial category’ outside my own. While I was aware of the problematic treatment of the racialized ‘Other’ through local racist discourse, my portrait of the “black man” in this poem is nothing more than an erudite simulacrum founded on interpretations of popular mediated representations of African-Americans.

Upon reflection, I suppose that if the author is written into those verses, then my own sense of self was somewhere between the two men, wrestling with the structural impetuses of meritocratic whiteness and the struggles to maintain livelihood in the face of a working class upbringing.[iii] Despite an ill-informed sense of history, I went on to employ various forms of poesis in re-imagining the Jewish experience in Nazi Germany and the religious persecution of peoples of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, there was still a discernable prejudicial bent to my interpretive voice; one I have been struggling to eliminate ever since.