But, she like me is what AVI calls "Mountain Tribe," and if you were born in the Mountain Tribe but want to join the City Tribe, you have to prove your loyalty.
I needed to question Dolly Parton’s meaning in my and our lives.Do half as much good as she has done, and then get back to me with your criticisms of her. But they'd better be stronger criticisms than this. I don't much love Pigeon Forge just because it's so fake; but what I do love are the real things the fakery symbolizes.
I needed to confront Dolly Parton’s blinding, dazzling whiteness....
Her Appalachia is pure and white and heroic; her Appalachia is drained of white America’s sins....
She’s embraced by feminists and queer folks at the same time she is declared a queen by Confederate apologists. Dolly-as-mountain-girl anchors her to an ancestral white home in the imaginations of white people, while her class-conscious and gender-transgressive performance of whiteness becomes a signifier for white progressives who embrace gender fluidity and working-class iconolatry. She exhibits worldliness at the same she cloaks herself in the symbols of white nationalism.
Dolly Parton has built her empire on and with the debris of old, racist amusements and wrapped it in working-class signifiers and feminist politics. I ignored that fact for a long time because it didn’t fit the script of the feminist, working-class heroine I had conjured. But I also ignored how others’ attachment to Dolly is exactly because of her embrace of Dixie and her complex celebration of whiteness. And I have ignored how whiteness clings....
Dolly Parton’s mythical story-songs of a mountain childhood and her witty and glitzy hillbilly performance were the secret ingredient to Dollywood’s success and expansion — an expansion that requires the ecological demise of the mountains, that gobbles up tons of water, land, and bodies in order to simulate a white Appalachian past of real hillbillies that Americans love.... Does Dollywood and Dolly Parton herself rejuvenate whiteness, fueling it so that it rises up again and again in its Dixie-forms and in its Appalachia-(Scots-Irish-Anglo-Saxon-mountaineer)-forms?
Parton is for real.
Who cares what she does? All that's important is what she suffered, and at whose hands.
ReplyDeleteI worked for a short while with an accountant who had had business dealings with Dolly Parton. She had nothing but good things to say about Dolly.
ReplyDeleteDecades ago I saw an interview of Dolly Parton where she said that from childhood she wanted to be a big star. None of this "Aw, shucks..lil' ol' me" from Dolly regarding her subsequent fame. She wanted the brass ring, and got it.
If what Dolly has done doesn't quite fit the prog narrative of the day, more power to Dolly.
Pseudointellectual striving to write something from a fresh point of view. The sound of axes grinding doesn't quite fit with the subject matter.
ReplyDeleteValerie
Do half as much good as she has done, and then get back to me with your criticisms of her.
ReplyDeleteNo, I don't have to do that. It's enough that I show my bona fides by criticising her.
Porch dogs rule.
Eric Hines
That was the most racist thing I've read this week. Disgusting.
ReplyDeleteYeah, you've got to work hard to pile up that much grievance at something so undeserving of it.
ReplyDeleteProbably the only 'hard work' she's ever done (moving irrigation lines at her grandfather's 'farm' not withstanding).
Aside, that's supposed to be a 43 minute read? Half an hour- tops, even with interruptions.
The writer considers her feelings to be the center of the universe. I wrote a lot of that sort of stuff myself when I was 23.
ReplyDelete