In 2004 Gretchen Wilson exploded onto the country music scene with 'Redneck Woman.' The blockbuster single led to the early release of her first CD and propelled it to triple platinum sales." Gretchen Wilson celebrates a new kind Virile Woman on the country music scene—but this subtle gender analysis reveals much more than immediately meets the eye. This article appears in the 2011 Music issue of Southern Cultures. Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklore, sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and geography, among many others. Covering issues of historiography and practice as well as the ways in which the genre interacts with media and social concerns such as class, gender, and sexuality, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music interrogates prevailing narratives, explores significant lacunae in the current literature, and provides guidance for future research. More than simply treating issues that have emerged within this subfield, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music works to connect to broader discourses within the various fields that inform country music studies in an effort to strengthen the area's interdisciplinarity. Drawing upon the expertise of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook presents an introduction into the historiographical narratives and methodological issues that have emerged in country music studies' first half-century.

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase "I’ll listen to anything but country" allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive "omnivore" musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

This book examines the multiple ways that popular media mainstream and reinforce neoliberal ideology, exposing how they promote neoliberalism’s underlying ideas, values and beliefs so as to naturalize inequality, undercut democracy and contribute to the collapse of social notions of community and the common good. Covering a wide range of media and genres, and adopting a variety of qualitative textual methodologies and theoretical frameworks, the chapters examine diverse topics, from news coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the NBC show Superstore (an atypical instance in which a TV show, for one brief season, challenged the central tenets of neoliberalism) to "kitchen porn." The book also takes an intersectional approach, as contributors explore how gender, race, class and other aspects of social identity are inextricably tied to each other within media representation. At once innovative and distinctive in its illustration of how the media is complicit in perpetuating neoliberal ideology, Neoliberalism and the Media offers students and scholars alike an incisive portrait of the intersection between media and ideology today.

The Music Issue enhanced eBook include all the tracks on our special CD and: The tell-all letter from a teenage girl who kissed—and kissed—Elvis Presley How corruption and greed made the Jacksonville music scene Gretchen Wilson, country music's "Redneck Woman" The invaluable social spaces of African American record stores Bobby Rush, "bluesman-plus" Where Opryland resides in hearts, minds, and souls Backstage with the Avett Brothers, Doc Watson, Tift Merritt, Southern Culture on the Skids, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Johnny Cash, and more great artists. This enhanced eBook also contains Loving, Leaving, Liquor, and the Lord, which is packed with tracks from the Avett Brothers, Doc and Merle Watson, Archers of Loaf, and many more amazing Southern musicians--old and new. Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

Talking White Trash documents the complex and interwoven relationship between mediated representations and lived experiences of white working-class people—a task inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in a white working-class family and neighborhood and how she came to understand herself through watching films and television shows. The increasing presence of white working-class people in media, particularly within the genre of reality television, and their role in fueling the unprecedented rise of Donald Trump, has made this population a central subject of U.S. cultural discourse. Rather than relying solely on analyses of mediated portrayals, Dunn makes use of personal narratives, interviews, focus groups, textual analysis, and critical autoethnography to specifically analyze how popular media articulates certain ideas about white working-class people, and how those who identify as members of this population, including herself, negotiate such articulations. Dunn’s work provides alternative stories that are rarely, if ever, found in popular media—stories that feature the varied reactions and lived experiences of white working-class people; stories that talk to, talk with, and talk back to mediated representations and dominant cultural ideas; stories that illuminate the multidimensionality of a population that is often portrayed in one-dimensional ways; stories that move inside and outside the white working-class to better understand their role within, and influence upon, U.S. culture.

Country music boasts a long tradition of rich, contradictory gender dynamics, creating a world where Kitty Wells could play the demure housewife and the honky-tonk angel simultaneously, Dolly Parton could move from traditionalist "girl singer" to outspoken trans rights advocate, and current radio playlists can alternate between the reckless masculinity of bro-country and the adolescent girlishness of Taylor Swift. In this follow-up volume to A Boy Named Sue, some of the leading authors in the field of country music studies reexamine the place of gender in country music, considering the ways country artists and listeners have negotiated gender and sexuality through their music and how gender has shaped the way that music is made and heard. In addition to shedding new light on such legends as Wells, Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Charley Pride, it traces more recent shifts in gender politics through the performances of such contemporary luminaries as Swift, Gretchen Wilson, and Blake Shelton. The book also explores the intersections of gender, race, class, and nationality in a host of less expected contexts, including the prisons of WWII-era Texas, where the members of the Goree All-Girl String Band became the unlikeliest of radio stars; the studios and offices of Plantation Records, where Jeannie C. Riley and Linda Martell challenged the social hierarchies of a changing South in the 1960s; and the burgeoning cities of present-day Brazil, where "college country" has become one way of negotiating masculinity in an age of economic and social instability.