Sookie's Place(s): New Roadways Into The South Of The Southern Vampire Mysteries
Charlaine Harris’ bestselling paranormal romance series, the Southern Vampire Mysteries is only beginning to be understood as more than a cultural phenomenon, but rather as a highly politicized and critical work of fiction that shines through genre designations such as romance, mystery, and fantasy. Much of this praise can be attributed to the series’ heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, who gracefully traverses boundaries that divide what are arguably racial and ethnic groups ever at odds with one another as they share political and social space. Her adventures therefore pose significant questions concerning diversity, equality, and nationalism, but more obviously they ask what southernness has to do with these issues of identity. The SVM situates itself between south as place and south as imaginary, insisting on the utility of this region and its attendant baggage by localizing issues plaguing American collective consciousness, such as identity politics and civil equality, class castes and poverty, racism and homophobia, violence and hate crimes. Such a south allows for the misdirection of American rhetoric, which demonizes the south as the nation’s Other, but employs its given role to effect change, to take Americanness to task. That is, here the south operates as not only a state of being (i.e. a place, an identity, etc.) but also a process. This thesis aims to locate where the “process South” operates in the SVM—in bodies, between bodies, across communities—in order to map its myriad successes and failures and thereby create a blueprint for reading the series’ “real” repercussions.
Charlaine Harris, Fantasy, Gender And Sexuality, Race And Ethnicity, Southern Studies, Southern Vampire Mysteries, American Studies
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