“Southern lore has it that the belle is a privileged white girl who is at the glamorous and exciting period between being a daughter and becoming a wife. She is the fragile, dewy, just-opened bloom of the southern female: flirtatious but sexually innocent, bright but not deep, beautiful as a statue or painting or porcelain but risky to touch” (Anne Goodwyn Jones, Belles and Ladies)
For as long as the South has understood itself to be a unique region, variations of the Southern belle have existed–and continue to exist–within its mythological cast of characters. Yet in the South, myth and reality maintain a complex, inseparable relationship, each influencing and informing the other. The belle has been–and remains foundational in perpetuating a racist patriarchal system, affecting women and constructions of femininity across lines of race, class, gender, and geography. In recent years, many of the ideas attached to the Southern belle’s purity, piety, chastity, and role contained within the domestic sphere have resurfaced with renewed vigor, and ensuing legislation aimed at restricting women and femininity have proliferated.
However, these anachronistic ideas are not without pushback. Photography is a powerful tool through which stories can be written or rewritten, ideas built or interrogated, and new worlds and ways of being constructed. In this show, images and image-makers interrogate ideas about who and what defines southern femininity. Southern Belle Redux asks the viewer to understand Southern Femininity beyond its oft-assumed class, race, ethnic, age and gender lines.
The show features work of contemporary photographers who explicitly challenge these notions with photographs which redefine and expand the construction of Southern Femininity. These images are showcased alongside images that, while not originally made to address the subject, work in tandem to expand our understanding of who and what shape Southern Femininity. Henry Clay Anderson’s photographs offer a historical window into post-war Black femininity, while Ashleigh Coleman and Emma Hopson’s explore the complications of motherhood. Peyton Fulford’s images of queer southerners showcase new definitions of femininity across lines of gender and sexuality, while Rachel Boillot’s images of migrant farmworkers in North Carolina ask viewers to consider labor, class, and race in our understandings of Southern Womanhood. Arielle Gray’s tender work explores themes of matrilineage within her family and the Black women’s experiences. In addition to these artists, the exhibition also includes works by other photographers whose images engage the theme from a wide variety of perspectives, creating a rich and layered dialogue, allowing us to inhabit a world in which Southern femininity is far more expansive than the narrow definition prescribed by the original Southern belle.
