Queering Whiteness, Queering Faulkner: Hightower's "Wild Bulges" (Gail Hightower, Light in August) (Critical Essay) (Character Overview‪)‬

I. I should clarify from the outset that I am not a Faulknerian by any stretch, and so am not interested in producing a reading of Faulkner's novel that "solves" its many ambivalences and inconsistencies, its hints and feints toward a critique of race, class, and gender as repressed but active discourses at work in the Jim Crow South. Such an analysis would lie beyond not only this essay but also my own expertise. Rather, I wish to use a particular character in a particular novel--the defrocked minister Gail Hightower, from Light in August--as a way of opening an inquiry into how current approaches to whiteness studies, especially those attuned to the ways in which gay and lesbian whites are somehow "marked" by their distance from heteronormative whiteness, may prove useful to the reading and interpretation of U.S. Southern literature generally, and Faulkner in particular.