Core Post #4 – Pau Brunet

From Elvis to Divine: Looking Beyond the Limitations of White Trash and Becoming Just Trash (thumbs up if you like this title 😃).


Few aesthetics are conflated with so many conflicts and prejudices as the idea of American white trash. I included the geographical notion because while we can find some parallels in other countries, it is in the United States that we can delimitate this identity in a very unique and genuine way. However, it is in its delimitations and its contrast with aesthetics, such as camp or queer, that I think scholars still have a path to explore or update. 


When I started reading Gael Sweeney's article about Elvis Presley, "The King of White Trash Culture", my brain was constantly pointing with neon lights and liquor store signs to one of the most influential underground filmmakers ever: John Waters. It is hard to disassociate "white trash" from Waters as it is to associate Presley with any idea of "trash." However, they are both different faces of the same coin, and their meeting point is the idea of celebrating working-class experiences. 


Gael Sweeney defines White Trash as an aesthetic not defined by economically and culturally hegemonic powers designed in large cultural capitals such as New York or Los Angeles but by the rural and small city culture (250). The taste is almost opposite to any bourgeois idea of sophistication and high culture, and it celebrates excess in many forms, such as "lime green stretch pants, leopard-print tube tops, pink curlers, too-tight flared jeans, big belt buckles decorated with eagles or steers, Hawaiian shirts open to the beer belly, and high-heeled snakeskin boots" (250). In some way, white trash constantly engages in opposition to its own essences, for instance, sexual lust but still religiously ruled or poverty with luxury. Elvis, who even needs his last name to be invocated, lived in that dichotomy, and it became his most visible mark. 


Because of the ideas of "trash," "poverty," "unliterary," or even "fundamentalism," white trash aesthetics and the people who belong have been constantly diminished by mainstream and dominant cultures. Like Dolly Parton, Elvis became an exception to that rule, and his excesses were constantly celebrated and admired even 50 years after his death. In other words, Elvis had never left the building. I think Sweeney's article fails to fully explore this intersection around social marginalization, aesthetics, and a sense of class struggle between white trash and queer culture.   


While it is true that many queer folks run away from rural areas because of physical and emotional danger, their formated aesthetics and mode of living stay with them. John Waters and his celebration of a marginalized universe in a Baltimore ecosystem that is rejected and displaced by the powers from Washington, Philadelphia, or New York is a rich scenario to understand a territory in which white trash, ghetto culture, and working-class inhabitants without necessary pointing the idea of camp. While I agree with Sweeney's notions of camp culture, her definition and framing in Waters and Divine's world totally reject their struggles and place them into an urban, middle-class, and high culture that, precisely, they constantly critique.  


Like Elvis, Waters also incorporates racial conflicts (Baltimore is a perfect scenario for that) and their negotiations to be in the world and benefit from being together against other powers. I just summarized Elvis' relationship with Black musicians and the plot of Hairspray. The grotesque in Elvis' overweight and his addictions belong to similar spaces of resistance. As Sweeney points out, "A 'defiantly grotesque' and excessive body is a political act, particularly if it is offensive, fat, or dirty (256)". These bodies, Presley and Water's characters, such as Divine or Rickie Lake, "evades, resists, and outrages the dominant social order – mainly the Northern middle class" (Sweeney 256). Itself, the notion of white trash comes from the dominant voices, and as bodies are racialized, they are also trashed, and the only way some people navigate this is by engaging and empowering that imposed identity. 


I don't know you, but I can spend hours talking about this subject, so "Breaking news from Pecked basement!" I think this can be a nice theme for the final essay. 

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