ABSTRACT
Before getting into my topic-porn's predilection for white trash looks and tastes-I want to say something about the benefits to one's theoretical formation that can accrue from growing up white trash. This brief comment is not a digression from my topic, because it was precisely my white trash upbringing that gave me the conceptual tools to recognize that predilection and the language to describe and explain it. I cannot imagine any better preparation for grasping the intricacies of contemporary theory and cultural studies than negotiating a Florida cracker childhood and adolescence. I
How does such theoretical precociousness emerge in cracker culture? Consider, for example, the intense conceptual work involved in figuring out the differential meanings of white trash-what it is because of what it is not, a regular down-home version of honey and ashes, the raw and the cooked. A Southern white child is required to learn that white trash folks are the lowest of the low because socially and economically they have sunk so far that they might as well be black. As such, they are seen to have lost all self-respect. So it is particularly unseemly when they appear to shamelessly flaunt their trashiness, which, after all, is nothing but an aggressively in-your-face reminder of stark class differences, a fierce fuck-you to anyone trying to maintain a belief in an America whose only class demarcations are the seemingly obvious ones of race.
