ABSTRACT
As with pornography, we know White Trash Culture when we see it. Rather than defining a people or a class, although both are implicated, it is an aesthetic of the flashy, the inappropriate, the garish. Unlike camp, which is a product of an urban, elite, and gay sensibility, White Trash has its roots in the South, the denigrated product of a rural-based under-class of poor whites, a culture in which the politics of identity and race is repressed and often politically and "culturally" incorrect. White Trash Culture is the denigrated aesthetic of a people marginalized socially, racially, and culturally. It
is an aesthetic of bricolage, of random experimentation with the bits and pieces of culture, but especially the out-of-style, the tasteless, the rejects of mainstream society: White Trash is an unwritten, folk aesthetiC, the true American Primitive.
