The othered South as a mediated space dates back, at least, to the post-Civil War era. As an appealing concept that has contributed to the preservation of the myth of southern exceptionalism and difference, the South as Other has arguably become more popular in the twenty-first century as streaming services and free-to-air television networks compete for audiences eager to engage with exotic, degenerate, and grotesque southern stories and characters. From the gloom and ugliness of True Detective's desolate landscapes, the Gothicized swamps and reconstructed alligator tussles of Swamp People (2010–present), the excesses and extremes of Tiger King and Murder in the Bayou (2019), to the deprivations depicted in “redneck reality” shows like Call of the Wildman (2011–2014) and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012–2014), the South as a space of strangeness is situated in a contradistinctive relationship with the (allegedly) un-gloomy, un-Gothic, and un-redneck North.

Representing the South: Swamps, Rednecks, and Steel Magnolias

The othering of the South did not necessarily originate with the commodification of the South in the late-nineteenth century when travel writers where tasked with selling the region to northern tourists to whom the South seemed a peculiar and unfamiliar place (McIntyre 2005, 35). But it certainly helped. In national magazines and travel books that sold in the hundreds of thousands, imagery crafted for “bona-fide tourists and armchair travellers” alike (McIntyre 2011, 4) painted a picture of the post-war South as a Gothic landscape of ruined plantations and gloomy swamps.