Queer Intimacies, White Supremacy, and the Domestic

Turning to spheres of girls’ education and cohabitation, Mary Zaborskis concludes our panel by looking to intersections between white supremacist violence and domesticity in Sofia Coppola’s 2017 Civil War-era film The... [ view full abstract ]

Turning to spheres of girls’ education and cohabitation, Mary Zaborskis concludes our panel by looking to intersections between white supremacist violence and domesticity in Sofia Coppola’s 2017 Civil War-era film The Beguiled. An adaptation of the 1971 novel The Painted Devil, The Beguiled explores racial and sexual violence at the heart of domesticity in a Confederate school for girls. The film challenges the location of wartime violence: does it enter the home from battles taking place outside (literally, in the film), or was it always there? Queer intimacies among white girls and women inhabiting the home simultaneously enable white supremacy while combatting the toxicity of white masculinity. Zaborskis discerns these queer intimacies as homonationalism, which, while nominally allied with the Confederacy, more accurately sustains a white national space positioned between the two armies.