featuring Mandy Carter, Jaime Harker, Hooper Schultz, and Mab Segrest
People have always told the story of the queer South. Still, both silenced and emerging stories remain to be told. In a region (and nation) where ideological battles over family life, gender, and sexual politics continue to unfold, the South is crucial terrain for doing meaning-making work, as well as critically examining the ever-changing context of queerness.
At the launch of our special issue on The Queer South, guest editors Hooper Schultz and Jaime Harker will talk with long-time activists Mandy Carter and Mab Segrest about “queer futurity.”
Drinks & Conversation
Thursday, April 10
5:30–7:30 PM
*please RSVP
Center for the Study of the American South
410 E. Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC
*This event is free and open to the public! Copies of the Spring 2025 issue will be available.
Mandy Carter is a southern Black lesbian activist with a 50-year movement history of social, racial, and LGBTQ justice organizing. She is a co-founder of Southerners On New Ground and the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), a national civil rights organization dedicated to the empowerment of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and same-gender loving people.
Jaime Harker is professor of English and director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of three monographs, most recently The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. She is the coeditor of four essay collections.
Hooper Schultz is an oral historian and PhD candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his MA in southern studies and MFA in documentary expressions at the University of Mississippi. His research interests include the queer South, gay liberation and lesbian feminism, student activism, and queer oral history.
Mab Segrest is an American lesbian feminist, writer, scholar, and activist associated with the American South. Segrest is best known for her 1994 autobiographical work Memoir of a Race Traitor, which won the Editor’s Choice Lambda Literary Award. Segrest is the former Fuller-Matthai Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Connecticut College.
Header image: Raft of Medusa, by Jimmy Wright, 2003–2004. Oil on canvas, 58 x 65 in. Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery.
