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The plantations, the tea parties, the “bless your hearts,” the genteel traditions, the towheaded babies, and “Farmhouse” lifestyle chic are the unique province of Southern womanhood to the national consumer. Sure, there are non-white women in the South, but they produce its problems, not the spectacle. Southern womanhood is afforded to, in order of importance of criteria, white women of a certain social class, with the proper disposition to marriage and motherhood who uses her womanhood in service to others. To achieve those ends, white Southern womanhood is armed with charm. And charm is decidedly a weapon, one without which a proper Southern woman could not do her job. Her job is two-fold. She reproduces Southern culture and she makes non-southerners feel good about the violence necessary to do so. The nation consumes this kind of charming Southern violence as a digestif for the material violence of economic inequality and the social violence of police brutality and the routine violence of segregated neighborhoods. No matter how urgent racial conflict feels in the present national discourse, revisiting the South through film, television, music, symbols, and celebrities reinserts the slavery and Southern apartheid as a point of comparison. How bad can police brutality in Oregon be if the South once held people in chains? And if the South —the hotbed of racist bones in every body — can progress to charmed civility, then that must be our national impulse. For the cultural tourist, there is hope to be found among the Southern white minstrels. A bumbling racist who isn’t a threat to anyone sophisticated enough to see past the racism to a heart of gold is a workaday progressive fantasy. It is also a fantasy that retains the enjoyable aspects of racism — a racist slur here, a xenophobic epithet there — to go along with the other enjoyable symbols of Southern racism like plantations (for nice weddings!), and cotillions (for the fashions!), and Southern college Greek life (the tradition!). There is always an audience for the feel-good polite racism in a Southern accent. You hear the echoes of that consumptive desire when one declares that they “hate country music” but love Dolly Parton. The love-hate relationship with the musical form that made Dolly possible is a reflection of the push-pull of Southern culture for non-Southerners. They may hate country music but they have a ceaseless appetite for its white escapism — sonic, visual, and embodied. With that appetite at the ready, a Southern-womanhood Frankenstein, like the pastiche of the region’s white cultural iconography Dolly grafts onto her childhood poverty, is powerful stuff. And Dolly can really sell it. Her authenticity rings with the charm we demand of Southern womanhood. We let her performance disarm us because we come to her wanting to be disarmed. Dolly gives us that in a package that also calls out to the imperative that the soul of America prevail and, above all else, prevail without consequence. It is an inconvenient truth that no one gets as rich as Dolly Parton in this country without trading in some aspect of our worst impulses. It simply cannot be done, not even by Dolly Parton. As important as her songwriting is to her success, Dolly’s most important writing is the monomyth she stitched from Southern crises and American exceptionalism. She is a working class warrior who got rich, but no one hates her for it. She turned herself into a feminine ideal that trades in the most grotesque ideas of eugenic whiteness — pale skin, blonde hair, thin body, big breasts. Yet no one calls her out for being sizeist or ageist. And, she has remained Southern in affect and performance, while pursuing a non-Southern audience from the outset of her career. That she has held our interest so long and could still be relatively unblemished enough to ascend to an unproblematic fave in the sixth decade of her career is owed to Dolly’s craft — and to something more. Her performance of blondeness is a very particular thread of race and gender and class. How Dolly has gotten away with performing so many challenged identities while completely escaping critique resonates with audiences that consume the South precisely for the hope that whiteness still matters. As for the rest of us, well, we are