Appalachians are typically represented in visual culture as homogenized: white and poor. For the rest of the country tuned into to American visual culture, Appalachia is nothing more than America’s backwoods country, crawling with hillbillies, peopled by incestuous families, and stocked with slovenly welfare abusers. In the spirit of recent Appalachian scholarship’s reclamation of Appalachian heterogeneity via challenges to what scholars have referred to as the “Appalachian Myth,” this study examines the rhetoric of Appalachian stereotypes in visual culture, observes scenarios in which they construct external and internal “others,” and theorizes the ways in which images promote prejudice, classism, and gender disparities and deny the existence of richly diverse cultural traditions within the region.
The visual ephemera covered in this project are not studied or organized as artifacts in an historical taxonomy. Instead, they are understood as subjects within a visual grammatical system. This system establishes boundaries between Appalachia and America. Thus, the subjects and materials studied – Jesco White: The Dancing Outlaw, media coverage of the 2006 Sago mine disaster, Jessica Lynch and Lynddie England, Hillbilly Days, Redneck Games, and The Descent – care treated as iconic phrases within a larger visual etymology or taxonomy of identity. By treating images as grammatical rhetorics and situating them within the context of contemporary feminist and visual studies theories, this dissertation offers a new theoretical framework to study the construction of identity through the deployment and rhetoric of imagery.