2024/10/02 by Cameron E. Williams, Williams, Cameron E.
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #American Sports and Literature #Gothic Literature and Media Analysis #Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis #Southern masculinity #The Paperboy #southern fiction
paper · doi:10.18716/ojs/gefo/2015.2659
openalex publication_date 2024/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
This essay examines the correlation between representations of sex, violence, and gender in Lee Daniels’ Southern gothic ‘mystery melodrama’ The Paperboy (2012). Though the film has been derided by critics as smut hardly worth watching, this article argues that The Paperboy fits squarely into a tradition of Southern fiction in which sex and violence are not only strangely and problematically tangled up, but are furthermore inextricably linked to representations of gender and race. By contextualizing the South’s historical preoccupation with associating sex and violence, this essay places The Paperboy within this narrative tradition to ultimately illuminate the ways in which the film directly confronts paradigms of Southern masculinity that are deeply entrenched in the region’s cultural and racial mythologies.