From curls stiff with hairspray and denim-tasseled everything to the barrels and beavers behind her, it seems queering rural America continues to be key to Roan’s art. Only now she seems to be tackling the South. Her recent performance on SNL took the famously fierce southern belle - think Dolly Parton, Britney Spears, Daisy Duke - and reclaimed her as lesbian iconography. As Roan says herself in between lyrics, “All you country boys saying you know how to treat a woman right / Well, only a woman knows how to treat a woman right / She gets the job done”. This representation of Southern femininity has never been diminutive, in fact it seems at home in queer culture, perhaps because it is only an exaggeration of the pre-existing, campy ‘bigger is better’ attitude. Either way, this performance leads me to some guesses on aesthetics of the album.
Moving away from Midwest Princess, we might be venturing further south. I expect the self-possessed farm girl gone gay story will carry on: maybe we’ll see Chappell Roan as a quarter back, scoring the touch down, or in pink cowboy boots with a lasso, bringing home the runaway stallion. Either way, it seems her fun in the red states isn’t over yet and we should be glad of that. In the light of Trump’s recent election, we can only feel grateful that someone is keeping queer identities seen, particularly in states where the culture excludes them. For an artist like Roan to exist as openly and proudly as she does whilst coming from a state like Missouri, which elected Trump by an 18.4% margin early November, is no small matter. With all this in mind, the continued queering of America is not only an exciting concept but a hopeful one. Queerness exists everywhere but it takes artists like Chappell Roan to put it in the mainstream.
