“Eat, Pray, Party!”

Through centering the Florida Panhandle and using MTV’s Floribama Shore as an entry point, this essay articulates a Floridian-Southern identity. We organize this project around three themes that are heavily present in both Floribama Shore and our personal experiences as Floridian-Southerners: intra-regional tensions around religion, gender performances, and reproductive politics. Through layering our experiences among vignettes from Floribama Shore, we make visible the relationship between the consumption of popular media, the representations of Floridian-Southerners in popular media, the social and cultural regulation of hegemonic Southern deportment, and our own Floridian-Southern identity.

1. Becoming southern

‘Becoming Southern’ discusses how Native Americans became the first southerners. They developed the first regional culture from environmental conditions that would always be a foundation of regional life. The Europeans who came to what became the American South brought with them preconceptions about that area, which were part of a New World that evoked images of fertile land that produced staple crops to enrich European nations, but also represented exploitation of African and indigenous labor and the threat of racial intermingling. The early 1700s were crucial years in the emergent South. The American Revolution itself was a landmark in the appearance of a self-conscious southern identity.

2. Section to nation

‘Section to nation’ examines how, by 1830, the American South had long had a predominantly agricultural economy. Its people soon idealized the agrarian republic that had taken shape after the American Revolution as the basis for an emerging sectional identity. Slavery was the basis of a productive economic system, in which the South was enmeshed with northern merchants and traders and the whole financial world of England. The American Civil War undermined southern ideology dramatically through the emancipation of slaves. The Reconstruction era would be nearly equal to the Civil War in forging a self-conscious white southern identity.

1862–1896

Having New England roots but growing up in Atlanta gave Bradley a dual Yankee-Southern identity. Her father’s sudden death when she was twelve plus her nursing her mother and siblings through serious illnesses brought an early but shadowed maturity. Marriage to Horace Bradley in 1885 took her to New York City. After his early death from tuberculosis in 1896, she faced poverty and raising four children alone.