Debutantes and Dykes: Class, Femininity, and Heteronormativity in Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ Little White Lies and Deadly Little Scandals (Abstract)

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Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ novels Little White Lies (2018) and Deadly Little Scandals (2019) reimagine the traditional role of the Southern debutante, using it as a lens to examine how femininity, class, and heterosexuality intersect to preserve elite social hierarchies.Within the world of the debutante circuit, Barnes reveals how young women are socialized to perform gender and sexuality in ways that reinforce patriarchal and class-based ideals of propriety, beauty, and respectability. Yet, through characters who simultaneously uphold and resist these expectations, particularly Lily Taft Easterling, Barnes also challenges the limits of these performances. Lily’s story complicates the debutante ideal by suggesting that rebellion and conformity, subversion and participation, can coexist within systems designed to control women’s identities and desires. I argue that Barnes subverts the traditional image of the Southern debutante by depicting young women who negotiate and manipulate the expectations placed upon them, thereby reclaiming a degree of agency over their bodies, desires, and futures. Through a feminist and cultural analysis, I will argue that Barnes’ depiction of Southern debutantes exposes the ways in which femininity and heterosexuality are constructed to maintain social order, while also imagining the potential for agency and transformation within those constraints.The Debutantes duology presents a complicated vision of Southern womanhood that both critiques and reclaims the debutante tradition as a site of resistance and self-definition.