Discuss the ways in which Dorothy Allison uses humor to represent and discuss the experiences of her sexual identity and prejudice.

Dorothy Allison uses humour to represent and discuss her experiences with sexual identity and prejudice in many of her published works. She has described her use of humor in several interviews: “I’m always doing these panels or doing a talk or go to a program, and people will come up to me after and say, ‘you’re so funny. I didn’t know you were funny. I thought you’d be tragic.’ I’ve had enough tragic, girl. I actually do believe that humor is one of the life-saving approaches that particularly Southern working class people use, so here I am honey. Get used to it.”
Allison’s humor is often self-deprecating and masks the prejudice experienced by herself and her family. She’s written about being “trash”—“I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats”— working class, and most notably a “bastard” in her semi-autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure describes some of her most horrific moments, such as a rape by her own uncle, and yet it is still littered with brutal honesty and humor: “I reminded myself that there were just some things we never had talked about before, like sex, money, and broken bones. Certainly we had never discussed love. Sex was dangerous enough, and our family was proof that love was a disaster waiting to happen.”
In terms of her sexuality, Allison, who identifies as a lesbian femme, sardonically acknowledges the fact that she will likely make others uncomfortable: “If I show up at a literary gathering, they tend to be uncomfortable with the fact that I’m a lesbian. . . . I really love talking about working class literature, which is one of the main ways I think about myself as a writer, but a lot of times working class literature focus doesn’t want to talk about region or sexuality, so pretty much wherever they invite me I bring the parts they’re most uncomfortable with.” She uses humorous stereotyping when recounting sexual experiences in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure: “She blushed. I love it when women blush, especially those big butch girls who know you want them. And I wanted her. I did. I wanted her. But she was a difficult woman, wouldn’t let me give her a back-rub, read her palm, or sew up the tear in her jeans—all those ritual techniques Southern femmes have employed in the seduction of innocent butch girls.”
Dorothy Allison uses self-deprecating humor and searing honesty to represent (and mask) her experiences of sexual identity and prejudice in several works.