Sex, Violence, and the Southern Man in Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy

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.