way” (3). In the years following his autobiography, Foxworthy has
continued to evoke what he views as his humble origins. In a 2012
interview with Tavis Smiley, he asserts, “I grew up by the airport with a
dirt yard. Never in my life should I have been a success.” Early in No
Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem, he jokes, “I grew up so deep blue collar
that my mother had to wash my shirts separately, in cold water” (5).
Rather than expressing shame toward his roots, he casts them as an
ennobling juxtaposition to his later success. Here, Foxworthy evokes the
term “Blue Collar,” a more recent category on the social landscape that
calls up images of industrial factories and other forms of skilled manual
labor, of hardworking fathers coming home covered in sweat and grease
to loving wives and children.
This idealized portrait of the working class hero demonstrates
one way that bearers of the redneck stigma have sought to recuperate the
label for their own purposes and to deploy their economic and social
reality in more positive terms. In the specific case of redneck (and to
lesser degrees terms like hillbilly and white trash) this refashioning of
identity has reached cultural prominence. In “A Short History of
Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity,”
Pa