The Pantomime of a Southern Chameleon By Cartie Whitelaw

The Pantomime of a Southern Chameleon is a memoir about performance — the kind we learn to survive, the kind we inherit, and the kind we mistake for identity.

Set in the American South in Texas and Louisiana, the book traces what it means to grow up inside systems that reward charm, obedience, beauty, and silence — and what it costs to become legible within them. Moving through art, class systems, education, politics, sexuality, religion, and credibility, this is less a confession than an inquiry: Who do you become when you are always adjusting? What parts of yourself are adaptation, and what parts are truth?

At its center, the book also confronts sexual assault and the culture of male entitlement that protects it. Rather than reducing these experiences to spectacle, the narrative examines how harm is often absorbed quietly — shaped by institutional indifference, social hierarchy, and the expectation that likability is safer than resistance. It asks not only what happened, but how power decides whose story is believable. All of this is done whilst confronting the emotional fallout of his own experience of being sexually assaulted creating a juxtaposition as both an analyst and survivor.

Blending cultural criticism with intimate narrative, The Pantomime of a Southern Chameleon examines how power operates quietly — through expectation, through institutions, through the stories we are told about ourselves. It is a meditation on reinvention, on visibility, and on the uneasy line between survival and self-erasure.

The memoir is to be released June 5th in Madrid, Spain with Ybernia Books.