Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America - Paperback

$31.61

Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America - Paperback

Name: Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America - Paperback
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9780691215303
Price: 31.61 USD
Availability: InStock

by Margot Canaday

$31.61

Book Overview

A masterful history of the queer workforce in America

Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as "straight spaces" in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America.

Rather than finding that many midcentury employers tried to root out gay employees, Canaday sees an early version of "don't ask / don't tell" in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for the lower wages they could be paid, their contingency, their perceived lack of familial ties, and the ease with which they could be pulled in and pushed out of the labor market. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, they were harbingers of post-Fordist employment regimes we now associate with precarity. While progress was not linear, by century's end some gay workers rejected their former discretion, and some employers eventually offered them protection unattained through law. Pushed by activists at the corporate grass roots, business emerged at the forefront of employment rights for sexual minorities. It did so, at least in part, in response to the way that queer workers aligned with, and even prefigured, the labor system of late capitalism.

Queer Career shows how queer history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.

ISBN	9780691215303
Author	Margot Canaday
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Genre	History, Education, and Business
Format	Paperback
Published	May 2025
Language	ENG- English
Pages	312
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print

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