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Title details for Queer Career by Margot Canaday - Wait list

Queer Career

Sexuality and Work in Modern America

by Margot Canaday
Laurel Lefkow
Audiobook
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Wait time: About 10 weeks
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0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 10 weeks
This audiobook narrated by Laurel Lefkow provides a masterful history of the LGBT 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 LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 31, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780691250014
      • File size: 311199 KB
      • Duration: 10:48:19

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      November 1, 2022

      As a follow-up to 2009's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, Princeton Univ. historian Canaday explores the relationship between LGBTQ individuals and their employers in the latter half of the 20th century. Using oral histories, court cases, and other documents, Canaday focuses primarily on gay and lesbian employment experiences and shows how fears of precarity and unemployment shaped their work life. She divides workplaces into the "straight work world," in which LGBTQ people hid their sexuality at work and the "queer work world," which allowed LGBTQ people to be more open about their sexual orientation, but typically came with lower pay and more precarity. The author looks at federal employment after the Lavender Scare, in which LGBTQ people's employment was terminated en masse, and focuses on its effects throughout the years. Additionally, the author also explores other topics such as security clearances, AIDS, lawsuits, and the expansion of employment benefits. Canaday reflects on the changing nature of employment and how the historical treatment of LGBTQ employees by their employers influenced current trends. VERDICT A fascinating and thought-provoking look into the relationship between sexual orientation and employment.--Rebekah Kati

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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