Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America

Queer Career offers an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce, arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and vulnerable to employer exploitation. Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America, and shows how queer history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor.

Format: Hardback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 31 January 2023
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Queer Career offers an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce, challenging the traditional view of workplaces as "straight spaces" and highlighting the experiences of queer people on the job. Margot Canaday argues that employment and fear of job loss were central to gay life in postwar America, and that queer workers were more visible than hidden and vulnerable to employer exploitation. She suggests that in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for their lower wages, contingency, perceived lack of familial ties, and ease of being 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. However, progress was not linear, and by the century's end, some gay workers rejected their former discretion and some employers eventually offered them protection unattained through law. Queer Career shows how queer history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.

Weight: 634g
Dimension: 165 x 245 x 31 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691205953