Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America

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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.

Reviews

"Winner of the Hagley Prize in Business History, Business History Association"
"Co-Winner of the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, Labor and Working-Class History Association"
"Finalist for the PROSE Award in North American and US History, Association of American Publishers"
"Shortlisted for the LGBTQ+ Studies Lammy Award, Lambda Literary"
"This is the rare academic book that brought tears to my eyes thanks to its poignancy, rather than out of boredom. It serves as a model of how the history of neoliberalism could and should be written: with concerted attention to categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, and their interaction, rendered with sensitivity and attentive to the subjectivity and dignity of the historical actors it portrays."---Lily Geismer, Chronicle of Higher Education
"Queer Career sets out to reveal an experience of exploitation and a history of rights strugglesambiguous as all such struggles are. What it shows beyond this is the possibility, in these origins, of a new language of labor."---Gabriel Winant, Modern American History
"Stunning. . . . The analytic pay-off of Canadays narrative is enormous. Her discovery of the postwar bargain and its decline should transform the narrative of postwar liberalism. . . . As powerful as Canadays arguments are, the triumph of this book is in the individual stories it tells. Queer Career is, first and foremost, a book about the lives of working people."---Reuel Schiller, Jotwell
"A fascinating and thought-provoking look into the relationship between sexual orientation and employment." * Library Journal *
"A significant contribution to studies of work. [Queer Career] interrogates how work has shaped the lives of queer workers and demonstrates how work can be simultaneously empowering and exploitative."---Patti Giuffre, American Journal of Sociology

Author Bio

Margot Canaday is professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America(Princeton).