Queer Career

Sexuality and Work in Modern AmericaBy Margot CanadayNarrated by Laurel Lefkow

Length10h 48m

About this audiobook

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.

Audiobook details

GenrePsychology, History

Length10 hrs 48 mins

Narrated byLaurel Lefkow

FormatAudiobook

Publish dateJan 31, 2023

LanguageEnglish

1Opening Anno, Introduction

8Chapter 4 - Continued

2Part 1 - Gay Labor, Chapter 1 , The Homosexual Does Cope Fairly Successfully with the Straight World - Defining Gay Labor at Midcentury

9Part 3 - Civil Rights In a Neoliberal Age, Chapter 5

3Chapter 1 - Continued

10Chapter 5 - Continued

4Chapter 2 - The Ones Who Had Nothing to Lose - Days and Nights in the Queer Work World, I Have Brought the Very Government to Its Knees - The Campaign to End the Ban on Federal Employment

11Chapter 6 - Making the Business Case - Gay Rights Inside the Post-Fordist Corporation

5Part 2- Law and Liberation, Chapter 3

12Chapter 6 - Continued

Show all chapters

6Chapter 3 - Continued

13Epilogue, Closing Anno

7Chapter 4 - Trouble Followed Revolutionary Action - Lesbian and Gay Liberation and Work