Description

This audiobook narrated by Laurel Lefkow provides a masterful history of the LGBT workforce in AmericaWorkplaces 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 AmericaRather than finding that many midcentury employers tried to root out gay employees Canaday sees an early version of dont ask / dont 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 postFordist employment regimes we now associate with precarity While progress was not linear by centurys 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 capitalismQueer Career shows how LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past