April 10: Perverse Ambitions, Deviant Careers: A Queer History of the Modern American Workplace

Perverse Ambitions, Deviant Careers: A Queer History of the Modern American Workplace

a lecture by Margot Canaday
Thursday, April 10
6:30 to 8 pm
Margot Canaday, History, Princeton University
While historians of sexuality have explored working class cultures, an assumption that workplaces were “straight spaces” in which queer people passed has limited inquiry into the workplace itself. Yet the workplace shaped queer life as much as the bar or the street. Fear of job loss was a central fact of queer life for most of the twentieth century. Moreover, because of a modern equivalence between work and personal identity (the job makes the person, said Marx), occupations have been central to establishing sexual identity. This talk—part of a larger book project that centers the workplace in queer history—offers a preliminary ethnography of LGBTs working in mainstream occupations during the American economy’s “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s.
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.