Proceedings Sixth Biennial Conference of the Center for Working-Class Studies Working-Class Studies: Intersections with Race, Gender, and Sexuality May 14 –17, 2003 Youngstown State University Youngstown, Ohio Forward The Center for Working-Class Studies (CWCS) at Youngstown State University is honored to host its sixth biennial conference, Working-Class Studies: Intersections with Race, Gender, and Sexuality. The CWCS affiliates and Advisory Board wish to thank the 200 scholars, workers, students, and activists for their participation in the conference and for their support of the activities of the Center over the past eight years. This year’s conference includes individuals from 25 states and five countries representing a rich diversity of individuals, academic disciplines, and theoretical and practical approaches to the development of what is being called New Working-Class Studies. The conference includes presentations, papers, roundtables, poetry reading, performance art, and a poster exhibition from the Center for Political Graphics. Our keynote speakers represent different approaches to studying working-class life and culture and its intersections with other identities. The speakers are Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity in America, Brown University on Exposing the Underside: Understanding Globalization from Race, Gender and Class Perspectives; Bonnie Thornton Dill, Director, Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, University of Maryland on an Intersectional Analysis: Toward Rethinking the Working Class; Michael Honey, Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies, University of Washington, Tacoma on Black Workers Remember: Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender in Personal Narratives of Black Workers; and Agymah Kamau, immigrant novelist, University of Oklahoma, The Writer in his Society. As you can see, the central theme of the conference is the complex relationship between class, race, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of culture and identity. How do these concepts intersect, and how are they useful to our efforts to understand working-class culture and politics? How are individual and group identities shaped by these categories of diversity and culture? How do tensions and connections related to race, gender, and sexuality shape working-class organizing, activism, and daily life? How have the relationships between these categories changed over time, and how do they differ in various places? We would like to recognize the organizations and individuals who helped make this conference possible. Once again, the CWCS conference is sponsored in part by the Ford Foundation. We appreciated their support and encouragement of program officers Gertrude Fraser, Margaret Wilkerson, and the Director of Education, Knowledge, and Religion, Janice Petrovich. We would also like to thank other organizations that have supported our efforts. These include the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the People’s Geography Project, the MLA Radical Caucus, and Working-Class Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association. A special thanks to the other centers in Working-Class Studies: the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies (University of Illinois, Chicago), the Institute for the Study of Working-Class Life (SUNY at Stony Brook), the Minnesota Center for Working-Class Studies (University of Minnesota), the Race, Class, and Gender Project (Southern University, New Orleans), the Center for African-American Women and Labor (University of Maryland), and the newest center, the Working Lives Research Institute (London Metropolitan University, UK). From the YSU community, we like to thank President David Sweet, Provost Tony Atwater, and especially Dean Robert Bolla of the College of Arts and Sciences and Dean Betty Jo Licata of the Williamson College of Business Administration for their continued support in a most difficult period economically for public universities. Mary Margaret Hovanes and the Kilcawley Center staff, Bill Sperlazza and his staff at Housing Services, Joe Scarnecchia and his Support Services staff, and Chief John Gocala and the campus police who helped in facilitating conference arrangements. We also would like to thank Leslie Brothers, Director of the McDonough Museum of Art, and Museum Exhibition Designer and Production Manager Robyn Maas for their support and efforts in bringing the poster exhibition. Once again, CWCS affiliate Bryn Zellers has designed a beautiful conference poster for all those attending the conference. Finally, and most importantly, the Center has a gifted administrative assistant in Patty LaPresta. Her humor, kindness, and occasional cajoling kept everyone organized and on-task as we prepared for conference. We are indebted to her in so many ways. John Russo and Sherry Linkon Co-Directors, CWCS Introduction and Contents These Proceedings represent many but not all of the presentations given at this year’s conference. Some presenters did not submit abstracts. The abstracts are arranged in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Contents: Keynote Speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . pgs 5 - 6 Conference Program . . . . . . . . . . pgs 7 - 18 Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pgs 16– 58 Keynote Speakers Bonnie Thorton Dill Bonnie Thorton Dill is a professor of Women’s Studies, an affiliate professor of Sociology and Afro-American Studies and the Director of the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland. Her published works include Women of Color in U.S. Society, co-edited with Maxine Baca Zinn (1994) and Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: Work and Family among Black Female Domestic Servants (1994) along with articles published in major journals and widely reprinted in edited collections. Dill has been the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award and the Jessie Bernard Award for research in gender studies both given by the American Sociological Association. Evelyn Hu-DeHart Evelyn Hu-DeHart is a professor of History and Ethnic Studies and the Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) at Brown University. Prior to joining Brown, she was chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Trained originally as a Latin Americanist/Caribbeanist, her recent work focuses on processes of globalization, transnationalism, and transculturation across the Pacific. She is the editor of Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization (1999). Michael Honey Michael Honey teaches African-American, Ethnic and Labor Studies, and American History. He is a founding faculty member at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and holds the endowed Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies for the University of Washington. His research and writing is widely recognized. His books, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (1999) and Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993), both won numerous national and state book awards. A former civil rights and civil liberties organizer in the Deep South, Honey has a long-standing involvement in linking scholarship, music, and public speaking with community and labor organizing. Agymah Kamau Agymah Kamau is the author of two novels. Flickering Shadows (1996) was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award, and was listed among the Library Journal’s top 20 first novels of 1996. Pictures of a Dying Man (1999) won the Commonwealth of Virginia/Library of Virginia Awards, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, was a finalist and received honorable mention for Gustavus Myers Book Award, was nominated for the Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts, and was listed among the Village Voice’s best 25 books of 1999. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma and is working on his third novel. Conference Schedule May 14, Wednesday 4:00 – 7:30 p.m. CONFERENCE REGISTRATION 7:30 – 9:00 p. m. KEYNOTE PRESENTATION “Intersectional Analysis: Toward Rethinking the Working Class” Bonnie Thorton Dill, Women’s Studies, Sociology and Afro-American Studies, Director of the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity, University of Maryland May 15, Thursday 9:00 - 10:15 a.m. African-American Writers Barbara Foley, Rutgers University “Engendering: The Crisis and Opportunity of the Popular Front” Cheryl Higashida, University of Colorado - Boulder “Race, Cultural Capital and Recasting One’s Place” Todd Vogel, Trinity College Chair: Terry Benton, Youngstown State University Class and Masculinity “Articulating Anxiety: Masculinity and Labor Narratives” James V. Catano, Louisiana State University “Unemployment and Deindustrialization: Challenges to White Working-Class Masculinity” Mark Melnik, Northeastern University “Class, Generation, and Masculinity at Work” Ian Roberts, University of Durham and Tim Strangleman, University of Nottingham Chair: Patricia Morris, Northeastern University Police Work Gordon Frissora, Youngstown State University Tammy King, Youngstown State University Christian Onwudiwe, Youngstown State University C. Allen Pierce, Youngstown State University Chair: Gordon Frissora, Youngstown State University Studying Class: Students’ Perspectives Marcus Allen, Youngstown State University Christopher Barzak, Youngstown State University Shell Feijo, University of Iowa Jacqueline Robles, Youngstown State University Chair: Renny Christopher, California State University, Channel Islands 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. KEYNOTE PRESENTATION “Exposing the Underside: Understanding Globalization from Race, Gender and Class Perspectives ” Evelyn Hu-DeHart, History and Ethnic Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University 1:00 - 2:25 p.m. Class Identities Jamie Daniel, University of Illinois - Chicago “The Matrix of Identity Revisited” David Greene, Ramapo College Chair: Homer Warren, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Affiliated Faculty Class Representations: From Proletarian to Elite? “Revolutionary Entertainment and the Pre-Code Warner Brothers Machine: A Fleeting Glimpse at a Proletarian Cinema?” Victor Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University “Harry Harrison Kroll and the Theory and Politics of Class in the 1930s” Charles Cunningham, Carnegie Mellon University “George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun: Class Elitist Propaganda Masquerading as Romantic Tragedy” Bob Niemi, St. Michael’s College Chair: Susan Padezanin, Youngstown State University Crossing Boundaries: Working-Class Women's Literature “Approaches to Teaching Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers” Jackie Atkins, Penn State DuBois “Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin’s Youth’s Companion Stories” Bonnie Shaker, Youngstown State University “Reading the Disabled Working-Class Body in 19th-Century Social Reform Novels” Whitney Womack, Miami University - Hamilton Chair: Beth Butters, Youngstown State University Labour, Race and Empire In Britain “The British Labour Movement and British Imperialism” Mary Davis, London Metropolitan University “The History of Black Workers’ Self Organization in the British Labour Movement Roger MacKenzie, London Metropolitan University Chair: Ian Roberts, University of Durham 2:30 - 3:45 p.m. Clearing the Table: The Working-Class Legacy of Mary Curran Doyle's "The Parish and the Hill" “Long-Ranging Impact of Mary Curran Doyle’s Classic Working-Class Novel The Parish and the Hill” Jean Casella, The Feminist Press; Laura Doyle, University of Massachusetts; Caledonia Kearns; and Sandra Krein, Lynn Museum Chair: Michelle Tokarczyk, Goucher College Experiencing Class Cultural Differences: A Dialogue Across the Class Divide Barbara Jensen, Metropolitan State University Betsy Leondar-Wright, United for a Fair Economy Jack Metzgar, Roosevelt University Fred Rose, Pioneer Valley Project Chair: Barbara Jensen, Metropolitan State University Labor Struggle and Reform in the Early 20th Century “Get Your Man!: The Pennsylvania Department of State Police, Labor, Violence and Masculinity During Progressive Era Pennsylvania, 1890-1917” Gary Jones, Muhlenberg College “‘If you are Afraid, Go home to the Children and Leave the Work to us!’: The IWW, Immigrant ‘Strikers’ Wives’ and the Pennsylvania State Constabulary in the McKees Rocks Strike of 1909” James Koshan, Thiel College “Only the Names Have Changed: A Comparative Study of Welfare Capitalism in Two Kentucky Counties, 1910-2002” Phillip J. Obermiller and Thomas Wagner Chair: Tom Leary, Youngstown State University Signs of Class: Images and Language “Dr. Kevorkian for White House Physician and Other Signs of the Times: Exploring Public Messages in Working-Class Taverns” David E. Engen, Minnesota State University “Class, Consumer Culture and Sign Value: The Strange Case of Abercrombie and Fitch” Bill Hetrick, Bethel College Chair: Larry Hugenberg, Youngstown State University 4:00 - 5:15 p.m. Film and Politics “Romancing Working-Class Daughters: Remaking Class Dynamics in the Film ‘Sabrina’” Megan Falater and Mary Romero, Arizona state University “Not Just One of the Guys: Gender and the Cultural Politics of Deindustrialization” Mary Margaret Fonow, The Ohio State University “Race, Class and Ideology in Contemporary American Film” Patricia Keeton, Ramapo College of New Jersey Chair: Phil Chan, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Affiliated Faculty People Like That: Creative Writers, Class, and Creation Mary Carroll-Hackett, East Carolina University Brett Hursey, East Carolina University Glenda Jakubowski, Chowan County School System Chair: Christopher Barzak, Youngstown State University Theorizing Class, Nation, and Literature “Understanding the Nations within Classes: Theorizing Self-Determination and Genocide as Working-Class Issues” Tim Libretti, Northeastern Illinois University “Class, Nation, Ideology: Notes Toward a Historical Critique of Post colonialism” Dennis Lopez, California State University, Northridge “Towards a Materialist Theory of Working-Class Literary Production” Will Watson, University of Southern Mississippi Chair: Jamie Daniel, University of Illinois - Chicago Visualizing and Transforming Work and Labor “Class and Work in Post-Socialism: Transforming the Spaces of Labour” Alison Stenning, University of Birmingham “Seeing Sheffield: Exploring the Visual in the Sociology of Work” Charlotte Waldron, University of Nottingham, U.K. Chair: Rosemary D’Apolito, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Member Work and Identity: Personal Narratives “I mad an Honest Living: Representations of Self in a Portuguese-American Working-Class Woman’s Life Story” Sandra J. Jones and Stacy Pirog, Brandeis University “Becoming a Medical Doctor: Class Counts” W. T. Whitney, Jr. Chair: Suzanne Diamond, Youngstown State University 7:30 - 9:30 p.m. Performance Art & Poetry “Poetry Reading – ‘A Proper Burial’” Paola Corso “Paying Down the Degree” Sylvie Green Shapero, George Mason University “Events and Victims: A Play in Circumstantial Evidence” Daniel Lang/Levitsky, meansofproductions Open Poetry Reading May 16, Friday 9:00 - 10:15 a.m. Gender at the Intersections: Literary Representations “Including Whom? Ambivalence toward Race and Gender in Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Martin Eden” Sheryl J. LeSage, University of Oklahoma “The Danger Zone: Working-Class Women’s Sexuality as Represented by Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison” Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Goucher College Chair: Shell Feijo, University of Iowa Life Histories: Class Identity, Work and Education “Across the Great Divide Part Two: Building, Bridging and Breaking the Rules” Barbara Jensen, Metropolitan State University “Representing One’s Race or Betraying One’s Class?: Paradoxes of Identity and Being in Memoirs of Education” Christie Launius, Ohio University “Talking Trash: Issues of Expectation and Performance in the Working Class” Andrea Sciacca, The City College of New York “Literacy Development and the Acquisition of Social Practices in the Lives of Four Working-Class Women” Gail Verdi, Fairleigh Dickinson University Chair: Martha Pallante, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Affiliated Faculty Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Carnegie's Legacy “Making, Unmaking, and Remaking History: Memorializing Carnegie’s Legacy” James Catano, Louisiana State University “Remember Carnegie in the Media” Steffi Domike, Chatham College “Who Owns Carnegie’s Libraries: Remembering Carnegie in the Built Environment” Joel Woller, Carlow College Chair: Donna DeBlasio, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Core Faculty Twenty-Nine Years: Closure to Life Support on a Dying Industry Angela Gianoglio, Youngstown State University Ron Gianoglio 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. KEYNOTE PRESENTATION “Black Workers Remember: Intersections of Race, Class and Gender in Personal Narratives of Black Workers” Michael Honey, African-American, Ethnic and Labor Studies, and American History, University of Washington, Tacoma 1:00 - 2:25 p.m. Class, Gender and Labor at the Movies “Working-Class Jane: Jane Fonda and Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker” Ron Briley, Sandia Preparatory School “Robot workers, Robocops: Automation, Masculinity, and Whiteness in Paul Verhoeven’s ‘RoboCop’” John Marsh, University of Illinois Chair: Rick Shale, Youngstown State University Contemporary Voices from the United Kingdom “The Shadow of ‘No Mean City’: Exploitation of Influence in Modern Scottish Urban Fiction Sylvia Bryce-Wunder, University of St. Andrews Chair: Beth Hepfner, Center for Working-Class Studies Community Affiliate Contesting the Class Vernacular Sherry Linkon, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Core Faculty Jack Metzgar, Roosevelt University Dorian Warren, Yale University Michael Zweig, State University of New York – Stony Brook Chair: Sherry Linkon, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Core Faculty Gender and Labor Narratives “Veins and Skeins: Narratives of Working-Class Women” Rebecca Montoya Bragdon and Roxanne Newton, University of North Carolina Greensboro “The Fluidity of Class and Gender: Questions from the Flow of Electrons” Margaret Costello, Ampere Electrical Contracting Chair: Mark Tebeau, Cleveland State University Organizing Around Changes in Work and Occupation “Social Justice Campaigns in Atlanta’s Day Labor Industry” Terry Easton, Emory University “Challenging the Exploitation and Abuse: A Study of the Day Labor Industry in Cleveland” Daniel Kerr, Case Western Reserve University “The Labor of Culture: A Web-Based Project Exploring the Experiences of Museum Workers from Socially Marginalized Groups” Therese Quinn, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Chair: Brian Corbin, Catholic Diocese of Youngstown, Center for Working-Class Studies Community Affiliate 2:30 - 3:45 p.m. Interactive Workshop (Building Bridges Program) Sandy Kifer and Rogers J. Laugand III, Clarion University of Pennsylvania Intersections of Identity in Writing: Brooks, McCarriston and O'Connor “Are They Not My Sisters?: Linda McCarriston and the Native Response to Indian Girls” Anne Herzog, West Chester University “But Could a Dream Send Up Through Onion Fumes: The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class in Gwendolyn Brooks’ A Street in Bronzeville” Cherise A. Pollard, West Chester University “Flannery O’Connor’s Farm Stories: Female Landowners, Female Tenant Farmers and the Inscription of Social Class” Carla Verderame, West Chester University Chair: Jacqueline Robles, Youngstown State University Organizing: Unions, Safety, Anti-Poverty Programs “Union Organizing” J. R. Ellis “Anti-Poverty Activism and the Fight Against Borders: Lessons from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty” Jeff Shantz, York University, Toronto “Hurt on the Job” an Injured Worker’s Perspective Marlene P. Souza, Injured Worker Chair: Jim Courim, USWA Local 1375, Center for Working-Class Studies Community Affiliate Songs of the Self: Music and Working-Class Identity “Born to Run: Lives, Community and Influence as Presented by Bruce Springsteen” Anthony Esposito, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania “Reemergence of Irish-American Ethnic Identity through Working-Class Music” Matthew M. Heffernan, Bates College “Michael Stanley: A Native Son Betrayed by His Hometown” Anthony C. Peyronel, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania Chair: Angela Gianoglio, Youngstown State University Teaching (About) Class “Description of and Rational for the ‘Labor and the Working Class’ Unit in High School Curriculum” James Gutowski and Cindy Meyer Sabik, Gilmour Academy “Discovery + Crafting = Learning: Empowering Pedagogy for Working-Class Students” Roxanne Newton, University of North Carolina at Greensboro “The Forgotten Ism: Including Class in Courses on Diversity and Multiculturalism” Felice Yeskel, University of Massachusetts Chair: Kevin Ball, Youngstown State University 4:00 - 5:15 p.m. Place, Class and Landscapes of Exclusion “Producing and Enforcing the Geography of Hate: Race, Class and Housing Segregation in the United States” Jeff R. Crump, University of Minnesota “Mapping the Absences: Historic Preservation, Cultural Resource Management and the Geography of Exclusion” William M. Hunter, Herberling Associates “The Politics of the Public Sphere in Public Space and the Media” Robert Ross, University of Syracuse “Building Identity in Landscape: The Cleveland Cultural Gardens” Mark Tebeau, Cleveland State University Chair: Ray DeCarlo, University of Akron Stress and Workplace Risk “Workplace Risk Communication: Literate Practice as Rhetorical Act” Lew Caccia, Kent State University “Stress in African Americans: Health Consequences of Race, Gender and Class” Beverly A. Gray, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Core Faculty Chair: Bill Padisak, Service Workers International Union The Working-Class Writer: History and Preservation “Bringing Working-Class Literature to Print” Jean Casella Chair: Diane Barnes, Youngstown State University Theater, Politics and Class: International Explorations “Women as Agents of Socio-Political Change: An Analysis of Female Characters in Femi Osofisan’s Morountodun” Halimat A-Sekula, Nasarawa State University “A Quest for Self Identity in Wakako Yamauchi’s Play The Music Lessons” Ayca Ulker Erkan, Ege University Chair: Melissa Smith, Youngstown State University 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. Labor Arts and Re-Emergence of the Labor Mural Mike Alewitz, Central Connecticut State University Paul Buhle, Brown University Poetry Reading Jamie Daniel, University of Illinois - Chicago Jim Daniels, Carnegie Mellon University “Kettle Bottom: Poems in Voices from the Coal Camp” Diane Fisher, poet May 17, Saturday Morning Workshops Class Documentaries “Steel Voices: From Mills to Malls and Movies” James V. Catano, Louisiana State University “No Justice, No Peace (Documentary)” Lynn Estomin “The Project and Results: Chicago Radical Jewish Elders Videotape Project” Stanley R. Rosen, University of Illinois and Director, Chicago Radical Jewish Elders “Women and Children Last: The Global Documentary Film and the New Rulers of the World” Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University Chair: Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University Class Identity & Cross-Class Dynamics Barbara Jensen, Metropolitan State University “Interactive Workshop – Proposal for a Class Identity and Cross-Class Dynamics Workshop” Betsy Leondar-Wright, United for a Fair Economy, and Felice Yeskel, University of Massachusetts Mill Creek Park History Hike “The Heaton Brothers, the Hopewell Furnace and the Origins of the Iron Industry in the Mahoning Valley” Rich Shale, Youngstown State University Prison Tour John Russo, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Core Faculty Speaking for Ourselves: Negotiating the Boundary between School, Work and Community through Working-Class Narratives Steve Abbott, Columbus State Community College Sue V. Lape, Columbus State Community College Rita Rice, Columbus State Community College Crystal Robinson, Columbus State Community College Jan E. Schmittauer, Ohio University - Chillicothe Theatre for Living “Interactive Workshop – Theatre for Living: Techniques for Exploring and Exposing the Intersections between Race, Class and Gender: Theresa Cluse-Tolar, University of Toledo, and Michel Coconis, Capital University Working-Class Housing Tour Brian Corbin, Catholic Diocese of Youngstown, Center for Working-Class Studies Community Affiliate Donna DeBlasio, Youngstown State University, Center for Working-Class Studies Core Faculty 1:00 - 2:25 p.m. Labor Organizing Within and Beyond the Academy: Forging Alliances Across Class, Race and Gender Boundaries Brenda Choresi Carter, Yale University Andor Skotnes, The Sage Colleges James Spady, College of William and Mary David A. Zonderman, North Carolina State University Chair: Kitty Krupat, New York University Queerly Classed: Exploring Intersections of Literature, Sexual Orientation and Class “Queer Studies and Social Class in the 21st Century” Renny Christopher, California State University, Channel Islands “Telling Our Stories: Literary Narratives in Resistance to a National Master Narrative” Joan Clingan, Prescott College “Training Gay: Liberace, Andy Warhol, and the Erasure of Class in Gay ‘Community’ Assimilation” Wendell Ricketts, writer Chair: Tom Copeland, Youngstown State University Working-Class Poetry: Gender, Race and Sexuality “Pedro Mir: Race, Class, Gender, and Revolution” Michael Hale, California State University, Northridge “Burning Beauty: Class and the Poems of Diane Wakoski, Eileen Myles, Wilma McDaniel, and Tracie Morris” Gary Lenhart, Dartmouth College “Diana diPrima: In the Vortex of Class, Gender, Sexuality, Race, Culture, and Art” Larry Smith, Firelands College of BGSU and Bottom Dog Press Chair: Stephanie Tingley, Youngstown State University 2:30 - 3:45 p.m. Poverty and Class: Education and the Economy “ACCESSing the World through Education: Where Academe Meets Grass Roots Activism” Vivyan Adair, Hamilton College, and Sandra Dahlberg, University of Houston - Downtown “Legitimating Corporate Education: Two-Year College Mission Statements” William DeGenaro, Miami University Hamilton “Our Enslavement of the Underpaid” Allan Matthews, National Initiative for Democracy Chair: Rob Levin, Youngstown State University Race Behind Bars Lessley Harmon, IMPACT Newsletter Staughton Lynd, Independent Scholar Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh Chair: David Roediger, University of Illinois Working-Class Self-Representation “Invisible Trauma: The Representation of Work and Workers in Harukile Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche” Michele Fazio, State University of New York – Stony Brook “The Contemporary Captivity Narrative: UFO Abduction Stories as Race and Class Allegories?” Jeanne E. Holland, University of Wyoming “Complexities in the Configurations of Class and Working-Class Representations” Gloria Larrieu, Alburquerque Technical-Vocational Institute “Here be Monsters: Representations of the Working-Class in Literature Zak Mucha, Independent Scholar Chair: Tim Strangleman, University of Nottingham 4:00 - 5:15 p.m. Gender, Work, and Geography “Gendered Experiences of the Restructuring of the Cattle-Beef Industry” Carrie Breitbach, Syracuse University “A Track to Freedom: Slavery and Emancipation in the Gendered Metropolis” Reccia Orzeck, Syracuse University “Getting in the Picture: Gender, Cultural Labor and Total Request Live” Clayton Rosati, Syracuse University Chair: Don Mitchell, Syracuse University, Center for Working-Class Studies Advisory Board The Literature of African-American Labor “The Racialization of Class Desire in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” Anthony Dawahare, California State University, Northridge “The Class Politics of Blackness: Chester Himes’ Lonely Crusade” Alex Lubin, University of New Mexico “Metaphors of the Material: Ann Petry’s The Street and the Economy of Black Black Womanhood” Bill Mullen, University of Texas San Antonio Chair: Barbara Foley, Rutgers University Working-Class Participation: Voting Patterns and Coalition Building “Immigration Reform and the Working-Class Electoral Support in the 1980s” Dominic Cote, McGill University “Documentation of Successful Worker Struggles” Edna Ewell-Watson, Eastern Michigan University “Race, Class and Gender Voting Patterns and Frequency in Ohio: Past, Present and Future Implications” Leo Jennings, Burges & Burges Strategists Chair: Bill Binning, Youngstown State University 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. KEYNOTE PRESENTATION “The Writer in His Society” Agymah Kamau, Creative Writing, University of Oklahoma Abstracts Working-Class Studies: Intersections with Race, Gender, and Sexuality Vivyan C. Adair, Hamilton College, vadair@hamilton.edu Sandra L. Dahlberg, University of Houston-Downtown, DahlbergS@uhd.edu ACCESSing the World through Education: Where Academe Meets Grass Roots Activism As Karl Marx once suggested, our goal as activists should be not simply to understand, but to understand and change the world. As working class/poverty class scholars, we celebrate higher education's radical potential to impact class structures, to mitigate poverty and material oppression, and to address and work against the ignorance that fuels racism, classism, sexism and homophobia. In our presentation we make a connection between theories that allow us to understand post-secondary education's ability to impact lives in ways that address these pressing social issues, (while recognizing that education can foster the very systems that it can undermine) and explore the operations of a successful and unique program that impacts both higher education and the lives of working-class and poverty-class people. Carrie Breitbach, Syracuse University, cbreitba@maxwell.syr.edu Gendered Experiences of the Restructuring of the Cattle-Beef Industry Throughout the history of the industrialization of cattle and beef production in the United States, constructions of gender have been mobilized to delegate place and function within the social relations of production and consumption. Gendered divisions of labor and gendered constructions of diet and the body have been variously used to ensure capital accumulation as well as to provide for social reproduction. Scholars with a number of focus points have examined the intersections of gender and various sectors of the meat industry. Examples of this work include studies of rural women’s work, and to a lesser degree, women’s work with animals (both of these have until recently largely been looked at in a non-Western context), the construction of the cowboy, and the later-recognized role of women in the west, the gendered and racial divides of packing house work, and gendered consumer practices and strategies. Though there has been a considerable amount of attention to the ways that gender has been constructed through beef production practices, this work is far from exhausted. What is particularly needed is a framework for connecting these multiple constructions of gender into an analysis of accumulation and exploitation through uneven development. Such a framework targets the industrial system of cattle and beef production as the prime beneficiary of gendered constructions. This paper examines one aspect of how industrial cattle and beef production benefits from gender constructions through an analysis of the advertising campaigns of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the industry structures of which these campaigns are a part. Recent marketing is focused on young girls, in the hopes that they will become lifelong beef consumers and the eventual beef providers to husbands and children. Especially featured in this and other Beef Board campaigns are new, more expensive, ready-to-eat and processed products. The campaign, funded through a check-off program that producers must pay into each time they sell an animal, is justified through research suggesting that many young girls have iron deficiencies, the implication being that the beef industry is concerned with children’s health. There is a jarring contradiction between the claims of the campaign – concern with girls’ health – and the overall industry structure of which the campaign is a part. The advertising campaign represents not only the efforts of the industry to ensure a market and continued accumulation, but also the attempts of the industry to erase class conflict between producers and packers or retailers in order to ensure producer cooperation with restructuring. Beef industry restructuring, as a part of broader trends in agro-industrialization, has been a process of consolidation and integration that has redirected capital away from many small towns. In many instances, it is women who are left to compensate for the gaps left in provision for social reproduction by retreating capital. Further, a declining tax base and depopulation have led to reduced social services, especially in the form of school consolidation. The results of restructuring, then, are precisely contrary to ensuring social and physical well-being and instead contribute to a growing class divide between producers and workers and the consumers targeted by the beef industry. Ron Briley, Sandia Preparatory School,snrbrile@nedcomm.nm.org Working Class Jane: Jane Fonda and Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker Jane Fonda has gone through many incarnations in her professional and personal lives: Barbarella sex symbol, Vietnam War dissident Hanoi Jane, serious Academy Award-winning actress in films such as Klute, divorce from political activist Tom Hayden and marriage to capitalist Ted Turner, exercise video guru, divorce from the iconoclastic Turner, and immersion in the Christian evangelical movement. Fonda’s propensity to attract herself to the latest fad and fashion has led many to ridicule the actress and her political attachments. However, such condemnation of Fonda’s private life should not obscure that she has produced a considerable body of important work. Often overlooked in Fonda’s career is her producing and starring roles in the 1984 television production of Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker. Arnow’s novel, published in the early 1950s, tells the story of Appalachian whites moving to Detroit in pursuit of work in the defense industry during the Second World War. The “Arsenal of Democracy” proves to be more of an American nightmare than dream for Gerti Nevels and her family. While the production does tend to perpetuate the Hollywood myth that the working class is simply white, racial themes are interwoven in this story of Detroit in the war years. This paper will examine Fonda’s production and performance, under the direction of Daniel Petrie, of Arnow’s The Dollmaker. The film tends to introduce feminist elements less developed in the novel, but Fonda’s The Dollmaker deserves strong marks for raising working class concerns during the anti-labor days of the Reagan administration. As the labor movement and working class people carry the brunt of the burden in the so-called war on terrorism, texts such as Arnow’s The Dollmaker, and Fonda’s fine film adaptation, deserve reconsideration and, hopefully, emulation. Sylvia Bryce-Wunder, University of St. Andrews, sbryce@gto.net The Shadow of No Mean City: Exploitation of Influence in Modern Scottish Urban Fiction No Mean City (1935), by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long, is the most important Glasgow novel influencing the presentation of working-class life in modern Scottish urban fiction. The controversy surrounding No Mean City has always been intense, largely because of the subversiveness of McArthur and Long’s depictions of Glaswegian slum dwellers. The novel demonstrates that adherence to the British class system coalesces with the acceptance of abusive and exploitative gender relations, producing the social and economic conditions for the development of damaged working-class identity. This paper scrutinizes the literary, cultural and political influences bearing on the writing and publication of No Mean City, and assesses the critical tradition surrounding the novel, from the first reviews of 1935 and 1936 to present day. A textual analysis explores McArthur and Long’s scathing representations of the Glaswegian working class. No Mean City’s influence is then traced in a selection of Scottish urban novels including William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw (1977), Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (1981), James Kelman’s The Busconductor Hines (1984) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Porno (2002). This examination of the legacy of the most notorious and maligned working-class novel in modern Scottish literary history demonstrates that its impact – notwithstanding its many detractors – has become something for many Scottish urban authors to write about and against. Lew Acacia, Kent State University, lcacciaj@kent.edu Workplace Risk Communication: Literate Practice as Rhetorical Act Workers’ compensation, as calculated by the National Safety Council, totals $120 billion a year. Of that amount, $20 billion comes from medical expenses. The remaining expenses come from lost wages and lost productivity (Atkinson, 1999, p. 49). Obviously, despite modern advances in occupational technology and in legislated regulation of occupational demands, risk still pervades the workplace. Workplace risk poses the greatest threat to blue-collar professionals. That is not to say risks aren’t inherent across the range of professions, especially considering the increased risk of tuberculosis to medical workers, teachers, and homeless shelter assistants during the 1990s (Field, 2001, p. 95). Still, manufacturers and construction workers often find long-term disability insurance far more expensive than do workers in many other occupations (Braes, 1994, p. 35). Indeed, chemicals and particles such as benzene, asbestos, and lead can induce greater risks of, respectively, leukemia, asbestosis, and destruction of reproductive capabilities (Beauchamp and Bowie, 1993, p. 180). The comparatively greater risk confronting blue-collars workers includes not only accumulative effect but also catastrophic occurrence. Glissando Mazola (2000), for example, notes that personnel working on offshore platform installations face exposure to toxic, flammable gasses released from pipelines ruptured by dropped loads during crane activities (p. 327). Workplace risk, however, is not so apparent to employers, particularly when the alleged risks are accumulative. The risk assessed relative to specific workplace environments rarely achieves consensus, at least not without extensive negotiation. Bursting and Kromhout’s (2000) conclusion that road construction workers are exposed to risks from coal-tar materials, engine-exhaust fumes, and emissions from bitumen materials (p. 653) is qualified by recognition that risks vary according to project, task, and most importantly, individual (p. 662). Another risk issue open for debate is the influence of job strain on cardiovascular disease in relation to individual variables such as alcohol consumption, body mass, smoking habits, and level of education (Landsbergis et al., p. 100). As the conclusions drawn through risk analysis are typically speculative, risk communication does not lack for rival hypotheses. Risk communication may be defined as providing the information needed “to make informed judgments about risks to health, safety, and the environment” (Morgan et. al, 1992, p. 2049). As the ultimate end of risk communication is usually persuasion, risk communication can be examined as a rhetorical activity. Katherine Rowan (1994) offers a rhetorical model for risk communication studies that assumes “risk communication situations . . . like all communication situations . . . include sources, receivers, messages, channels, and contexts.” Rowan’s rhetorical model further assumes that risk communication situations “are distinct only in their topics,” topics that are often controversial and technically difficult to understand. Because of the controversial and technically-difficult nature of the topics, risk communication is typically complicated by “feelings of suspicion, confusion, ignorance, disagreement, and apathy” (p. 30). Focusing on risk communication situations at the level of channel, literate practices are central to rhetorical activity. In other words, if we are to define rhetoric as the use of language to influence the thoughts and actions of one’s audience, then we will find that literate practices in the workplace are being used to persuade, even manipulate, perceptions of risk. Brenda Choresi Carter, Yale University, brenda.carter@yale.edu Organizing at Yale The decade-long drive to organize graduate teachers and researchers at Yale University culminated this year in a week-long strike for recognition. Hundreds of members of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) participated in the strike together with thousands of clerical, technical, maintenance, and dining hall workers, members of Locals 34 and 35 of the H.E.R.E. and District 1199 of the S.E.I.U. The four unions are joined together in the Federation of Hospital and University Employees, which is also linked with the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, through which members of the New Haven community are organizing for a new “social contract” between New Haven and Yale, the city’s largest employer. I will discuss my experience organizing as a graduate student within the unique and exciting alliance among GESO, the predominantly female “pink collar” workers of Local 34, the predominantly male and African-American “blue collar” workers of Local 35 and District 1199, and New Haven community members who are primarily African-American and Latino. I will discuss the challenges presented by organizing across occupation, class, race, and age, and argue that the Yale/New Haven organizing drive provides a model for organizing in a post-industrial economy. James V. Catano, Louisiana State University, catano@lsu.edu Articulating Anxiety: Masculinity and Labor Narratives Workplace narratives--those told on the shop floor and those told about the shop floor--are adaptations and alterations of other stories rooted in deeply seated cultural myths. Workers' tales are thus helpful in recognizing not only workplace shifts, but also variations and negotiations within socio- cultural beliefs and behaviors as a whole, particularly those addressing gender configurations. Within such tales, masculine values are put under pressure, and they begin to reveal their attachment to deep anxieties over patterns of sadism and masochism that are central to masculinity. These tensions are intensified in narratives like those of the steel industry, where both the raw power and processes of large-scale steel making underwrite its long-standing history as a premier arena in which to represent and enact masculinity. During the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, steel production was essentially a craft-based, small-group process that often used literal paternal hierarchies to structure the group and its behaviors. The oedipal overtones of that structure quickly collapsed, however, with late nineteenth-century development of technological processes for mass-producing steel. As paternalism quickly gave way to mass production, workers were faced with significant changes regarding worker agency, control of the shop floor, proper modes of aggression, and proper targets for that aggression. Ultimately, and even more traumatically perhaps, workers faced the demasculinizing forces of late twentieth-century deindustrialization. These alterations underwrite the ways in which workers' tales of masculinity enact, interrogate, and even endorse sadomasochism as both a core value and a deep conflict in masculine training. Ultimately they do so in order to deny key implications that the dominant myth of masculinity encourages but is loath to acknowledge, let alone address. James V. Catano, Louisiana State University, catano@lsu.edu Making, Unmaking, and Remaking History: Memorializing Carnegie's Legacy The Homestead memorial is a small, granite monument erected in 1941 by the United Steelworkers of America in Homestead, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Designed to memorialize a bloody 1892 labor action at Carnegie’s steel mill, the monument’s "intended rhetoric" echoes that of war memorials. At the same time, the monument offers itself as a counter-memory to that provided just eight blocks away by Carnegie's own memorial: the huge library intended to serve, Carnegie declared during its 1898 dedication, as "an emblem of peace, reconciliation, mental confidence, harmony, and union" between workers and owners. These two monuments still stand today, but Homestead no longer contains steel mills, nor many steelworkers. Instead, the site of the former mills is "The Waterfront," which contains "memory makers," monuments left there for their "entertainment" value, since the owners do not want to "dwell on the past." Memorials are not fixed truths, then, even though their regular use of stone attempts to suggest otherwise. Their effects are really no more--and no less--than the historical, contextual meanings produced within the rhetorical dynamic that any particular audience is able to enact--alongside, or against the stated claims of the memorial itself. James V. Catano, Louisiana State University, catano@lsu.edu Steel Voices: From Mills to Malls and Movies In 1892, the workers, civic authorities, and citizens of Homestead, Pennsylvania insist on having a voice in the running of Homestead's Carnegie steel mill. The ensuing lockout and Battle of Homestead lead to deaths among workers and strikebreakers alike, and ultimately the loss by townspeople and workers of any real voice in the governance of their community and workplace. By 1942, new voices are being heard. The Steel Workers Organizing Council and Local 1397, Homestead, celebrate the one-year-anniversary of the dedication of the Homestead Steelworkers Memorial to the initial battle. But by 1992, the steel industry has collapsed. Today in 2002, the former mill site evokes different comments, memories, and commentary. It contains a new mall, light industry, and--sprinkled about in the midst of both--a variety of mementos of the site's former steel heritage: stacks, ladle cars, rolling presses. In addition, voices of historians, preservationists, former steelworkers, and community organizers are to be heard. Meanwhile, Steve Maszle, Homestead steelworker from 1938 to 1978: "Tear it all down. No one will understand what they are anyway." We might ask, "Who is right?" But we really need to be asking, "What voices are, should be, and ultimately will bespeak the heritage of Homestead and its steel-industry monuments?" It is this struggle to be heard, to have a voice in what is remembered and memorialized, that forms the heart of "Steel Voices," a 12-minute video documentary by James Catano and Gerard Byrne. What this film asks is whether the "Steel Heritage" to be preserved includes the "Steelworkers' Heritage"--or just the machinery and material constructions they left behind. Renny Christopher, California State University, Channel Islands, renny.christopher@csuci.edu Queer Studies and Social Class in the 21st Century In 1996, in a review essay in College English, Donald Morton faulted “well-known writers on sexual politics” for suppressing class politics from their writing. In 2003, class has gained visibility within queer theory and sexuality studies, just as sexuality studies itself has gained increasing visibility since the early 1990s. Class and sexuality have each, separately, become more visible. In the past, even when queer writers have written about class, as not only Dorothy Allison but also Paul Monette, Richard Rodriguez, and Leslie Feinberg have been doing for years, frequently every aspect of their work except class has been discussed. Now, though, to paraphrase the title of Julia Penelope’s pioneering anthology, class has come out of the closet, and is foregrounded in new works that relate to sexuality and feminism. This presentation looks at how newly-published works like C.L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, Out in the South (Temple UP, 2001), Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (Routledge, 2000) Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Duke UP, 2000), and Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class (Monthly Review Press, 2001) have advanced discussions about the interrelations of class formation, sexuality, and feminist theory, and how they draw on, extend, or diverge from the generation of works of the 1990s. Victor Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University, vcohen@andrew.cmu.edu Revolutionary Entertainment and the Pre-Code Warner Brothers Machine: A Fleeting Glimpse at a Proletarian Cinema In this paper, I use several of the "social consciousness" films of the Warner Brothers studio of the 1930s to argue that American cinema was becoming "proletarianized" during the early years of the Great Depression, and also that this impulse was disabled by the strict enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934, which effectively concealed this chapter of American film history from the public, and with it not only a filmic vision of oppositional working-class identity, but also a burgeoning materialist critique of class conflict that was becoming a generic marker of this studio's films. I argue that this drive on the part of the Warner Brothers studio fostered a situation in which the common-sense vernacular of film narrative, the personalization of all social and political problems, was unable to adequately deal with the issues being cinematized, and that in their efforts to wed traditional narrative structure to a leftist social critique, the studio generated a space for the working class to be represented in revolutionary form. I provide a history of this effort on the part of the studio to depict the American socio-political landscape in a "realistic" fashion, and how it forced an awareness of the class (or at least mass)-oriented struggles of the era onto the mainstream movie screen, placing a formative working-class cinema into circulation as a legitimate and competitive form of mass entertainment. While the film I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is often referred to as the representative text of this genre, the majority of the paper focuses on two of William Wellman's lesser-known films, Heroes For Sale (1933) and Wild Boys of the Road (1933), and shows the ways these texts, in contradictory and conflicting ways, construct a vision of the class struggles of the Depression that is both aligned with the working class, and at times, sympathetic to its revolutionary goals. Paola Corso, poet, paola_corso@hotmail.com Poetry Reading of “A Proper Burial” with photographs by George Thomas Mendel Book reviews: Varied in sound, form, and voice, the poems of Paola Corso’s chapbook, “A Proper Burial,” are united by a vivid immediacy of people and place and an elegiac core. Through the rhythms of machinery, speech, memory, and human interaction, she makes us realize the vitality we lose when a community dies. Walter Cummins The Literary Review Paola Corso’s sympathetic voice evokes post-industrial Pittsburgh with its detritus of old women and boarded-up greengrocers, a Pittsburgh that’s missed the high-tech revolution. But unlike an exercise in nostalgia, the poems capture the tastes, sounds and smells of a lively Italian family’s work-oriented life, with its joys and sorrows. “A Proper Burial” is a welcome addition to working-class literature. Patricia Dobler Director, Women’s Creative Writing Center at Carlow College Margaret Costello, Ampere Electrical Contracting, ampereinc@charter.net The Fluidity of Class and Gender: Questions from the Flow of Electrons I grew up with bricklayers, concrete blocks and blueprints. As a licensed master electrician, female companionship at my job level has been the exception rather than the rule for almost thirty years. Questions raised as a “diversifying worker” within the building trades reach far beyond gender. Electricity teaches me that as workers, as portions of organizations, we could be so much more than we are. The negative corollary is that we are being less than we could be. What questions fall between the cracks of political ideology and the lives of building tradesworkers? Assuming that change is inevitable, how can creativity and focus upon power implement change? Jeff R. Crump, Housing Studies Program, University of Minnesota, jrcrump@che.umn.edu Producing and Enforcing the Geography of Hate: Race, Class, and Housing Segregation in the United Cities in the United States are the most racially segregated urban areas in the world. The segregated residential structure of U.S. cities reflects discrimination in housing markets that systematically limits the housing options available to minorities, particularly African-Americans. At the same time that many African-Americans reside in deteriorating urban ghettos, affluent Euro-Americans maintain the system of racial segregation by creating exclusionary gated communities; their fear of the demonized “other” ameliorated by guards, security cameras, and walls. The divided urban landscape of early 21st century America is characterized by mutual distrust, fear, exclusion, and economic and social discrimination. Racial segregation in housing is created and maintained by a multiplicity of private and public actors operating at a variety of spatial scales. At the national scale, federal housing policy, explicitly promoted racial segregation in housing. The policies of the Federal Home Administration (FHA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are particularly noteworthy in this regard. There is also little doubt that private interests, particularly the banking, construction, and real estate industries played significant roles in producing racial segregation. Redlining and blockbusting are just two of the most nefarious methods used by the banking and real estate industries to perpetuate racial segregation in housing. Moreover, federal policy goals and private sector objectives run parallel, as the banking and real estate sectors help to shape federal housing policies. Local politics also play a critical role in shaping the geography of housing. Common examples include urban redevelopment efforts, characterized by critics as ‘Negro removal’ and exclusionary planning regulations that aid in the production and maintenance of segregated residential landscapes. At the neighborhood and individual scales, hate crimes are used by whites to preserve racial boundaries and maintain the racial purity of their communities. In a provocative and important argument, Meyer (2000) argues that the violent opposition of Euro-Americans to racially integrated communities led to institutional responses that attempted to defuse racial tensions by keeping African-Americans apart from whites. In this view, institutional actions promoting racial segregation were responses to violent white racism. Because white violence helped to shape local, state, and federal housing policies, the impact of housing-related hate crimes reached far beyond the neighborhood level and had far reaching consequences at a variety of scales. In sum, I argue that a complex amalgam of individual and institutional racism created and continues to maintain racial segregation in the housing market of the United States. Hate crimes are an integral part of the overall system of domination and subordination that has produced the racially segregated landscape of the U.S. city. Charles Cunningham, Carnegie Mellon University, cc7v@andrew.cmu.edu Harry Harrison Kroll and the Theory and Politics of Class in the 1930s Harry Harrison Kroll was a best-selling author in the 1930s. Although he is now mostly forgotten, Kroll produced the popular novel Cabin in the Cotton (1931), which was adapted into a 1932 Bette Davis film remarkable for its frank description of class conflict. In 1937, capitalizing on the increasing public interest in agrarian poverty, he wrote a widely reviewed memoir I Was a Sharecropper. Both these works are ruminations on what it meant to be poor and yet anxious to rise in station. While middle class writers such as Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck, and numerous others wrote treatments of rural poverty, Kroll was unusual for having actually experienced it. In fact, his writing about poverty is what enabled him to escape it. In these books, Kroll describes class relations in the tenant system as structurally unjust and even superexploitative. Yet, his analysis also assumes that race and class hierarchies are natural to some extent, unwittingly reproducing the elitist positions he attacks. More interestingly, the memoir shows the contradiction between his feelings of solidarity with the poor working class and the conflicts within his family over his rise into the middle class. In the novel, this kind of conflict is improbably resolved in a way impossible in his own life. Thus, the theoretical weakness of his analysis of poverty and class hierarchy is poignantly embodied in real familial strife and alienation. Jim Daniels, Carnegie Mellon University, jd6s@andrew.cmu.edu Reading Jim Daniels will be reading from his new books Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems and Detroit Tales. Mary Davis, Labour History, Head of Centre for Trade Union Studies/ Deputy Director, Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, m.davis@londonmet.ac.uk The British Labour Movement and British Imperialism This paper is part of a longer study on the impact of British Imperialism and its attendant ideologies (in particular ‘scientific’ racism) on the development of the British Labour Movement. The macro research question is to explore and hopefully explain British Labour Movement exceptionalism of Continental Europe in relation to the absence (in the former) of a mass Marxist party from the 1880’s. Put briefly my hypothesis is that although trade unions were very strong in Britain, the socialist movement, which was beginning to resurrect itself in the 1880's was caught on the tidal wave of imperialist hysteria and was weakened by it. Of course, the labour movements of other European countries were affected by imperialist propaganda and practice, but in the main most of the countries of continental Europe had established independent socialist parties by the last quarter of the 19th century. In Britain, with the exception of the Chartists, in the first half of the 19th century, trade unionism took precedence over socialist politics. When, by 1900, the unions recognized, at long last, that they could not rely on the Liberal Party to represent their interests, the resulting political formation, the Labour Representation Committee, was a compromise between a barely established socialist tradition (the Independent Labour Party formed in 1893) and the older incorporated lib-labism. Although it was the main force in building the unity between the industrial and political wings of the labour movement, the Independent Labour Party paid an enormous price for its efforts. It sacrificed both its socialism and its independence for the sake of unity. The end result was a Labour Party, the ideology of which could best be described as labourist rather than socialist. Until the 1920’s, the Labour movement’s attitude to the Empire was supportive but not pro-active. Thereafter the leadership actively developed a colonial policy. I shall examine the reasons for this as well as analyzing the policy itself especially in relation to colonial independence movements and post-independence governments. This will entail an assessment of the ways in which: 1. the TUC acted as the conduit of Labour Party policy on the colonies and assisted in the implementation of that policy during the Labour governments of 1945-51; 2. the labour movement’s anti-communist ideology shaped its attitude to colonial independence movements; 3. TUC-inspired trade unionism in the colonies acted as a buffer against independence movements and/or provided a bulwark against anti-western post- independence outcomes; 4. the policy and practice of the TUC related to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) on colonial questions. 5. TUC policies on imperialism and colonial independence movements impacted on union attitudes to black workers in Britain. . ‘Lib-labism’ was the practice developed after the Second Reform Act of 1867 whereby working class men seeking election to the House of Commons serving predominantly working class constituencies stood as Liberal candidates. The 1867 Act had extended the franchise to better paid male workers. Anthony Dawahare, California State University, Northridge anthony.dawahare@csun.edu The Racialization of Class Desire in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand I will discuss the ways in which literature of the Harlem Renaissance racialized class positioning and class desire. This racialization of class itself has a long history in the Americas, due to the ideologies and practices of slavery that equated blackness with servitude and being of the “lower” class. I will explore the dynamics and implications of this racialization through an analysis of Nella Larsen’s novel, Quicksand. In Quicksand, the protagonist, Helga Crane, a “mulata,” desires to escape racial categorization and objectification. Yet, her desire to be free from the experience of racism entails, for her, a love-hate relationship with the black working class. By the novel’s end, it becomes clear that Helga’s bourgeois desire for a life of leisure, entertainment, and consumption is the driving force of her racial confusion and desire not to be black. That is, above all else she wants to be bourgeois, yet racism—whether the kind she experiences in the U.S. or the exoticism she experiences in Copenhagen while fleeing America--prevents her from attaining her class desires without compromise. The novel insightfully presents the complicated desire to escape from the problems of a racialized class society, yet it cannot see any way out of the problem. To become bourgeois (coded as white) and no longer associated with the objectified and commodified black working class is the illusory goal to which Helga aspires. William DeGenaro, Miami University Hamilton, degenaw@muohio.edu Legitimating Corporate Education: Two-Year College Mission Statements For critical scholars of higher education, the ever-increasing consumer orientation of colleges and universities in the U.S. is a problematic trend. Critics (Connell and Galasinki, Peeke, Swales and Rogers) have pointed to the growing popularity of mission statements at institutions of learning as one of the signposts of the shift toward a corporate model of education. The mission statement can be read as a tool of legitimation and dominant ideology. Not only have mission statements in our own age put colleges and universities in service to business interests, they have also served to increase the efficient functioning of the institution. By clearly and carefully articulating the aims and purposes of education, they have allowed colleges to check their own ability to meet those specific purposes. In other words, as efficiency apparatuses, mission statements are tools of the corporate state. Thus the imperative to examine the antecedents of contemporary mission statements. Just as we are witnessing today a movement toward privatization, the progressive era gave rise to colleges fashioned to serve private interests, specifically the interests of capital. Since the rise of two-year colleges is one of the key achievements of schooling during the progressive era, this presentation looks specifically at the mission statements used by the earliest two-year colleges. I argue that ultimately, these early mission statements were not merely communicative, but also constitutive of the identity of the two-year college. Specifically, the missions helped give (public) voice to the virtues of education for the purpose of mobility. These missions had a wide-ranging readership, by virtue of their placement in course catalogues and various community publications, but because of their marked abstractions fail to articulate a unified vision of “corporate education.” In my presentation, I rely on overheads of college missions, culled from archival research, which augment my spoken delivery of my critique and give voice to the primary texts with which I work. Ayça Ülker Erkan, EGE University, Turkey, aycacici@yahoo.com A Quest for Self Identity in Wakako Yamauchi’s Play: The Music Lessons The aim of this paper is to explore the social and cultural life of Japanese Americans, who experience difficulty in integrating themselves to the dominant American culture and life, in The Music Lessons. Japanese Americans belong to neither the Japanese culture nor the American culture, in other words, they are trapped in between. Hence, their quest for identity can be interpreted as a search for a secure place in a non-secure arena. However, while they live on the periphery, the secure place they want to attain is inevitably located in the center. The characters in the play are Issei (first generation Japanese Americans) but the most difficult situation awaits the Nisei (Japanese Americans born in the US) since they have to integrate themselves into a society that considers them aliens and tries to keep them on the margins. Nisei become a bridge between the two cultures. Nisei have no sense of belonging to Japan that is why the gap between the two generations is at its uttermost. Hence, there is a conflict between the mother and the daughter, as in the case of Aki and Chizuko in the play, which we perceive as a conflict of the Japanese culture integrating into the dominant American culture. Yamauchi reflects her cultural tradition by portraying the lives of the Japanese rural immigrants and thus she remains loyal to Japanese culture. Meanwhile, the quest for self-identity comes to the foreground and this quest demonstrates transnational ethnic dimensions. Individual quest for self-identity finds its parallel in Japanese Americans’ search for their own culture and in their attempt to keep their traditions and art alive. The sense of belonging to Japanese culture as they also create a space for themselves within the dominant American society is the central theme that also applies to other ethnic groups in the United States. Megan Falater, Honors College, Arizona State University Mary Romero, Justice Studies, Arizona State University, Mary.Romero@ASU.EDU Romancing Working Class Daughters: Remaking Class Dynamics in the Film "Sabrina" Social mobility for the working class is commonly presented as a process of acquiring cultural capital through assimilation. Consequently, emphasizing education among the children of immigrant and native workers is key to maintaining the notions of the American Dream and equal opportunity. Embedded is the Horatio Alger myth is the assumption that hard work is all an individual needs to be financially successful. In the case of working class daughters, there also exists the romantic Cinderella fantasy of marrying into the upper class. This paper analyzes the cultural construction of social mobility and class dynamics in film depiction of servant's children. Given my previous research on private household workers and more recently, research on the children of domestic workers, I have selected the original (1954) and remake (1995) of the film “Sabrina” for examining class and intersection race, gender and sexuality in popular culture. “Sabrina” focuses the analysis on domestic service and on workers' children. The films' plot provides a framework for interrogating ideologies of social mobility and class. Sabrina Fairchild is the chauffeur's daughter who lives with her father in the servants' quarters located above his wealthy employer's garage. Linus and David Larrabee are the two eligible bachelors in the employer's household. Sabrina has been infatuated with David all her life but is unable to attract his attention until she returns from Paris: transformed from a young, shy, and awkward girl to an elegant, sophisticated, beautiful woman. As the president of the Larrabee corporate empire, Linus fears that Sabrina may endanger David's imminent wedding to another corporate family. Linus first attempts to distract Sabrina by charm and then by buying her off. Scenes of employee culture that is situated in the kitchen offer a comparison between workers and employers' assessment of mixed-class romance and social mobility. While both versions of the film are based on Samuel A. Taylor's play, Sabrina Fair, the differences between each version point to the changes in depicting class dynamics (and related ideologies) in popular culture over the last forty years. Contrasting and comparing these films suggest ways in which class ideology has been transformed over time and remaining tensions in depicting class diversity that is inclusive of race, gender and sexuality. Identifying aspects of culture and identity popularized in film, can assist working-class studies educators and organizers in common myths and everyday understandings of class relations. Beverly A. Gray, Youngstown State University, bagray@ysu.edu Stress in African Americans: Health Consequences of Race, Gender, and Class The field of stress research has rarely included or even acknowledged the role of race, gender or class in the stress (major life events and daily hassles) experiences of African American men and women. Race, gender, and class are unique social and psychological stressors with physical, social, economic, and mental health consequences. In addition, these stressors affect the availability and the utilization of resources (e.g. access to health care, availability and presence of support systems) for coping. There are few, if any stress management books which enable African Americans to deal more effectively with such stressors, with the exception of the occasional article in minority published magazines. Given the higher rates of stress-related illnesses and disorders such as heart disease, hypertension, and the shorter life expectancy of African Americans, it is especially critical that the psychosocial stressors of race, gender, and class be examined and understood. The proposed interdisciplinary two section paper will present empirical and theoretical research on stress and coping from the fields of social psychology, health psychology, sociology, and psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). In section one, the results of a survey on the stressors and the coping techniques reported by a diverse sample of African American men and women, as well as, their demographic profile will be presented. The role of formal (professional) and informal (personal) support systems in mediating race, gender, and class related stressors will be investigated. In section two, health issues confronting African Americans as a function of race, gender, and class related stressors will be analyzed. In addition, the development of coping techniques as a function of class in response to racism and sexism will be examined. Finally, the most effective coping techniques for race, gender, and class related stressors will be discussed. David Greene, Ramapo College, dgreene@ramapo.edu The Matrix of Identity Revisited At a Working-Class Academics conference, I presented a narrative paper in which I traced the many ways in which my working class background influenced my journey through academe--from grammar school to Full Professor. In that paper, I firmly centered social class and did not include any other aspect of my identity (e.g., race, sex, religion). My paper was well received, and no one challenged my account by saying that things would have been different if I was a woman, or gay, or Black. But I knew differently. I knew that there is no one real version of being working class. I knew that many aspects of our categorically- based identities are modified by (and modify) other identity categories to which we belong. I knew that this paper represented a denial of the fact that identity is a matrix. In fact, a few years earlier, I had been invited to do a panel presentation on the theme, “The Social Construction of Masculinity: A Multicultural View.” In my paper, I attempted to center masculinity and then personally explore how my race, religion, social class and sexual orientation contributed to my male identity development. Although this attempt was rather elementary, some useful insights did emerge. For example, in thinking about my class background, I realized that the image of a man that had surrounded me was a physical one--using your body to express yourself, to protect yourself, to earn a living. Here I was taught to denigrate the middle and upper class man who was seen as being overly intellectual, effete, weak, fragile, less than a real man. However, in thinking about my religion, I realized that the majority culture’s stereotype of the Jewish man was that he is--overly intellectual, effete, weak, fragile, less than a real man. Thus within my predominantly Catholic neighborhood, trying to be both a Jewish man and a working class man at the same time was problematic. This conflict proved to play a large role in the way that I came to structure my identity. Whereas the working-class academic paper demonstrated that I can center my identity in social class alone and construct a reasonable interpretation of my life, the masculinity paper presented a methodology capable of questioning such an interpretation. I went on to write a second narrative in which I again centered social class, but then proceeded to examine the dynamic impact of other facets of my identity. My latest project is a yet more sophisticated attempt to use that methodology to create a personal dialog about the matrix of identity. In the first part of this work, I once again center only social class. I look at who I am today and discover several features that appear to have explicit origins in my life as a working-class kid—yet again a reasonable interpretation of my life. But this is followed by a second step. Here I introduce my other categorical memberships: sex, race, sexual orientation, immigrant status, ablebodiedness, and religion. I fold them in, one-by-one, and examine their dynamic interaction with social class and with each other. My working-class identity becomes much more complicated. That reasonable interpretation of my life becomes only one of many. The fact that my identity is a matrix becomes that much more apparent. After the narrative, I conclude with a discussion of issues in intersectionality that arise from my work. Michael Hale, California State University, Northridge-Graduate Student, csun_michael@yahoo.com Pedro Mir: Race, Class, Gender, and Revolution The poetry, essays, political activism, and remarkable life of Pedro Mir exemplify exactly the writer that should be discussed at a working class studies conference focused on the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Pedro Mir is the national poet of the Dominican Republic. Among other things, he was a poet, historian, teacher, activist, and most importantly an outspoken member and defender of the working class. He was exiled along with many other worker/activists fighting against the dictator Trujillo. Mir’s ten-page poem “There is a Country in the World” has such a dramatic impact upon workers in the Dominican Republic that many can recite it by memory. Mir’s poetry accomplishes two things almost simultaneously. He brings the brutal ravages of Trujillo’s dictatorship and U.S. imperialism into immediate and palpable view, while at the same time maintaining a hopeful view of the future based upon revolutionary optimism. He beautifully sews together many working class themes in a poetic form. He discusses the political economic forces driving the exploitation of the peasant worker and industrial worker. Many of his poems end in a multi-racial struggle where men and woman workers are fighting internationally to build an egalitarian world free from racism, sexism, and imperialism. Pedro Mir’s poetry is also deeply influenced by the sexual political and revolutionary optimism of Walt Whitman. The purpose of my presentation is to examine Pedro Mir’s poetic representation of the ravages of imperialism, his revolutionary vision of the future, and how Walt Whitman’s poetry influences his vision. Matthew Heffernan, Class of 2005 Bates College, mheffern@bates.edu Reemergence of Irish-American Ethnic Identity through Working-Class Music There has been a recent reemergence of Irish-American ethnic identity in working-class punk rock music spearheaded by Boston’s the Dropkick Murphys. This paper traces the role of Irish-American music through the assimilation of the Irish into American mainstream, WASP, culture in the late nineteenth century. Nearly a century later, the Dropkick Murphys have been the main force in a revival of Irish-American music and Irish-American consciousness through their blend of traditionally Irish folk and punk rock forms of music. This music combines the instruments, arrangements, and performance styles of both musical forms to create something entirely new and uniquely American. The music of the Dropkick Murphys and other groups influenced by them also presents lyrics that educate as well as inform about an ethnic an mainly working-class past. This musical expression challenges the dominant ideas on what it means to be Euro-American but not Anglo-American, and what constitutes “punk rock” or “folk. Bill Hetrick, Bethel College, hetrickw@bethel-college.edu Class, Consumer Culture, and Sign Value: The Strange Case of Abercrombie & Fitch The perspective taken in the following paper is that there exists as a parallel to the capitalist mode of production a corresponding capitalist mode of consumption. Production and consumption are, of course, co-requisites of each other, but compared to the production side, the sphere of consumption has received less attention among those on the Left. For affirmative postmodernists, consumption has superseded production as the point of critique. American consumer culture has had the dual effect of stifling a working-class consciousness, and perpetuating the hegemonic status of the capitalist class. Over the years, the marketing industry has facilitated the mass production and mass consumption process by propagating the ideology of consumerism. A continuous process of the social construction of consumer identities was intentionally developed. Because of the machinations of capital, one can observe the systematic degradation of work in the 20th century. Satisfaction had to be sought elsewhere. The advocates of capital found that the transformation of people from workers into consumers was indeed another very profitable venture. More importantly and insidiously, however, was the working class’s dependence on the system of consumer commodities circulating throughout the market place. Alienation and commodity fetishism are still relevant in the capitalist mode of consumption, albeit in revised forms. In the drive for super profits, it is argued that 21st century corporate enterprises must continue to be concerned with the production of brand, and the facilitation of brand equity, as opposed to mere product development. The clothing manufacturer A&F serves as a pristine case example of a brand that possesses not only hyper-exchange value, but also sign value. A content analysis of A&F’s advertising representations reveals a very troublesome appropriation of working-class type clothing coupled with the traditions and lifestyles of elite social groups. The popularity and appeal of this clothing line far exceeds its upper-class base, and adversely affects working-class young people, particularly high school and college students. In addition, the methodologies of semiotics, feminism, and queer theory assist us in alternative interpretations that could ultimately lead to forms of resistance. For A&F, the deployment of the ideology of consumerism not only has a profit-oriented motive, but also a strongly political one. Once deconstructed, A&F’s promotional agenda is rife with the reproduction of idealized images of white, male, Anglo, affluent privilege. For the case study, however, production is still a crucial concept. Under what labor conditions were A&F’s clothing items produced? Workers in lesser-developed countries are disproportionately represented, and this provides us with another deconstructive moment. Would it not look strange to view those people that actually manufactured the clothing to be seen as models in Abercrombie’s advertisements? This textual class “switch” supplies us with additional interpretive insights, and is consistent with the overall program of working-class studies, and a counter hegemonic agenda. Cheryl Higashida, English, University of Colorado at Boulder, cheryl.higashida@colorado.edu Engendering The Crisis and Opportunity of the Popular Front If U.S. literary radicalism – and its best-known form, proletarian fiction – was in its embryonic stage in 1927, it was in its death throes (as most accounts would have it) circa 1939. Too, the heyday of the NAACP’s Crisis and the Urban League’s Opportunity was but a faint dream by the late thirties, a long way from the journals’ pivotal roles in creating the Harlem Renaissance. Hence, with the notable exception of Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson’s seminal study of African American magazines, it is not surprising that studies of these journals’ significance to black letters focus on the twenties. Yet The Crisis and Opportunity continued to publish compelling literature well into the thirties and forties, and a wealth of black radical women’s writing can be found therein, as Paula Rabinowitz, Charlotte Nekola, and Suzanne Sowinska have shown. Ann Petry is the best known of these writers, but many others including Marian Minus and Lucille Boehm exemplified what Alain Locke called the “Newer Negro” – the generation of African American artists who built upon and transformed the political aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, extending its relevance to American cultural life of the thirties and beyond. Examining short stories by Petry, Minus, and Boehm, as well as the contexts in which they were published, I discuss some key ways in which black women writers explained, re-negotiated, and engendered working-class radicalism of the Popular Front to interracial, national audiences. Although male intellectuals often dominated the discussions circulating in The Crisis and Opportunity, radical women writers forged aesthetic strategies to recast those terms of debate that marginalized or erased their presence, as they articulated the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. William M. Hunter, Heberling Associates, whunter@heberlingassociates.com Mapping the Absences: Historic Preservation, Cultural Resource Management and the Geography of Exclusion Critics note that historic preservation and cultural resource management (CRM) suffer from an elite bias and uncritical approach to problems of historical significance. Often, in the practice of CRM, historic properties associated with productive labor are misinterpreted or overlooked, and are thereby excluded from the publicly financed texts and landscapes produced during development of major public works. This exclusion of working class contributions to landscape production and reproduction also obscures historically significant aspects of working class culture, namely those aspects associated with race, sexual identify, and the role of women. Using examples from the iron and steel complexes of central Pennsylvania, this paper advances critical geography as a way to illuminate the landscapes of production and social reproduction, identify significant resources that represent the relationship of race and gender to industrial production, and recover historical geographies lost to deindustrialization and urban renewal. Gary Jones, Muhlenberg College, Lecturer, gjones@muhlenberg.edu Get Your Man: The Pennsylvania Department of State Police, Labor, Violence and Masculinity during Progressive Era Pennsylvania, 1890-1917 “Get Your Man” was the most important motto of the troopers of the Pennsylvania Department of State Police, established in 1905-06. That motto indicates the relationship among force, violence and masculinity in the routine operation of the State Police, the formation of which was the single most important institutional response of the state to the bitter and constant class conflict that accompanied the consolidation of corporate capitalism during the Progressive Era. By examining the formation, organization and operation of the State Police and response of labor my paper argues that without the existence of contemporary notions of gender that linked masculinity to physical strength and aggression, the formation of the Pennsylvania Department of State Police and, indeed, the response of labor would have been impossible. As such, my paper contributes to the on-going debate about class and masculinity exhibited in the work of David Montgomery, Stephen H. Norwood, Gary Gerstle and Joshua B. Freeman and others. During the Progressive Era the State Police refused to distinguish between strikes and riots, hence strikers and rioters. According to the State Police a crowd inevitably became a mob and rioted. A crowd should therefore be dispersed before it became a mob and rioted. Indeed during a time of riot there were “no innocent bystanders.” Hence the motto “Get Your Man.” Consistently implemented such a policy inevitably led to tension and conflict, injury and death. So much so that according to Big Bill Haywood, during the McKees Rocks Strike of 1909, the Industrial Workers of the World warned the State Police that, “For every man you kill of us, we will kill one of you.” Furthermore, James Maurer, President of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor, and socialist state assemblymen, advocated that labor “learn the art, or we become trained in the science of militarism ourselves. I am sick and tired of having our men constantly shot at.” Therefore the state, in the formation and operation of the State Police, and labor, in its response to the State Police, simultaneously drew upon and valorized shared contemporary notions of masculinity. Such a conclusion does not erase the crucial difference between rhetoric and action in the case of labor, nor equate “labor violence” and “state violence” the origins, nature, extent and consequences of which were very different. In sum, an analysis of the role of gender, especially the practices and construction of masculinity, is crucial for our understanding of the relationship among the state, corporate capital and labor during the Progressive Era. J. Jones and Stacy Pirog, Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center, sandbill@rcn.com and stacyp@brandeis.edu "I Made an Honest Living": Representations of Self in a Portuguese American Working-Class Woman's Life Story During the first half of the nineteenth century, the whaling industry in New Bedford, Massachusetts attracted Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. Following the decline of the whaling industry in the late 1800s, Portuguese from the Azores, Cape Verde, Madeira, and mainland Portugal immigrated to the New Bedford area for employment in the city's burgeoning cotton-textile industry. When the textile industry closed factories in New England, a fraction of textile workers found employment in the apparel industry. At its peak in 1980, the apparel industry employed about 20,000 people in the manufacture of sewn goods, the majority of whom were women. This presentation explores the experience of work and the ways in which work informs subjectivity by drawing on analysis of interviews with a second-generation Portuguese woman who worked as a stitcher in the apparel industry for 50 years. After two years of retirement, she chose to return to work and is now employed in a supermarket bakery. Through narrative analysis, we represent the particular strengths and practices of survival employed by this woman and the ways in which work informs self and working-class consciousness. Patricia Keeton, Ramapo College of New Jersey, pkeeton@ramapo.edu Race, Class and Ideology in Contemporary American Film This paper will examine the representation of race in four contemporary American films that feature working class characters and settings, and in which white working class characters demonstrate a consciousness of the role that race plays in dividing black and white workers: Blue Collar (Schrader, 1978), Matewan (Sayles, 1989), A Time to Kill (Schumacher, 1996), and American History X (Tony Kaye, 1998). Generally, these films are viewed as liberal films with an anti-racist message. In all four films, the central white protagonists acknowledge racism as a crucial social and economic issue in society and challenge this racism in some way. All four films also have central black characters that are major voices in each film participating in the ideological debate in each film about racism in American society. However, in at least three of these films -- all but Matewan -- the economic and social arguments against racism are secondary to, and ultimately overshadowed by, moral and psychological arguments against racism. This paper will explore the ways in which narrative development and cinematic representation in these three films weaken the anti-racist analysis of the films by subtly conveying the message that blacks and whites do not share the same humanity, and that when whites do oppose racism, they must pay a price economically, socially, and personally. I will contrast this analysis with an examination of race, class, and ideology in Matewan, the only film of the four whose narrative and racial representation presents racism as a structural phenomenon in which whites have a material and economic stake in opposing racism as well as a moral one. Dan Kerr, Case Western Reserve University, drk9@po.cwru.edu Challenging Exploitation and Abuse: The Day Labor Industry in Cleveland, Ohio In the spring and summer 2001, Dan Kerr and Chris Dole led an extensive study of the day labor industry in Cleveland. The research findings made it abundantly clear that day laborers are one of the most abused and exploited segments of Cleveland’s working population. Although day laborers frequently do the region’s hottest, dirtiest and most dangerous labor, they typically bring home less than $30 a day for eight hours labor and four to six hours of waiting time off the clock. Large numbers of the city’s day laboring population are homeless while predatory day labor agencies thrive. Besides not being paid fairly for a hard days work, day laborers report being lied to about wages, hours and working conditions. Interviewees testified to being charged fees for necessary safety equipment, transportation, and check cashing services that bring their rate of pay below the minimum wage. Additionally they discussed the significant barriers day labor agencies erected to prevent them from gaining permanent employment. Day laborers also documented a persistent failure of day labor agencies to pay overtime or provide necessary safety equipment or training. Numerous stories of verbal abuse, blacklisting, discriminatory treatment and sexual harassment were also recounted. Efforts to transform the working lives of day laborers in Cleveland have gained momentum since the initial study. Day laborers, advocates, social service agencies and labor unions have come together to form a non-profit alternative Community Hiring Hall and promote the passage of municipal ordinance to regulate the day labor industry. Sandy Kifer, Clarion University of PA, s_skifer@clarion.edu Rogers J. Laugand III, Clarion University of PA, laugand@clarion.edu The Building Bridges Program Through a simulated Building Bridges session, you will be engaged in an active Building Bridges session and leave the session with some tools and ideas on how to begin the initial process of breaking down the racial barriers of discrimination and hate. The Building Bridges Program facilitates discussions on issues of race and diversity using an open and honest dialogue format. Creating a safe and non-judgmental environment is one of the key tools used to encourage engaging dialogue. The associates, a multi-ethnic group, are undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines and majors with varying interests. Among the members there are athletes, Student Senators, organization officers, sorority/fraternity members and student leaders. They are very involved in the campus and/or community. Diversity is an issue that should be of concern to every individual in our society today. Unfortunately, many view this as a problem for people of color to deal with or fix. However, the Building Bridges family believes that this is a societal problem and needs the attention of society for effective solutions. James Koshan, Thiel College, jkoshan@thiel.edu ‘If You Are Afraid, Go Home to the Children and Leave the Work to Us!’: The IWW, Immigrant ‘Strikers’ Wives,’ and the Pennsylvania State Constabulary in the McKees Rocks Strike of 1909 The commonality of immigrant peoples in western Pennsylvania during the early 1900s was the product of industrial capitalist development, the construction of communities, and the organizing efforts of a radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or “Wobblies”). In addition, the Pennsylvania State Constabulary, as representatives of industrial capitalism, had a tremendous impact on the course of labor struggles during the early Twentieth Century. Thus, the involvement of the State Police in the McKees Rocks Strike of 1909, part of a series of conflicts within the Pittsburgh district, and the subsequent reaction of foreign-born “strikers’ wives” to its presence, offers a lens to study the relationship between the IWW and the ethnically diverse immigrant workforce. The relationship between the IWW and immigrant labor was distinctive because Wobbly organizing helped transcend ethnic, religious, and to a degree, gender differences that so often divided foreign-born workers from southern and eastern Europe. Wobbly theorists and ethnic families both recognized the significant contributions made by working men and women in the gendered hierarchy of the steel towns, and based their respective ideologies on similar social justice concerns, such as “distributive justice” demands and “workplace rights” issues, that transcended cultural differences. These concepts will be exemplified in this paper through an examination of the statements and actions of the IWW, immigrant women, and the constabulary in the McKees Rocks area the steel strike of 1909. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the brand of industrial unionism preached by the Wobblies in this steel town was reflective of the basic social needs of a new industrial unionist working class, which primarily consisted of unskilled immigrant laborers and their families, who were attempting to bridge gaps, caused by various categories of difference, in an effort to attain their goals. The significance of this paper is that the Industrial Workers of the World addressed real social issues for a cross section of the immigrant population through a “reciprocal social process” that shaped both lives and institutions throughout western Pennsylvania. Daniel Lang/Levitsky, Means of Productions, glitz@clerk.com Events and Victims (A Play in Circumstantial Evidence) A semi-staged reading from a performance centered on Bartolomeo Vanzetti and other working-class immigrant radicals of the early twentieth century. Events and victims takes as its starting point not the trial of Vanzetti and Sacco, but their politics and work, militant revolutionary work that took place in small autonomous groups of men whose deep commitment to each other mirrored their shared commitment to the ideal that brought them together. Events and Victims is an attempt to explore the relationship between anarchist politics – politics based on affinity, the structures of feeling among close comrades – homosociality as it slides towards homoeroticism, and intergenerational, international convergences around certain ideas of how to go about organizing for radical social change, both then and now. Events and victims uses vaudeville, puppetry, and other popular performance forms of the early 20th century, stepping away from the melodramatic, purely narrative, and often hyper-naturalist ways in which Sacco and Vanzetti have been portrayed on stage and on film. The form of the piece as well as its content aims to break with the aura of fatality, of an inexorable march to the electric chair, that runs through presentations of the case, and give both a glimpse of the lives involved and a sense that the end of the story could have been otherwise. The performance draws on Vanzetti’s writings, the work of other anarchists of the period (Nicola Sacco, Alexander Berkman, Edward Carpenter, and Luigi Galleani in particular), and the notes, sketches, and research assembled by Marc Blitzstein (the openly gay, heterodox Communist composer/author of The Cradle Will Rock) for his unfinished opera Sacco and Vanzetti. The piece aims to revive and make useful the fluid conversation about the meanings of commitment visible in Vanzetti’s poetic letters about his “love of my beautiful Anarchy”, Berkman’s account of his “openly tender and affectionate” jailhouse romances, Carpenter’s pioneering queer anarchist writing of the 1910s, and many of their comrades’ work. I have used only their own words to construct the text of the piece, to let the voices these radicals made for themselves engage with each other – arranging and curating them rather than putting words, or thoughts, in their mouths. Events and victims is my contribution to the process of gleaning from past models ideas of how we can build, and understand, a radical movement based on deep commitment and personal affinity – the direct emotional as well as ideological ties between people – in the present moment. Christie Launius, Ohio University, launius@ohio.edu Representing One’s Race or Betraying One’s Class?: Paradoxes of Identity and Being in Five Memoirs of Education “College had given me a glimpse of a wider, whiter, wealthier world than my own. I wanted to assume its benefits, but not its identity. Did I have to be it, to share in it? That was the conflict that had wrestled me down and threatened to pin me there, in the projects” (PG 76). With these words from her memoir Project Girl, Janet McDonald captures what I take to be the central dynamic of a group of five memoirs by men and women of color (four are African-American, one is Mexican-American). These writers offer an intense exploration of the consequences of their pursuit of higher education, tackling in particular the relationship between the worlds of home and school and the questions of identity that arise from the encounter. In wanting to assume the benefits of the “wider, whiter, wealthier” world of college but not its identity, McDonald is attempting to resist assimilation, and she is not alone. Ruben Navarrette, Jr., Lorene Cary, Brent Staples, and John Edgar Wideman, explicitly or implicitly, ask a version of this question in their narratives. As a part of asking this question, these writers also contemplate something of a reverse formulation: whether the educational institutions they attend might be asking them to assume its identity without the intention (conscious or unconscious) of allowing them to fully share in its benefits. Further, they consider the potential cost of those benefits, whether proffered or withheld, including the cost to their relations to their families and communities of origin. Like Alice Walker in her essay, “My Father’s Country is the Poor,” they consider an educational system that allowed them to gain class mobility, but does not offer equal opportunity for all. Also like Walker, they do so through comparing their own lives to the lives of family members and/or friends. Put most simply, they contemplate who is excluded by their inclusion. Each of these texts tells a complicated tale of race, class, and education. John Edgar Wideman, acclaimed novelist, is the oldest of the five (b. 1941), while Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is the youngest, born in 1967. Their memoirs were published between 1984 and 1999. In one way or another, each is writing against the backdrop of the societal changes brought about by the civil rights movement, as well as the cultural and economic changes of the 1960s that resulted in the creation of an “underclass” in large part populated by African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Overall, these writers have conflicted feelings about their success. They realize on some level that the educational system is marked by and perpetuates the class hierarchy. They struggle with the question of whether they are being offered the opportunity to get an education on the basis of their race, and fear that a condition of taking this opportunity is that they in a certain sense leave the rest of their race behind. In order to represent their race, they must also be a traitor to their race. Unraveling this particularly snarled knot forms the basis of this paper. Part of what makes this knot so difficult to unravel is the fact that social class is rarely named as one of the sources of this paradox. When these writers perceive themselves to be traitors to their race, many times it is as a result of changes in their class allegiances or position. Put another way, the classed nature of racial identity often gets pushed into the background of these narratives. Gary Lenhart, Dartmouth College, gary.lenhart@dartmouth.edu Burning Beauty: Class and the Poems of Diane Wakoski, Eileen Myles, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, and Tracie Morris The oldest of these poets, now in her 80s, spent years as a farm laborer and published her first poem at age 55; the youngest, now near 30, was an acclaimed hip-hop poet from Brooklyn while still a teenager. But all four make poems that return again and again to their working-class origins. Looking at their poetry raises questions about class solidarity and individual alienation, aesthetics and audience, popular performance and authenticity. Though all are outspoken about their class origins, we can read in their poems how those origins are modified by generational, regional, ethnic, aesthetic, religious and experiential differences. Writing about slave narratives, K. Anthony Appiah said that “autobiography aims above all to establish the existence of the author-protagonist as an autonomous agent, a person whose life is worthy of interest, whose experiences and choices matter…by claiming mastery of the privileged sphere of literary production.” In the lyrics of these four poets, we see such insistence upon the worth of one’s “experiences and choices,” and its resonance for ideas about class in the U.S.A. This is adapted from the last chapter of a manuscript, tentatively titled The Stamp of Class: Essays about Poetry and Social Class, which reflects on the conflict between the dream of a classless society and the disappointments suffered by poets moved by that dream. Sherry Lee Linkon, Youngstown State University, sllinkon@ysu.edu Jack Metzgar, Roosevelt University, jackmetz1@attbi.com Dorian Warren, Yale University, dorian.warren@yale.edu Michael Zweig, State University of New York at Stony Brook, mzweig@notes.cc.suynsb.edu Contesting the Class Vernacular: Zweig’s Alternative? A roundtable discussion on how best to contest the vernacular conception of classes in America – that is, the three-class notion of rich-poor-and-middle class where almost everybody is seen as middle class. Jack Metzgar will critique Michael Zweig’s alternative three-class model (working, middle, and capitalist classes) and propose a less ambitious tweaking of the vernacular. Metzgar proposes to simply divide the vernacular’s sprawling “middle” into a “working class” and a “professional middle class” based on multiple factors (rather than just occupation) and to work within the vernacular’s shifting connotations for practical political reasons. Zweig holds that it is important to develop a vernacular that explicitly identifies the capitalist class and that links “the poor” more clearly with the working class. Sherry Lee Linkon and Dorian Warren will then comment on the debate before opening up discussion to the audience. Should be of special interest to college teachers who use Zweig’s landmark text, The Working-Class Majority, and those interested in American electoral politics. Sheryl J. LeSage, University of Oklahoma, sjlesage@ou.edu Including Whom? Ambivalence toward Race and Gender in Jack London’s “The Iron Heel” and “Martin Eden” London’s socialist-utopian vision is expressed very differently in two of his novels, The Iron Heel and Martin Eden. The works resemble each other in terms of plot, character, general themes, attitudes toward the ruling classes, and even the romantic relationships of the main characters, so much so that one could almost be the template for the next. Yet the novels contain important differences, specifically in their treatment of female and nonwhite characters. Where The Iron Heel expects the revolution to involve people of all nations and both genders, Martin Eden portrays a hero whose Nietzschean masculinity necessarily excludes his receiving help from women—frail, weak creatures—or people of color. London almost definitely regarded his “superman,” Martin Eden, with contempt, but Martin was the character who resonated with the reading public, possibly because they missed London’s point about the childishness of the supreme individualist. Readers never did respond well to his more pure (and unquestionably more didactic) Ernest Everhard, who, I argue, truly did embody the ideals London hoped the entire world would adopt. Tim Libretti, Northeastern Illinois University, T-Libretti@neiu.edu Understanding the Nations within Classes: Theorizing Self-Determination and Genocide as Working-Class Issues Most broadly, this paper will argue that “racial” divisions within the working class, including and especially divisions within the U.S. working class, at times need to be understood, or are most effectively understood, as national divisions; that is, certain sectors of the U.S. working class still constitute internal colonies, and neglecting to understand the specific situations and experiences of racial minorities as colonized subjects prevents us from properly and fully imagining liberation for all constituents of the U.S. working class. Many Native American and Chicano proletarians, for example, are still concerned with issues of self-determination and national autonomy. Native Americans often prioritize survival and seek reacquisition and control over land and resources. These constituents of the U.S. working class require unique consideration in theorizing the working class and working-class resistance and liberation and, most importantly, provide important models for both resisting capitalism and developing alternative social and production relationships. This paper will proceed initially by revisiting debates from 1928 within the comintern as layed about Harry Haywood in Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Haywood recalls debates about whether the oppression and exploitation of African-Americans be understood as a “race” issue which should be resisted by seeking social and political equality within the U.S. or as a “national” issue which should be resisted by demanding and struggling for self-determination. I will also explore DuBois’s writings on the relationship between First and Third world working classes and also the writings of Nahman Syrkin and Ber Borochov, two Marxist Zionist writers from the turn of the century who discussed the national question in the context of class struggle. In particular, I will be interested in discussing the importance of centering genocide as an issue to be addressed in working-class studies and thinking about how centering such an issue inflects many other concerns. Dennis Lopez, Cal. State Northridge, dennislopez@hotmail.com Class, Nation, Ideology: Notes Toward a Historical Critique of Post colonialism Two specific junctures of theoretical and political development may be observed in the recent history of the particular branch of cultural criticism today commonly referred to as “postcolonial studies.” The first, that of Third-Worldist ethnic nationalism, emerged after World War II in connection with the national liberation struggles and revolutions that secured the ascendancy of national bourgeoisies in many of the nominally decolonized countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Under the auspices of Third-Worldist nationalism, the nascent national bourgeoisies of the “Bandung era” were heralded as both the leaders of their newly independent nation-states and, more astonishingly, as the vanguard of the democratic struggle against the imperialist classes of the industrialized world. When the collusive role nationalism and the national bourgeoisies have played in facilitating the exploitation of workers and peasants worldwide became conspicuously undeniable, metropolitan intellectuals turned to a “postcolonial” discourse fashioned out of the ludic writings of secular poststructuralism for an alternative to a now highly discredited ethno-nationalist politics. Indeed, the recent consolidation in metropolitan academies and institutions of “postcolonial studies” marks, if nothing else, the overall critical repudiation of Third-Worldist nationalism as a viable politico-theoretical position by the radical intelligentsia of both imperialist and imperialized nation-states. In recent years, questions of empire, colony, nation, imperialism, racism, and diaspora have been predominantly articulated within a “postcolonial” framework, which has worked to subordinate or completely displace more traditionally historical materialist readings. This paper hopes to explore the ways in which the critical paradigms of both Third-Worldist nationalism and ludic post colonialism, which have come to dominate the study of imperialized literatures and cultures, tend to obfuscate the concrete material contradictions of imperialism and neocolonial subjugation, ultimately repressing the class determination of these exploitative relations. The racialist and nationalist thematics of Third-Worldist ethnic nationalism, more often than not, racializes anti-imperialist resistance and struggle, projecting the indigenous or national ethnos as a transparent and uniform space of counter-hegemony. Routinely, this racialized rhetoric slips into the familiar Manichean allegory of a uniform, ubiquitously oppressive “West” and a homogenized “Third World” that somehow is seen as intrinsically progressive and revolutionary – a formulation that fails to account for the class inequalities, not to mention the patriarchal and racial forms of oppression, that prevail in the countries of both advanced and backward capitalism. Similarly, the poststructuralist affinities of “postcolonial studies” generally dissipates any interrogation of the class relations of imperialist exploitation, or of imperialism’s historical determination, by substituting cultural determinations in its place – recasting the social and historical as the textual and discursive – and thus precluding the possibility of concrete political praxis. Alternatively, this project will argue for the necessity of a historical and class-based analysis of racism, the nation(al), neocolonialism, and imperialism, while attempting to assess the political and theoretical weaknesses present in these latter ideologies of the “postcolonial.” John Marsh, University of Illinois, jemarsh@uiuc.edu Robot Workers, RoboCops: Automation, Masculinity, and Whiteness in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning describes the 1930s as a period of “the laboring of American culture,” when the “children of working-class families grew up to become artists in the culture industries” and made “‘labor’ and its synonyms” pervasive “in the rhetoric of the period.” Taking its cue from Denning’s exhaustive survey of the cultural front in the 1930s, my paper argues that a similar, though by-far less pronounced “laboring of American culture” takes place in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a result of the most severe economic recession since the Depression of the 1930s. In this paper, I examine one product of that laboring culture: Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film RoboCop. I argue that RoboCop comes out of recession-era Detroit and responds to changes in the economy caused by what we might group under the catch-all terms “automation” and “de-industrialization.” Set in a futuristic and apocalyptic Detroit, RoboCop bases its kitschy, science-fiction plot on the mechanization of labor—a human cop turned robot. But the film also (and perhaps indirectly) recreates a beleaguered white working-class consciousness that resents this mechanization of labor and fantasizes about redeeming itself from that mechanization. The film effects this redemption primarily through violence directed at those—corporations and working-class African Americans—whom it holds responsible for de-industrialization, unemployment, and the whitewashed, drug-fueled gang warfare of inner cities. The paper concludes by exploring how the film can also reflect the on-going crisis in working-class studies over the problem of gender and race, especially how this film (in concert with other media) insist on the equivalence of agency, skill, masculinity, and whiteness. Allan Matthews, Independent Analyst, afmatthews@earthlink.net Our Enslavement of the Underpaid More than a billion people worldwide exist in poverty, according to the world Bank. Most of them live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Many of them produce coffee, fruit, clothing, and metals for export to the United States and other well-to-do countries but cruelly are paid only about one dollar a day. Such wages cannot support families with the necessities of life and thus are close to slavery. The reason the international trade economy pays so little for developing-country exports is that competitive production exceeds demand and results in distress prices far below any reasonable calculation of costs. The situation, so favorable to well-to-do importers, is seldom evaluated and is kept in place by corporate and military power. Actually, the world economy could continue to be productive even if much more fairness were introduced - even to the extent of ending all world poverty. An essential first step would be to examine the myth that megacorporations are more efficient than small farmers and small business. Megacorporations seem efficient because they are profitable, but their profits are due far less to purported economies of scale than they are to the unwarranted subsidies they inviegle from taxpayers and the huge costs they unload on the public. That unloading includes massive pollution of streams and atmosphere, tax breaks, getting bureaus and universities to do much of their research, and using public resources such as grazing land and mineral deposits for a small fraction of their worth. National and state legislators allow this in corrupt deals for the millions of dollars megacorporations pay to their election campaigns. Small farms are usually more efficient than factory farms. The former have seeds by saving them, use manure to fertilize land and provide fuel rather than disposing it as pollution, harness animals for work, usually treat animals considerately, and produce much of their own food avoiding the need of grocery cash. Big seed companies patent seeds largely developed by others, make their seeds terminate (not able to be saved for future crops), and connive to prohibit right-to-know labeling of seeds biologically altered. Large ocean trawlers are very destructive. They unsustainably overfish, kill discard bycatch, and destroy bottom habitat. Forests managed by megacorporations only for lumber impoverish or displace forest dwellers, ruin the habitate of flora and fauna, and silt and flood stream valleys. The movements needed to abolish world poverty are: (1) Reduce large-scale corporate activity and strengthen small farms and small business. (2) Pay a wage allowing all farmers and workers to support their families above the poverty level. This could be accomplished by a minimum wage of the equivalent of $2 a day (times the number of family members) and be paid by a tariff of about 40% on well-to-do country imports from developing countries. The effect on ultimate consumer prices would probably be less than IO%, possibly only overconsumption. (3) Support the above two movements through amendments to constitutions by popular initiative and referendum. Mark Melnik, Northeastern University, melnik.m@neu.edu Unemployment and Deindustrialization: Challenges to White Working-Class Masculinity This paper focuses on the importance of labor in the lives of white-working class men and the role that work plays in defining contemporary notions of heterosexual masculinity. Particular focus will be placed on the effects of massive unemployment on white working-class males. Employment patterns play a key role in the formation of contemporary notions of masculinity. The workplace within manual labor has a profound impact on the reproduction of various working-class values, including the notion of the male “breadwinner” and various patriarchal and sexist views on the role of women in the household. In addition, the author explores how massive unemployment, such as the economic downturn experienced during deindustrialization, challenges gender ideology within the working-class. Specifically, looking at how white working-class men try to negotiate personal expectations of being a “good provider” for their wives and children with the growing fact that quality employment opportunities within the working-class are scarce. Brush (1999) describes this process when she states, “Deindustrailization disrupts notions of masculinity as being centrally about providing for wife and family through tough or skilled labor…Men formerly able to use employment in the U.S. auto industry, for example, to fulfill the manly role of provider…have learned how fragile this construction of proper manhood is” (173-174). In addition, this paper explores white working-class male backlash against “Other” social groups viewed as threats in the work place. Specifically, white working-class males appear to scapegoat both white women and African Americans as “stealing” jobs from more deserving white males. Focus is placed on the current arguments surrounding these issues within the sociological literature. The author concludes it is essential that white working-class males begin to change their focus away from looking “down” at social groups perceived to be causing economic unrest. Instead, it is important that social definitions of what it means to be white and what it means to be male change, such that coalition building between the white working-class, women, and racial minorities can begin. The focus on “Who did this to us?” should be placed on corporate and elite control of the capitalist world order. The reality is that the work of all laborers is under siege by the threat of shutdown or relocation. An understanding sameness in social plight is essential in making significant social change. Rebecca Montoya Bragdon, UNC Greensboro, rbragdon@cableone.net Roxanne Newton, Mitchell Community College, rnewton@mitchell.cc.nc.us Veins and Skeins: Narratives of Working-Class Women This presentation will bring to light the experiences of women in a Utah mining community who were involved in a tragic mining accident and will unravel the experiences of women who were involved in North Carolina textile mill labor disputes. Deep within the veins and woven into the skeins of these collected stories are the personal narratives of the presenters. One, the daughter of a miner, and the other, the daughter of a textile mill worker, will also share their stories as reflected through the lives of the women they studied. Zak Mucha, Independent Scholar, zakmucha@aol.com “Here Be Monsters”: Representations of the Working-Class in Contemporary American Literature The categorizations of literature are, more often than not, passed down from above. When Phillip Roth estimates the number of “serious readers” in America to be around 120,000, he’s not talking about us (and he’s not even close to the worst offender in this sort of elitism). What is most often presented to the public as the ‘highest’ literature generally sets an exclusionary tone, referencing a culture belonging to a rarified minority. Literature is not a meritocracy. Unlike the goals for running a marathon or amassing a fortune, there is no quantifiable way to measure literature, nor is there a direct route to enter the field. If ‘class’ is partially based on perceived or true access to the institutions that determine the cultural canons, those of us apart from the cultures and classes of the ‘highest’ literature (those of us outside Roth’s 120,000 “serious readers”) are denied entry—our experiences and ideologies become those of outsiders. (True, exceptions are made, but rarely with a class designation; often the qualifier of outsider status is made racially, ethnically, or along lines of gender or sexual orientation.) As authors, our works are relegated to the exotic fringe and as readers we have to struggle to find representations of the lives we know intimately. A cohesive literature—one encompassing racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientations—would be a true representation of the American working-class, and could possibly rebuild a readership seemingly ignored by “serious” literature. Ricardo Gaspar Müller, UFSC, rgmuller@superig.com.br Drama, Class and Race: Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN) in Brazil: (1945/1968) (Unable to attend conference due to personal reasons.) This paper deals with some aspects of the political project of Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN) (Brazilian African-American Experimental Theater). This experience included activities such as the organization of courses, seminars and conferences, especially addressed to Brazilian Afro-American working-class. Paper’s main purpose is to highlight the pedagogical attribute of TEN’s strategy, as a means to fight for the emancipation of Brazilian Afro-descendant people. This pedagogical axis was present in all of TEN’s different activities and promoted a kind of unity which conveyed a political and ideological meaning to its project. As a case study, this article analyzes speeches and manifestos presented at the Convenção Nacional do Negro (Brazilian Afro-descendants´ National Conference), held in São Paulo in November 1945, and at other later conferences promoted by TEN. The experience of TEN was very rich and enterprising. TEN´s project was based on the simultaneous development of different levels of activities, from 1945 to 1968, mostly in Rio de Janeiro. In October 2004 TEN would be completing 60 years since its foundation and, in May 2005, the première of its first performance (Emperor Jones, by Eugene O’Neill, in Teatro Municipal, Rio de Janeiro) will celebrate its 60th anniversary as well. However, those facts are not part of the hegemonic Brazilian intellectual and artistic memory. Briefly, this article tries to carry out the meaning of TEN’s experience in its particularity, but always focusing TEN’s project as a whole; an experience informed by class and race issues and committed to a dialogic strategy relating theater, politics and education. Roxanne Newton, Mitchell Community College, rnewton@mitchell.cc.nc.us Discovering + Crafting = Learning: Effective Strategies for Working Class Students Teachers may transform working class students’ learning and lives through research (Friere’s “hopeful inquiry”) and creative praxis. My paper will detail the experiences of working class students in women’s studies and interdisciplinary humanities courses. Through empowering pedagogy, students connect their own personal histories with a larger collective history and craft tangible, enduring artifacts of their “usable past[s].” In the process, the students also become active participants in the ongoing histories of their lives and their communities. Students in a women’s studies course became a tightly woven community of learners who contributed to the archive of women’s history and “invented and re-invented” research, history, and knowing. With little or no humanities background, these working class students were engaged in creative and research projects as well as a women’s history quilt created by the entire class. Dewey’s “problem of practice” was negotiated when students were inspired to act through creating family histories, journals, family quilts, and voter registration drives. In two humanities courses, “The Immigrant Experience in America,” and “Working Lives: Multicultural Perspectives,” students researched their own immigrant and working backgrounds and crafted art, poetry, music, quilts, and plays, creating new artifacts of historical inquiry. In addition, in our quest to situate history within our class and in our time, students collected narratives of immigrants and working people in our community, resulting in books of these individuals’ stories. An amalgamated pedagogy of inquiry and praxis empowers working class students, enabling them to avoid “the separation of knowledge from doing and making.” Phillip J. Obermiller , Independent Scholar, solotso@aol.com Thomas E. Wagner, Professor Emeritus, thomas.wagner@uc.edu Only the Names Have Changed: A Comparative Study of Welfare Capitalism in Two Kentucky Counties, 1910-2002 Welfare capitalism grew hand-in-hand with the industrial model town movement that began in the late 1800s. These tightly controlled working and living arrangements were intended to attract and retain a suitable labor force; to enhance worker productivity; to prevent unionization; to counter government intervention in labor issues; and to create a benevolent corporate image among workers, managers, and investors. Under the precepts of welfare capitalism, in addition to improved working conditions and benefits large corporations provided their employees with housing, education, health care, recreation, even churches and stores. In exchange, workers and their families surrendered a great deal of civic, social, and economic freedom to their employers. In the early 1900s Harlan County, KY was the site of an historical experiment in model town development and in the full implementation of the doctrines of welfare capitalism; at the outset of the 21st century Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Scott County, KY is the site of a current example of the corporate role in urban development and the contemporary application of welfare capitalism. Harlan County became “Bloody Harlan” during the struggles of the 1930s as the United Mine Workers of America replaced welfare capitalism with the tenets of organized labor and federal labor-relations laws were passed. District 3 of the United Auto Workers has been working to organize Scott County’s Toyota plant intermittently since 1988; the plant has successfully avoided paying full local and state taxes via tax abatements acquired through both intimidation and largesse and typifies contemporary welfare capitalism in action. Although separated by nearly a century in time, these two industrial venues have much in common. The implementation of welfare capitalism in Kentucky has evolved only slightly in the intervening years, and remains a powerful deterrent to unionization and state intervention on behalf of workers. The paper concludes that, whether loading coal cars in Harlan County during the early 1900s or building cars in Scott County today, Kentucky workers are faced with corporate policies and practices designed to inhibit mounting political challenges to corporate control and discouraging their participation in organized labor. Anthony C. Peyronel, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, apeyronel@edinboro.edu Michael Stanley: A Native Son Betrayed by His Hometown? Cleveland Native Michael Stanley is a singer/songwriter who has enjoyed an immense following in and around his hometown. However, the regional working class theme that runs throughout Stanley’s lyrics has never really resonated with music fans outside the state of Ohio. Stanley, as front man for the Michael Stanley Band, reached the height of his popularity in the early 1980’s, a time when the nation’s perceptions of Cleveland were dominated by images of government corruption, urban pollution, and an inept Major League Baseball franchise. This presentation will combine a rhetorical analysis of Stanley’s lyrics with a review of the literature on working class communities, especially Ohio’s “Rust Belt” cities of Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown. The presenter will argue that Michael Stanley failed to reach national prominence largely because his music focused on Cleveland’s working class issues and images, which were deemed unappealing by music fans outside the region. Cherise A. Pollard, West Chester University, cpollard@wcupa.edu “But Could a Dream Send up through Onion Fumes”: The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class in Gwendolyn Brooks’ A Street in Bronzeville Gwendolyn Brooks’ A Street in Bronzeville is a poignant collection of poems that explores the complexities of the lives of the urban black working class. In this stunning first book, Brooks elevates the struggles of the working poor to new heights through her depictions that challenge our ways of thinking about black life in the inner city as well as the form and function of poetry. Brooks’ representations of black women in the “Hattie Scott” cycle of poems, as well as in “Queen of the Blues” and the “Ballad of Pearl May Lee” give us insight into the daily rigors and frustrations of life in and around Chicago’s inner city tenements. The characters in these poems confront the local menace of racism, the global threat of war, as well as the ever present demands of work both in and out of the home as they endeavor not only to survive, but to live. This paper will study the ways that Brooks uses form to complicate and elevate her readers’ understanding of the hard work of being poor, black, and female in the mid-Twentieth Century. Therese Quinn, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, tquinn@artic.edu The Labor of Culture: A Web-based Project Exploring the Experiences of Museum workers from Socially Marginalized Groups This presentation focuses on doctoral research that explored the experiences of youth and workers from socially marginalized groups using museums as both visitors and employees. This project grew from and drew on my experiences as a child of working class guardianship who rarely visited and never considered working in museums. However, I eventually reached an adulthood that included employment in museums. My qualitative dissertation included a section about labor in museums, including worker demographics and organizing history. To understand this topic through the experiences of the individuals paid to labor in cultural institutions, I developed a Web-based questionnaire for museum-workers, asking questions about employment experiences from earliest introduction to museums as worksites, through promotions and future employment plans. I launched the website in 2001 and within only a few weeks (and advertising the site through museum “professional” journals and listservs) had received nearly 100 emailed responses from employees working in museums in several parts of the world (though primarily the United States and Canada). Wendell Ricketts, uur@earthlink.net Training Gay: Liberace, Andy Warhol, and the Erasure of Class in Gay “Community” Assimilation In recent years, a substantial body of criticism has emerged in response to the perceived racism, elitism, and classism of the lesbian and gay (but especially gay male) “community.” The processes of coming out and of subcultural assimilation are seen as powerfully prescriptive, simultaneously creating and coercing conformity not only with so-called “mainstream” values but also with in-group standards of consumer behavior, social sophistication, physical appearance, and partner-choice commodification. Mark Simpson’s controversial edited volume Anti-Gay and Ian Barnard’s essay, “Fuck Community, or Why I Support Gay-Bashing” (from the anthology, States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change) are representative of the genre. This presentation explores the assertions of such “post-gay” commentators, placing them alongside examples from coming-out manuals, pop culture, and literary texts to illuminate the extent to which the erasure of class differences has, indeed, “marked” itself as one orthodoxy of gay-male “community” assimilation. American cultural icons Liberace and Andy Warhol are discussed in the context of their working-class roots—and of the ways in which the disappearance of those roots represents the process of gay male class erasure writ large. The elimination of working-class descriptors as a prerequisite for successful gay-male subcultural membership is also explored as a theme in texts from the blatant (John Caffey’s classic 1982 “gay Pygmalion,” The Coming Out Party) to the historical (Mart Crowley’s 1969 The Boys in the Band) to the sublimely ridiculous (the popular television show Will and Grace). The analysis concludes with a consideration of the ways in which both working-class and non-working-class gay men participate—about equally—in the purging of working-class “markers” from their lives and bodies. Clayton Rosati, Syracuse University, cfrosati@maxwell.syr.edu Getting in the Picture: Gender, Creative Labor, and 'Total Request Live This paper presents some preliminary findings from dissertation research on MTV, geography, and the industrial production of culture. Through in-depth interviews and observations, the paper looks at creative labor on the live show, “Total Request Live” and its heavily masculinized workspace of MTV studios. This masculinization, it is argued, is actualized by the contradictory geographical relations of capital in the media sector, where increasingly expansive broadcasts are fashioned by increasingly compact and restrictive spaces of production. In that context, the paper explores some of the ways that creative workers make meaning in their workplace and of the massive reserve armies of labor struggling to occupy those same spaces of cultural production and expression. The paper then turns to live audiences and the necessary competition and cooperation between a show’s salaried workers and the mostly female, teen “gift-laborers” that define the show’s energetic and popular image. It is argued that the geography of industrial cultural production and circulation through mass media, creates the terms and conditions for the gendered shape of work in that context. Stanley Rosebud Rosen, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, strutrose@cs.com Oral History as a Way of Examining Jewish Radicalism The Chicago Radical Jewish Elders Video History Project has done over 100 two hour interviews. This six-year project seeks to examine the relationship between Jewish identity and political/social consciousness. My conference presentation will describe the project conception and history, summary and analysis of content, observed common patterns and relationships, critical issues raised, and problems and limitations. Jeff Shantz, York University, Toronto, jshantz@iww.ca Anti-Povert Activism and the Fight Against Borders: Lessons from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty Lsmithdog@aol.com Diane diPrima: In the Vortex of Class, Gender, Sexuality, Race, Culture, and Art Diane diPrima is a vibrant example of the artist caught in the vortex of the tensions of class, gender, sexuality, race, culture and art. In her fifty years of writing and publishing, she has generated waves of influence upon the American culture. Most recently in her reflective and autobiographical Recollections of My Life as a Woman—Memoirs: The New York Years (Penguin 2000) she has provided a key to understanding herself, others, and our collective culture. She stood at the intersection and generated both art and identity from that vortex. In this presentation, I will use a PowerPoint program to reveal the main forces in her life and art, explaining and supporting them through quotes from her books: Revolutionary Letters (City Lights, 1971) and Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (City Lights, 1990). What emerges is a path toward self through: Resignation—Resistance—Rebellion and Renunciation—Redefinition—Reconciliation. We will trace and link the journey of her life and work through these major issues. Alison Stenning, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, alison.stenning@ncl.ac.uk Class and Work in Post-Socialism: Transforming the Spaces of Labour Under socialism, work and workers were valued and celebrated not only through the spectacular promotion of hero workers and Days of, for example, the Steelworkers, but also through continuing investment in the everyday material and discursive prestige of workers. Over the years of Communist Party rule in east central Europe, workers saw their income and status rise to overtake that of the intelligentsia. Moreover, class status determined not only income and conditions within the workplace, but also access to resources and opportunities in communities. The workplace stood at the centre of a network of social, cultural and service provision. However, the working class was, without doubt, fragmented, with workers in large, strategic, heavy industries (such as coal mining, energy production and steel working) valued more highly than workers in light industry and smaller enterprises; that these latter sectors were often dominated by women, and in some countries, minority ethnic workers, reinforced the division of the working class. Workers’ leaders were often co-opted into state structures and trade unions were incorporated into the network of political institutions which ensured the reproduction of the regime. In later years, however, the relationship between workers and the state began to break down as opposition movements, often founded on an alliance between workers and the intelligentsia, challenged the legitimacy of the Communist Party to rule in the name of the working class. These opposition movements grew, in Poland most particularly, to eventually lead to the collapse of communism in 1989. Since 1989, the countries of east central Europe have been characterized by economies marked by the loss of work and the end of employment security and by political systems which venerate the market and entrepreneurialism, denigrate the achievements of earlier generations of workers and downplay the value of social policy for marginalized social groups. The traditional left-right continuum of party politics makes little sense in a system in which post-communist parties, parties emerging from workers’ opposition movements (such as Solidarity), unions, peasant parties and other organizations all find themselves adopting a peculiar mix of conservative and progressive policies and union leaders use their connections and social capital to secure lucrative positions on the management boards of privatized enterprises. Trade unions are declining, the political representation of the working class is fragmented, ‘common cause’ is increasingly difficult to identify and the opposition isn’t clear. The collapse of social networks, destroyed often by the costs of transformation, is reflected in a wearing away of collective action and a celebration (or, more often, begrudging acceptance) of individualism. At the same time new patterns of exclusion are emerging in the region as gender and ethnicity become significant markers of poverty and marginalization. Based on a review of the literature and on empirical work with working class communities in Poland, this paper explores the shifts in the meanings and experiences of class and work following the collapse of communism, exploring the transformation of the spaces of labour, from workplaces to trade unions, homes and communities and asks what particular legacies socialism has left for the working class in east central Europe. Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Goucher College, mtokarcz@goucher.edu The Danger Zone: Representations and Negotiations of Working-Class Sexuality in the Works of Sandra Cisneros and Dorothy Allison For working-class women, sexuality is particularly loaded. Early pregnancy can hinder a woman’s chances for respectable marriage and upward mobility. Also, working-class women often live in areas where physical and sexual abuse occurs frequently. This paper will examine how Sandra Cisneros’s and Dorothy Allison’s novels depict working-class girls coming to grips with sexuality. Sandra Cisneros in The House on Mango Street juxtaposes Esperanza Cordero’s ambitions and curiosity about her sexuality with images of women trapped in unhappy marriages, and most importantly, with her own experience of rape. In Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, the protagonist Bone suffers physical and sexual abuse from her stepfather while trying to come to terms with a lesbian identity. Her masturbatory fantasies of being beaten by him, while disturbing, represent her attempt to reclaim her sexuality. Aunt Raylene, a free-thinking lesbian, represents an escape from the empty and abusive relationships that characterized the marriages she knew. Interestingly, both Cisneros and Allison present less troublesome versions of sexuality in their second novels than in the first. I will speculate on reasons for this shift and its possible implications. Gail Verdi, Fairleigh Dickinson University, g.verdi@att.net Literacy Development in the Lives of Four Working-Class Women Academics This paper explores the social practices four working-class women academics encountered at home and at school in relation to meaning making and literacy. It reveals their relationships with reading and writing as well as the influence school structures had on literacy development. My research evolved out of conversations with three full time faculty. The researcher was also a participant and has included her own evolution. During unstructured interviews significant themes emerged as women narrated lived experiences. Participants grew up in the New York Metropolitan area, ranging in age from forty to fifty-two, and came from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Charlotte Waldron, The University of Nottingham, lqxcjw@nottingham.ac.uk Seeing Sheffield: exploring the Visual in the Sociology of Work This paper begins with me introducing my research on the city of Sheffield, England and its former major employer, the steel industry. How this form of work is represented and remembered by various groups within the city has been the central question within this study. Although the main focus of the research has been a collection of narratives from a number of key informants in and around Sheffield, I have always been conscious that in order to gain a deeper understanding of these processes, we need to explore how this form of work is visualized. As a sociologist of work and employment, I did find, however, that this inclusion of the visual was not as straightforward as I had previously imagined. This became even more problematic when a steel worker sent me a collection of photographs of the mill where he worked. He didn't know when they were taken or why, but we both believed in their significance. Although I knew that these photographs were a rich and powerful resource it soon became evident that the sociology of work and employment lacked a visual element. This paper will explore why this might be the case and how, as researchers of industrial work, we can address this. Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University, tzaniello@nku.edu Women and Children Last: The Global Documentary Film and the New Rulers of the World Although the economic and political process of globalization has been underway for many decades, only recently--with the rise to prominence of demonstrations against the World Trade Organization have the media caught up with the implications of a virtually unchecked multinational force. The recognition of the power of globalization, of the havoc it causes (especially in Third World countries), and of the subsequent protest movement against its international proponents have now reached a critical mass in contemporary documentary filmmaking, so much so that we can begin to assess the variety and strength of what might be called the "global documentary." I will screen excerpts and discuss the varieties of global documentaries now circulating, including: agit-prop documentaries, such as Vision Machine Film Project's "The Globalization Tapes" and the National Labor Committee's "Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti," designed to organize workers against globalization or to protest it; traditional documentaries such as Stephanie Black's "Life and Debt," analyzing the effect of the IMF and other international capitalist organs; television documentaries, such as John Pilger's "The New Rulers of the World," which features an internationally recognized reporter with an investigative journalist's style.     1