Spaces of Encounter: The Cultural Labor of Class Difference

This article explores the complicated relationship between narratives of working-class America and formations of national Otherness. Arguing that class, sex, and ethnicity are deeply relational, it seeks to map the symbolic terrain and emotional depth of class difference as it circulates in the American imaginary. It ask how we might think about the cultural poetics of class difference in ways that make a difference––in ways that register class narratives as participants in constructions of the Nation and the “normal,” the irregular and the queer? Attending to the kinds of emotional and conceptual services stories of class perform, it locates “class” as part of a discursive imaginary topography that structures and turns narratives of working men and women into spaces of encounter, contest, and containment. My own feeling is that ‘identity’ is an acutely double-edged weapon––not useless, but dependent on the context, sometimes risky––and that the closeness between an identity and a derogatory identification may . . . resemble that between being a subject and the process of subjectification. Denise Riley Let me begin with two images that saturated the news media during one week in the winter of 2004. The first is the international speedway at the Daytona 500 where 180,000 racing fans (“some a few beers into the celebrations”), rev up to hear President Bush commence race week activities. Air Force One is parked on an airfield adjacent to the stands as Bush dons his snappy new Nascar jacket, rolls into the stadium and shouts the traditional, “Gentlemen, start your engines.” The other image is of hundreds of gay couples flocking to San Francisco to get married before state lawmakers can go to court to seek an injunction. On the opposite coast Massachusetts lawmakers are shown heatedly debating a constitutional ban against gay marriage as opponents, unable to get into the gallery, spill over into Boston’s angry streets where demonstrations continue for three days. At fist glance, these images seem disconnected and worlds apart: the former a cynical nod to the rural working classes and the votes they represent, the latter a familiar reportage of the sexually deviant “acting up” and “in your face.” But in the discursive imaginary topography of American culture, these two media moments share a complicated history of encounter that has shaped modernist conceptions of national Otherness in ways that conjoin the International Labor and Working-Class History No. 69, Spring 2006, pp. 177–194 # 2006 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. working classes, especially rural wage-earners, with the spectacular and the illicit––oddities of the eye their irregularities represent. In his recent examination of social thought and American literature, Michael Trask argues that “class and sex are deeply relational,” historically moving in tandem as mutual sites of social anxiety, threat, and displacement, especially during times of rapid change and wide spread dislocation. “The disobedience and lawlessness that social theorists located in the erotic realm,” Trash points out, “had a close affinity to the disobedience that contemporaries saw as the defining attribute of the class other.” While Trask is concerned with the first quarter of the twentieth century, the deployment of sexual illicitness in the making of working-class identity has a long genealogy rooted in a tradition of representational practices. In recent years scholars have begun to map the symbolic charge and psychological depth of such practices and the ways in which “mismatches between sex, gender, and desire” have been central to the establishment of the “unnatural” Otherness of the margins and the normalizing “us-ness” of the center. Because national unity demands the erasure or masking of class difference, moral discourses and “sex panics” have been especially effective in mobilizing a national sense of belonging, especially during moments of crisis. Anna Marie Smith shows, for example, that in the Thatcherite purge against British homosexuality “Englishness” depended upon queerness as a way to imagine spaces of national harmony and collective memories of “our” nation. Homophobic discourse is organized not around a fear of otherness but around an obsession with otherness. This obsession is structured symptomatically; insofar as homophobic representations condensed a whole range of anxieties onto the queerness signifier, queerness began to function as a supplement to Thatcherite discourse. Queerness became one of the enemy elements which supported the phantasmatic construction of the family as the antagonism-free center of the British nation. Studies like these push labor historians to think about representational practices that weld together cultural unity in the face of economic disparities and social inequalities. The operations of Otherness underscore as well the instability of class identities and the limits of conceptualizing class difference in socioeconomic terms alone; class becomes both an emotionally charged social identity and a signifying practice always at work. And for many Americans, class resonates less as a function of economic power, than as an effect of cultural difference and social style, “a matter of embodied identity akin to the classification of erotic desire less in terms of object choice, than according to sexual types.” Picture the Nascar fan as his rural, southern, unassimilated image took hold in relation to the threatened chaos and queer desires enacted by gay marriage. Long before the death of the Nascar racing hero Dale Earnhardt, stock car fans hovered in the nooks and crannies of national culture, a vague part of the rural “toothless and couthless.” Their motto, “Guns, God and Guts,” emblazoned 178 ILWCH, 69, Spring 2006