Love and money [electronic resource] : queers, class, and cultural production / Lisa Henderson.

ISBN:

9780814790595

9780814744673

Title:

Love and money [electronic resource] : queers, class, and cultural production / Lisa Henderson.

Author:

Henderson, Lisa.

Personal Author:

Henderson, Lisa.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 201 pages) : illustrations.

Series:

Critical cultural communication

Contents:

Introduction: love and money, queerness and class -- The class character of Boys don't cry -- Queer visibility and social class -- Every queer thing we know -- Recognition: queers, class, and Dorothy Allison -- Queer relay -- Plausible optimism -- Conclusion: a cultural politics of love and solidarity.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

Gays -- Social conditions.

Homosexuality -- Social aspects.

Social classes.

Gays in mass media.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2013

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
306.766 23	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Love and Money argues that we can't understand contemporary queer cultures without looking through the lens of social class. Resisting old divisions between culture and economy, identity and privilege, left and queer, recognition and redistribution, Love and Money offers supple approaches to capturing class experience and class form in and around queerness.

Contrary to familiar dismissals, not every queer television or movie character is like Will Truman on Will and Grace--rich, white, healthy, professional, detached from politics, community, and sex. Through ethnographic encounters with readers and cultural producers and such texts as Boys Don't Cry, Brokeback Mountain, By Hook or By Crook, and wedding announcements in the New York Times, Love and Money sees both queerness and class across a range of idioms and practices in everyday life. How, it asks, do readers of Dorothy Allison's novels use her work to find a queer class voice? How do gender and race broker queer class fantasy? How do independent filmmakers cross back and forth between industry and queer sectors, changing both places as they go and challenging queer ideas about bad commerce and bad taste?

With an eye to the nuances and harms of class difference in queerness and a wish to use culture to forge queer and class affinities, Love and Money returns class and its politics to the study of queer life.

Author Notes

Henderson Lisa :

Lisa Henderson is Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

Henderson (communication, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) uses a broad repertoire of methods (e.g., textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork) and texts (e.g., Boys Don't Cry, The L Word, and Modern Family) to highlight and examine the often-neglected classed assumptions of queer representations. For instance, she shows how class-ness is always manifest in queer clothing, taste, beliefs, and worries; in being (un)comfortable in some jobs and having/wanting certain perceived-to-be-lucrative occupations; in (not) worrying about immigration or inheritance rights; in being (un)able to access therapy; and in believing that marriage will cultivate a person's morals and control over her/his sexual desires and relations. She concludes by describing a "commercial repressive hypothesis" and formulates the concept of "queer relay"--a way to understand cultural production in generative and reparative ways. Throughout, Henderson grounds queer cultural criticism in the liminal movements and moments of everyday life, treating this criticism as art and understanding criticism as inside of, and a contributor to, cultural production. She also formulates a new kind of classed-queerness, one characterized by softness and slowness, of people trying hard to live and survive as best as they can. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections. T. E. Adams Northeastern Illinois University