Celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase our Asian American Studies titles for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Readers can get 30% these books with the code TAAAS22 at checkout through our shopping cart.

Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities, by erin Khuê Ninh, asks, How does it feel to be model minority—and why would that drive one to live a lie? “As an Asian American daughter of immigrants, reading Passing for Perfect, I felt my life understood. erin Khuê Ninh has explained our plight—the mad scramble for refuge, the guilt over our parents’ sacrifices, and our trust that education will save us. This book will give us strength against the attackers who blame us for what’s wrong with America. We shall overcome violence with knowledge.”—Maxine Hong Kingston Read more here

Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, by Long T. Bui, presents a study of the stereotype and representation of Asians as robotic machines through history. “In this powerful and indispensable historiography, Long Bui puts to rest any lingering doubt about the pernicious pervasiveness of the model machine myth that has long cast Asians as technologized nonhumans in American cultural and economic histories…. Bui provides rigorous analyses of the implications and damages of the myth as well as bold provocations for interventions and change.”—Betsy Huang, Associate Professor of English and Dean of the College at Clark University Read more here

Pedagogies of WoundednessIllness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority, by James Kyung-Jin Lee considers what happens when illness betrays Asian American fantasies of indefinite progress? “In this powerful and indispensable hist“James Kyung-Jin Lee’s Pedagogies of Woundedness is a poignant and moving work of criticism about illness and mortality. Beginning with a remarkable connection between the seeming invulnerability of Asian Americans as a model minority and their prevalence in the medical profession, Lee proceeds to explore the many ways that Asian Americans have written about bodies, health, and death. One comes away from his insights wiser and braver about what we all must face.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, University Professor at the University of Southern California, and author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War Read more here

CULTURAL STUDIES

Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media: Civic Engagement, Contested Issues, and Emerging Identities, by James S. Lai, examines how social media has changed the way Asian Americans participate in politics. “Lai’s timely book provides a nuanced analysis of the ideological and other divisions among Asian Americans, scrupulously refusing to homogenize or essentialize them.”—Claire Jean Kim, Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine Read more here

Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, by Elora Halim Chowdhury, illuminates how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can generate possibilities for gender justice. “This book enables a timely understanding of contemporary Bangladesh through the cinematic lens of 1971.”—Nayanika Mookherjee, Professor of Political Anthropology at Durham University, UK Read more here

Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano, explores transnational giving practices as political projects that shape the Filipino diaspora. “Giving Back is a compelling ethnography about the politics of diaspora giving, tying the personal, the family, the community, the state, and the global in a critical stroke of brilliance, empathy, and alternative visions of philanthropy and volunteerism in the lives of Filipinos in America….Mariano’s critical examination of the politics of diaspora giving is a must-read for Filipinos and anyone participating in transnational philanthropy.”—Pacific Historical Review Read more here

Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique, by Crystal Mun-hye Baik, examines the insidious ramifications of the un-ended Korean War through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic memory works.  “Crystal Baik’s Reencounters offers a vital archive of desire, violence, silence, and decolonial possibility while crafting a much-needed critical framework for thinking and feeling through the diasporic memory work of contemporary Korean/American artists and cultural producers.”—Eleana Kim, University of California, Irvine Read more here

BIOGRAPHY

Prisoner of Wars: A Hmong Fighter Pilot’s Story of Escaping Death and Confronting Life, by Chia Youyee Vang, with Pao Yang, Retired Captain, U.S. Secret War in Laos, recounts the life of Pao Yang, whose experiences defy conventional accounts of the Vietnam War. “It is rare to read personal accounts from those who fought as surrogate soldiers of the American Armed Forces in Laos and to hear about the experiences of our T-28 pilots, because so many of them were killed during the war. Vang did a wonderful job of capturing the experiences of Pao Yang, one of the Hmong T-28 pilots who was shot down and captured by the communists. I will definitely use this book as a requirement for my Introduction to Hmong History class.”—Lee Pao Xiong, Director and Professor of the Center for Hmong and East Asian Studies, Concordia University Read more here

Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood, by George Uba, is an evocative yet unsparing examination of the damaging effects of post-internment ideologies of acceptance and belonging experienced by a Japanese American family. “This is a lovely addition to the rich literature somehow created out of a moment in history where an entire generation of Japanese Americans had every dream they’d ever had taken from them, all at once.”—Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery Medal– and National Book Award–winning author of Kira-Kira and The Thing about Luck Read more here

Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration, by Rachel Schreiber, recounts the remarkable story of a Jewish activist who joined her incarcerated Japanese American husband and son in an American concentration camp.   “Rachel Schreiber, an expert on Jewish women labor activists, presents a highly useful biographical sketch of an important figure in Elaine Black Yoneda. Avoiding the extremes of mythologizing or demonizing her subject, she offers a balanced account that historians specializing in women’s history, labor history, and Japanese American history will heartily welcome to the scholarly works in these areas of inquiry.“—Brian Hayashi, Professor of History at Kent State University Read more here

LITERARY STUDIES

Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War, by Joo Ok Kim, examines the racial legacies of the Korean War through Chicano/a cultural production and U.S. archives of white supremacy. “Crucially, Kim’s juxtaposition and brilliant analysis of unlikely archival materials and cultural texts make an original and exceedingly important contribution to our understandings of the links between the Korean War and U.S. racial, carceral, and settler colonial formations. This is a rigorous and impressive interdisciplinary cultural study.”—Jodi Kim, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside Read more here

Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America, Edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, Alice Y. Hom, and Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Preface by David L. Eng, offers a vibrant array of scholarly and personal essays, poetry, and visual art that broaden ideas and experiences about contemporary LGBTQ Asian North America “[T]hese voices from queer Asian North America attest to the brilliance, fierceness, and raucous pleasures of queer diasporic world-making, theorizing, and cultural production. A landmark achievement.”—Gayatri Gopinath, Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University Read more here

Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures, by Erin Suzuki, compares and contrasts the diverse experiences of Asian and Pacific Islander subjectivities across a shared sea. “Ocean Passages demonstrates how transpacific studies can evolve and continue to be a generative framing for counterhegemonic, decolonial research across disciplines.” —Lateral Read more here

Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas, by Quynh Nhu Le, illuminates the intersecting logics of settler colonialism and racialization through analysis of contemporary Asian and Indigenous crossings in the Américas. Association for Asian American Studies’ Humanities and Cultural Studies: Literary Studies Book Award, 2021 Read more here

Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora, by Kavita Daiya, examines “what remains” in migration stories surrounding the 1947 Partition of India. “Daiya’swide scholarly purview ranges across literature, cinema, graphic novels, and the creative arts, as she assembles a rich archive of contemporary reflection and critical relevance.”— Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University Read more here

Announcing Temple University Press’ Fall Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes we showcase the titles forthcoming this Fall from Temple University Press

“Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain, by Charles Upchurch, provides a major reexamination of the earliest British parliamentary efforts to abolish capital punishment for consensual sex acts between men.

Are You Two Sisters?: The Journey of a Lesbian Couple, by Susan Krieger, authored by one of the most respected figures in the field of personal ethnographic narrative, this book serves as both a memoir and a sociological study, telling the story of one lesbian couple’s lifelong journey together.

Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media: Civic Engagement, Contested Issues, and Emerging Identities, by James S. Lai, examines how social media has changed the way Asian Americans participate in politics.

The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction, by Shamira Gelbman, investigates how minority group, labor, religious, and other organizations worked together to lobby for civil rights reform during the 1950s and ’60s.

Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration, by Rachel Schreiber, tells the remarkable story of a Jewish activist who joined her imprisoned Japanese American husband and son in an American concentration camp.

Fitting the Facts of Crime: An Invitation to Biopsychosocial Criminology, by Chad Posick, Michael Rocque, and J.C. Barnes, presents a biopsychosocial perspective to explain the most common findings in criminology—and to guide future research and public policy.

From Improvement to City Planning: Spatial Management in Cincinnati from the Early Republic through the Civil War Decade, by Henry C. Binford, offers a “pre-history” of urban planning in the United States.

Gangs on Trial: Challenging Stereotypes and Demonization in the Courts, by John M. Hagedorn, exposes biases in trials when the defendant is a gang member.

Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins, by Alex Tizon, now in paperback, an anthology of richly reported and beautifully written stories about marginalized people.

Islam, Justice, and Democracy, by Sabri Ciftci, explores the connection between Muslim conceptions of justice and democratic orientations.

The Italian Legacy in Philadelphia: History, Culture, People, and Ideas, edited by Andrea Canepari and Judith Goode, provides essays and images showcasing the rich contribution of Italians and Italian Americans to Global Philadelphia.

Making a Scene: Urban Landscapes, Gentrification, and Social Movements in Sweden, by Kimberly A. Creasap, examines how autonomous social movements respond to gentrification by creating their own cultural landscape in cities and suburbs.

Making Their Days Happen: Paid Personal Assistance Services Supporting People with Disability Living in Their Homes and Communities, by Lisa I. Iezzoni, explores the complexities of the interpersonal dynamics and policy implications affecting personal assistance service consumers and providers.

The Many Futures of Work: Rethinking Expectations and Breaking Molds, edited by Peter A. Creticos, Larry Bennett, Laura Owen, Costas Spirou, and Maxine Morphis-Riesbeck, reframes the conversation about contemporary workplace experience by providing both “top down” and “bottom up” analyses.

On Gangs, by Scott H. Decker, David C. Pyrooz, and James A. Densley, a comprehensive review of what is known about gangs—from their origins through their evolution and outcomes.

Pack the Court!: A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion, by Stephen M. Feldman, provides a historical and analytical argument for court-packing.

Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities, by erin Khuê Ninh, considers how it feels to be model minority—and why would that drive one to live a lie?

Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority, by James Kyung-Jin Lee, asks what happens when illness betrays Asian American fantasies of indefinite progress?

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania, by Beverly C. Tomek, highlights the complexities of emancipation and the “First Reconstruction” in the antebellum North.

Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank, by Maryam S. Griffin, considers collective Palestinian movement via public transportation as a site of social struggle.

Who Really Makes Environmental Policy?: Creating and Implementing Environmental Rules and Regulations, edited by Sara R. Rinfret, provides a clear understanding of regulatory policy and rulemaking processes, and their centrality in U.S. environmental policymaking.

Living amidst constant disruptions that keep on taking new forms.

This week in North Philly Notes, Ghassan Moussawi, author of Disruptive Situations asks, What kind of everyday life strategies can we use in these times?

Since March 2020, we have been living in uncertain and troubling times due to COVID-19, where our lives, everyday routines, and sense of safety have been heavily impacted. However, as we have witnessed, the global pandemic has and continues to affect peoples’ lives differently, where the most precarious people have most been affected by the pandemic. For example, there are higher death rate among communities of color, especially Black, Indigenous, undocumented, queer and trans people of color and communities in the U.S.

What came as a shock to many is the sudden interruption of everyday life as we know it. People are lost, confused, and mourning the loss of their routines and the stability in their lives. While some might say, we are living in “a new normal;” the definition of “new” and “normal” keep changing to the extent that the term “new normal” fails to account for the moment we are living in. The majority of people living in the U.S. today have not encountered such sudden shifts and disruptions in their everyday lives. For queer people and communities of color, however, pandemic and government neglect are familiar; the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s wiped out an entire generation while the Reagan and Bush administrations looked the other way.

We think of these as exceptional times, however, how do scholars account for people’s lives in places where everyday life disruptions and uncertainties about the present and future are normal and normalized? What kind of everyday life strategies can we use in these times?

My book Disruptive Situations answers the question above, by looking at the everyday life strategies of LGBT people living in post-civil war Beirut. I ask readers to take a step back and think about what it means to live amidst constant everyday life disruptions that keep on taking new forms. Disruptive Situations comes at a time when we are all experiencing a sense of loss and disorientation, and my hope is that the book might shed light on how people survive constant and imminent disruptions, caused by wars, civil unrest, and everyday violence.

The idea for the book started in 2009, when I found many Euro-American media outlets advertising Beirut as a new destination for gay tourism. Though life in Beirut remains highly precarious, such representations downplayed such realities. My book looks at the period 2005-2016, which was marked by a series of assassinations, an Israeli war in 2006, suicide bombings, a shortage of basic services (such as electricity and clean water), and a garbage crisis. Drawing on fieldwork I conducted in Beirut among LGBT people between 2009-15—during the height of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s suicide bombings in Beirut and Lebanon—I ask how we can account for people’s everyday lives amid uncertainty and violence that has no beginning and no end. People in Beirut have devised the term al-wad’ or “the situation” to capture the complexity of these everyday violence and disruptions.

Using the concept of al-wad’, or “the situation,” I raise questions about spaces beyond Beirut, by asking what it has to say about queer life in contexts where precarity and disruptions are the conditions of everyday social and cultural life. Though the book draws on LGBT people’s strategies, these queer strategies are not necessarily enacted only by LGBT people.

Disruptive Situation highlights these and other issues:

• How and in what ways has Beirut been marketed as a “gay friendly” destination? For whom, is it “gay friendly? It is class and race—and not gay friendliness—that determines who is able to experience Beirut as “gay friendly;” In Beirut—as now amid the COVID pandemic—race and class primarily determine who gets to experience safety and precarity
• LGBT individuals’ various negotiations or “queer strategies” in navigating everyday disruptions, with a focus on mobilities and access to space. These includes movements within and across the city, to crossing neighborhood borders, and access to “gay-friendly” spaces and communities of organizing
• Queer strategies that people use, like accepting contradictions, and creating bubbles as both metaphorical and physical spaces of respite to negotiate life
• What can everyday queer tactics tell us about the local and regional politics, and everyday life violence and uncertainty? This current pandemic also illustrates how it affects LGBT communities differently based on race, class, gender, and documentation status. Similarly, State and interpersonal violence in the U.S. remain heavily determined by marginalization, with Indigenous and Black communities particularly targeted even in the midst of the pandemic
• What does it mean to conduct ethnographic research at times of violence and disruption? What does it mean when one’s research gets constantly interrupted and one has to leave their research site due to violence and bombings?

I hope Disruptive Situations will help us better understand both how people negotiate constant major life disruptions and how we can come up with creative ways to conduct research when we live in uncertain times, such as the ones we are currently experiencing.

Celebrating LGBT History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, in celebration of LGBT History Month, we showcase eight Temple University Press titles that chronicle LGBT History.

Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America by Miriam Frank 

Out in the Union tells the continuous story of queer American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013. Miriam Frank shrewdly chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s. She documents coming out on the job and in the union as well as issues of discrimination and harassment, and the creation of alliances between unions and LGBT communities.

Featuring in-depth interviews with LGBT and labor activists, Frank provides an inclusive history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests. She carefully details how queer caucuses in local unions introduced domestic partner benefits and union-based AIDS education for health care workers-innovations that have been influential across the U.S. workforce. Out in the Union also examines organizing drives at queer workplaces, campaigns for marriage equality, and other gay civil rights issues to show the enduring power of LGBT workers.

The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture by Heike Bauer

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? The Hirschfeld Archives answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century.
Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence—including persecution, death and suicide—shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism.
The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.

Modern American Queer History edited by Allida M. Black

In the twentieth century, countless Americans claimed gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities, forming a movement to secure social as well as political equality. This collection of essays considers the history as well as the historiography of the queer identities and struggles that developed in the United States in the midst of widespread upheaval and change.

Whether the subject is an individual life story, a community study, or an aspect of public policy, these essays illuminate the ways in which individuals in various locales understood the nature of their desires and the possibilities of resisting dominant views of normality and deviance. Theoretically informed, but accessible, the essays shed light too on the difficulties of writing history when documentary evidence is sparse or “coded.” Taken together these essays suggest that while some individuals and social networks might never emerge from the shadows, the persistent exploration of the past for their traces is an integral part of the on-going struggle for queer rights.

Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America, by Colin R. Johnson

Most studies of lesbian and gay history focus on urban environments. Yet gender and sexual diversity were anything but rare in nonmetropolitan areas in the first half of the twentieth century. Just Queer Folks explores the seldom-discussed history of same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in rural and small-town America during a period when the now familiar concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were just beginning to take shape.

Eschewing the notion that identity is always the best measure of what can be known about gender and sexuality, Colin R. Johnson argues instead for a queer historicist approach. In so doing, he uncovers a startlingly unruly rural past in which small-town eccentrics, “mannish” farm women, and cross-dressing Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees were often just queer folks so far as their neighbors were concerned. Written with wit and verve, Just Queer Folks upsets a whole host of contemporary commonplaces, including the notion that queer history is always urban history.

Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics by Moira Rachel Kenney

In this book, Moira Kenney makes the case that Los Angeles better represents the spectrum of gay and lesbian community activism and culture than cities with a higher gay profile. Owing to its sprawling geography and fragmented politics, Los Angeles lacks a single enclave like the Castro in San Francisco or landmarks as prominent as the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, but it has a long and instructive history of community building.

By tracking the terrain of the movement since the beginnings of gay liberation in 1960’s Los Angeles, Kenney shows how activists lay claim to streets, buildings, neighborhoods, and, in the example of West Hollywood, an entire city. Exploiting the area’s lack of cohesion, they created a movement that maintained a remarkable flexibility and built support networks stretching from Venice Beach to East LA. Taking a different path from San Francisco and New York, gays and lesbians in Los Angeles emphasized social services, decentralized communities (usually within ethnic neighborhoods), and local as well as national politics. Kenney’s grounded reading of this history celebrates the public and private forms of activism that shaped a visible and vibrant community.

Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice, by Ryan Patrick Murphy

In 1975, National Airlines was shut down for 127 days when flight attendants went on strike to protest long hours and low pay. Activists at National and many other U.S. airlines sought to win political power and material resources for people who live beyond the boundary of the traditional family. In Deregulating Desire, Ryan Patrick Murphy, a former flight attendant himself, chronicles the efforts of single women, unmarried parents, lesbians and gay men, as well as same-sex couples to make the airline industry a crucible for social change in the decades after 1970.
Murphy situates the flight attendant union movement in the history of debates about family and work. Each chapter offers an economic and a cultural analysis to show how the workplace has been the primary venue to enact feminist and LGBTQ politics.
From the political economic consequences of activism to the dynamics that facilitated the rise of what Murphy calls the “family values economy” to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Deregulating Desire emphasizes the enduring importance of social justice for flight attendants in the twenty-first century.

Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain by Lisa Z. Sigel

After the Great War, British men and women grappled with their ignorance about sexuality and desire. Seeking advice and information from doctors, magazines, and each other, they wrote tens of thousands of letters about themselves as sexual subjects. In these letters, they disclosed their uncertainties, their behaviors, and the role of sexuality in their lives. Their fascinating narratives tell how people sought to unleash their imaginations and fashion new identities.

Making Modern Love shows how readers embraced popular media—self-help books, fetish magazines, and advice columns—as a source of information about sexuality and a means for telling their own stories. From longings for transcendent marital union to fantasies of fetish-wear, cross-dressing, and whipping, men and women revealed a surprising range of desires and behaviors (queer and otherwise) that have been largely disregarded until now.

Lisa Sigel mines these provocative narratives to understand how they contributed to new subjectivities and the development of modern sexualities.

City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972, by Marc Stein

Marc Stein’s City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves is refreshing for at least two reasons: it centers on a city that is not generally associated with a vibrant gay and lesbian culture, and it shows that a community was forming long before the Stonewall rebellion. In this lively and well received book, Marc Stein brings to life the neighborhood bars and clubs where people gathered and the political issues that rallied the community. He reminds us that Philadelphians were leaders in the national gay and lesbian movement and, in doing so, suggests that New York and San Francisco have for too long obscured the contributions of other cities to gay culture.

Temple University Press is having a Back-to-School SALE!

It’s Not (Only) About Transgender: Bathroom Bills and the Politics of Fear

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost a column by Finn Enke, editor of Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies, that first appeared April 2 on myhusbandbetty.com, about bathroom legislation and the climate of fear these bills produce.

In 2015, 21 different anti-trans bills were put before legislatures in over 12 states. In the first 3 months of 2016, politicians have brought us another 44 bills in still more states. Most of these bills focus on public facilities that are sex segregated; most criminalize transgender and nonbinary people for using public facilities; most suggest that these bills are necessary for the “safety” and “privacy” of “the public;” most include a definition of “sex” as that determined by birth assignment and confirmed by birth certificate, and chromosomes. Many focus on public schools. In their rhetorical conflation of transgender with perversion and predation, and in their legitimation of excessive surveillance, they disproportionately impact people who are already most targeted: trans and queer people of color, trans women generally, and nonbinary people.

Whether or not they pass, these bills produce a climate of fear and suspicion, and they have already contributed to an increase in violence in and around bathrooms.

As a white transgender person who doesn’t “pass” well in either bathroom, I am more nervous than ever every time I need to use a public restroom (roughly 1,500 times a year).

These bills don’t originate from public concern or from any documented problem, and protests against them show that many people aren’t buying it. After all, trans people have been around forever, and there is no record of any trans person harassing anyone in a bathroom, ever. Plus, the bills themselves are staggering in their fantasies that sex could simply be flashed at the door with the wave of a birth certificate. Most people know that these bills don’t make bathrooms safe and only marginalize trans people, even making it impossible for us to use any bathroom.

We know we are political fodder. The GOP made a sudden “issue” out of our access to public facilities in order to galvanize a crumbling party. It wouldn’t be the first time the GOP has created a political platform around vilifying already-marginal communities. As John Ehrlichman explained in 1994, Nixon advisors designed the war on drugs in order to derail the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam Antiwar Movement. In the midst of the Cold War, the GOP also consolidated itself around anti-abortion platforms. And from the 1990s on, the GOP turned gay marriage into the fuel behind their campaigns rather than addressing economic and environmental crises.

But even more specifically, the rhetoric surrounding these bills relies on a very old trope of white women needing protection against sinister intruders. In Wisconsin during a 9 hour public hearing about its bathroom bill, we heard from quite a few men who didn’t want their daughter or granddaughter to be vulnerable to men preying on girls in the locker room. One said, for example, “we don’t allow exhibitionists and child molesters to hang out outside of school buildings, so how can we even be talking about letting them into girl’s locker rooms?”

North Carolina State Senator David Brock shared a similar concern in response to the state paying $42,000 for an emergency session to pass SB2 which criminalizes trans people for using public facilities: “you know, $42,000 is not going to cover the medical expenses when a pervert walks into a bathroom and my little girls are in there.”

Or we can look at the campaigns against Houston Proposition 1 during 2015. Prop 1 was an Equal Rights Ordinance barring discrimination in housing and employment on the basis of gender identity as well as sex, race, disability and other protected statuses. These are rights that should already be guaranteed under the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and elaborated by Title IX and the American with Disabilities Act. Refusing to affirm these rights, those who opposed the bill claimed that the bill would allow men into women’s bathrooms. They created TV ads depicting large dark men intruding on white girls in bathroom stalls. They rhetorically turned a housing and employment nondiscrimination ordinance into a “bathroom bill,” and they succeeded; Prop One failed to pass.

And let’s not forget that the North Carolina bill also contains unchallenged sections that discriminate against workers and veterans. Against the more graphic iconography of predatory men in women’s bathrooms, the rights and workers and veterans are easily lost from view.

This is not the first time that demands for equality across race, sex and gender have been resisted with the claim that public accommodations will become spaces of unregulated danger against innocence. The face of the intruder may change slightly, but across centuries, the victim is ever and always a young white girl.

It’s also not the first time we have seen white women used in the service of sexist and racist and transphobic violence. Feminist historians have conclusively shown that the 19^th and 20^th c. trope of protecting young white womanhood was foremost about securing white masculinity, domesticity, and white supremacy.

Though they cause real violences, these bathroom bills are not primarily about transgender people or bathrooms. Nor have lawmakers, for all their concern about young girls being molested in bathrooms, shown similar concern about the most common forms of sexual violence and assault against girls and women (across race) that take place outside of bathrooms.

As mean as these bathroom bills are, something much larger is also at stake.  The North Carolina bill is designed primarily to strip the right of local municipalities to set their own anti-discrimination and protection laws.

We have lost all semblance of constitutional, democratic process.

These anti-trans tactics work because they succeed in directing fear away from the corporate demolition of democracy; they succeed by making people believe that the reason they are struggling and vulnerable is because some other group of people is dangerous and taking away something “we” worked hard to earn.

How, then, can we best address the fact that these bills increase everyone’s vulnerability and directly make the world less safe for people of color, people who are known or perceived to be trans, nonbinary, queer, or gender non-conforming?

While politicians vie for corporate favors at the expense of their constituents, and as more and more people struggle to maintain jobs, health, and life, we can still refuse to perpetuate hatred. Our only hope may be to refuse the rhetoric that pits people against each other. As politicians and corporations dismantle democracy, it is more crucial than ever to organize across race and class and ability, across queer and feminist and trans and straight; and to be brilliant in our resistance to cooptation.

An Interview with Miriam Frank, author of Out in the Union, from Notchesblog.com

This week in North Philly Notes, we re-post an interview with Miriam Frank, author of Out in the Union, that originally appeared on Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality, a blog devoted to promoting critical conversations about the history of sex and sexuality across theme, period and region. Learn more about the history of sexuality at Notchesblog.com.

Out in the Union: An Interview with Miriam Frank

Interview by Katherine Turk

Out in the Union (Temple University Press, 2014) by Miriam Frank tells the continuous story of queer American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013. This book chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s and how these struggles continue to the present day. Frank documents coming out on the job and in the union as well as issues of discrimination and harassment, and the creation of alliances between unions and LGBT communities, organizing drives at queer workplaces, campaigns for marriage equality, and other gay civil rights issues to show the enduring power of LGBT workers. Drawing from 100 interviews with LGBT and labor activists, Out in the Union provides an inclusive history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests.

Katherine Turk: The subfield of gay and lesbian history has existed for more than three decades. Why do you think it has taken so long for scholars to write queer labor history?

Miriam Frank: The field of LGBT history includes many studies of queer working-class communities but very few investigations of the actual work lives of queer working-class people in those communities. Traditional labor history considers the everyday lives of working-class people at their jobs in terms of unionization, job mobility, and racial, ethnic and gender segmentation in the workforce. Queer workers and queer issues have not been a topic.

Before the 1970s, this made sense, because LGBT workers rarely revealed their queer identities on the job or in their unions. But customs have changed. In Out in the Union, I show how workplace cultures, community standards, and union traditions have influenced the ease or difficulty workers experience as they come out at work and in their unions. Contemporary explorations by union activists about working class lives and queer identities have led to LGBT-oriented reforms in organizing drives and collective bargaining, in union service programs, and in politically effective labor/community coalitions.

The US labor movement has a great history of strong political coalitions that have pressed for reform on economic and social problems. I wanted readers to consider how LGBT trade unionists developed alliances to apply their organizations’ principles and resources to queer union members’ economic status, basic civil rights, and workplace cultures. The successful LGBT coalitions that first emerged in the 1970s continue today, influencing collective bargaining priorities, community organizing, regional politics, and trade union ethics.

KT: Your book is organized thematically and chronologically; much of the narrative unfolds through case studies that illuminate the issues that have faced gay unionists as they pursued economic justice and the right to be open at work.  Why do you start the book with a timeline?

MF: Out in the Union narrates untold stories of queer labor based on more than 100 oral histories that I recorded between 1987 and 2010. The collection’s scope follows diverse industries, unions, communities, and political events and ranges through more than 50 years of US labor and LGBT history.

A wise reviewer of the manuscript suggested that this complex narrative of communities, organizations, and events could benefit from chronological markers. I made a timeline based on occasions from the larger narrative that would contextualize political issues and decisions that shaped unions and queer working-class communities during that important half-century. I wanted to highlight locations, conflicts, alliances, and negotiations to demonstrate the astonishingly uneven, yet consistently dynamic diversity of these two movements.

KT: You make a strong case that queer and labor histories are intertwined.  The years you chronicle saw the expansion of queer civil rights and the contraction of labor rights; as queer identities have become more accepted, working class identities have declined.  Do you see any causal relationship between these dynamics or are they merely conterminous?

MF: My book begins with the mid-1960s, before gay liberation emerged as a mass movement. Unions then represented approximately 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. Public and service-sector unions were organizing successfully and their gains offset declines in union participation in the private manufacturing sector. Those losses stemmed from manufacturers’ decisions to shift operations to regions where lower wage rates prevailed and “right-to-work” laws disadvantaged labor’s goals.

During this same period, public opinion on queer civil rights began to favor reform, especially in liberal urban centers – and in states where union drives could not be stopped by right-to-work sanctions. These congruencies are neither causal nor coincidental. Rather they indicate politically liberal values: the acceptance of sexual variance in civil life and the encouragement of fair work rules in economic policy.

One early marker of the growing acceptance of queer civil rights was the 40-year-long state-by-state elimination of anti-sodomy laws in 36 states, by ballot or by judicial decree, a trend that began in 1961. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas struck down the anti-sodomy laws of the fourteen remaining states; of those fourteen states twelve maintained right-to-work statutes.

Declines in union membership have steepened, but without real losses in working-class identity. The harm, instead, is economic. Former union members still hold jobs, sometimes two or three, often as part-timers, often at or close to minimum wage. Their positions are precarious: they hesitate to challenge managers about unsanitary and unsafe working conditions, undependable schedules, and scarce raises. An ever-stronger corporate class with ever more consolidated political power threatens the security of working-class people and their unions as well as the hard-won gains of queer communities.

On April 15 of this year, queer and straight skilled laborers in highly-paid unionized jobs rallied in shopping malls and downtown plazas throughout the country. They were joined by queer and straight fast-food workers, big-box store workers, adjunct professors, home health care aids, and others who labor in underpaid and underrepresented jobs. I went to the demonstration in midtown Manhattan. People were demanding a raise in the minimum wage and an end to union-busting harassment during organizing drives. It seemed to me that while decline in union membership remains a serious issue, there is no dearth of people with working-class pride who would gladly reverse the situation.

KT: The book opens with the story of Bill, a covert trans man who worked as a locomotive engine repairman and rose to a leadership role in his union in the early twentieth century.  How does the history of transgender workers relate to that of gay and lesbian workers, thereby rendering the more general term “queer” useful for labor history?  How have transgender workers’ priorities been incorporated or downplayed within broader labor struggles?  

MF: Bill’s fragmentary story of survival and transformation fits in with what little we know about transgender lives a century ago; and his union involvement is unique during an era when transgender working-class people had few options for survival. Some lived openly as outsiders; others would quietly pass. Rarely were any of these experiences recorded.

Decades later, transgender people were active in homophile and early gay liberation movements. But as gay liberation entered the political mainstream during the mid-1970s the strategy shifted from radical confrontation to a lesbian/gay civil rights agenda. Two issues emerged, both of them popular and possibly winnable: legal sanctions to halt sexual orientation discrimination and legalization of domestic partnerships. Anti-discrimination policies were included in unions’ constitutions in the early 1970s and the first collective bargaining agreement to protect domestic partners was ratified in 1982. Lesbian and gay advocates in the labor movement based their claims on union principles as old as the labor movement itself – an injury to one is the concern of all. Absent from the civil rights dialogue was any mention of gender transition or expression.

Nevertheless, transgender workers of the 1960s and 1970s found recourse from straight workmates and union representatives. At one auto plant, a worker who was in transition from male to female suffered hazing from co-workers and supervisors. Her local president broke up the worker-to-worker harassment, then helped her file a lawsuit against the company.

Unions first adopted constitutional resolutions on transgender workers’ rights to equal protection late in the 1980s and then confirmed those rights in their contracts. But not until the late 1990s did any workplaces prioritize health benefits and gender expression as rights specific to the lives and needs of transgender members. A few unions have followed that trail, but many others have yet to highlight transgender workers’ claims in contract negotiations.

Queer progress in the US labor movement has never been easy, but lesbian and gay union members have seen basic civil rights and economic benefits move steadily forward, especially since the mid-1990s. By contrast, transgender union members continue to travel a road that remains remarkably uneven. Now is the time for all queer unionists and their allies to support transgender activists as they press for a trans-friendly bargaining agenda. Their demands can shape improved contracts that will at last address head-on their basic needs: to earn their livelihoods free of harassment, protected from discrimination and supported by good wages and fair benefits.

KT: The second of the book’s three sections emphasizes the significant and often unlikely coalitions among queer and other workers and between queer activists and unionists. But did you also encounter evidence of notable tensions or fissures (sexism or transphobia, for example) within the queer labor community?

MF: Political cultures of the labor movement are actually different from the cultures of many identity-based civil rights organizations. To say it plainly, healthy unions operate with a primary ethic of solidarity when they work with activists from the ranks and with coalition partners from allied organizations.

This is not to say that expressions and issues of sexism, homophobia or transphobia do not exist in the ranks or in leadership. But from my interviews I have consistently found evidence of LGBT union members supporting one another in organizational decisions and working out their differences in frank dialogue. At best that openness flows from the union hall to the workplace and back again. LGBT union members who have come out have usually found fair-minded allies among straight and cisgendered co-workers: on the job and in their organizations

Often what sealed that respect was the willingness of LGBT activists to join in the projects of their unions. Everyday tasks, focused planning, and casual conversations gave people paths for productive collaboration. Queer people were seen less as outsiders and more as compatible volunteers; the energies of new activists lightened everyone’s loads.

That second section of the book consists of two chapters about the politics of coalitions. Labor/queer coalitions have been important to the health of both movements because queer communities, like unions, continue to deal with real and destructive political threats. Both have found reliable allies in one another in national, regional, and local struggles.

I have seen union meetings where waves of mistrust greeted new ideas. But way more often than not, labor’s essential ethic of fairness and equality has made a vibrant difference: “United we stand, Divided we fall — An injury to one is an injury to all.”

KT: Do labor unions still serve a vital role for queer workers, and, if so, is their need greater than other workers’?  Given labor’s precarious position in today’s political and economic landscape, should queer activists continue to pursue the union-building strategies you uncover in Out in the Union? Or should they instead intensify their efforts to boost protections for queer identities in more visible and professional workplace settings?  

MF: Out in the Union shows how unions and queer communities learned to collaborate during a critical 40-year period. During that time, unions were being diminished and weakened by multiple waves of deindustrialization accompanied by right-wing pressures against gains achieved through collective bargaining. And yet the US labor movement has managed to survive.

Currently, unions represent 11 percent of employed people in the US, a sure decline from the high point of 35 percent in the 1960s. Still, in 2013, 11 percent of the number of people represented by unions was 14.5 million. Estimates of how many people in the US are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender vary widely, but if we say 5 percent, we still have 725,000 workers; and that’s not counting partners, spouses, parents, and children impacted by the economic security of their queer family members.

Activists should come to terms with labor’s track record on queer issues and make their own estimations of the value of working in coalition with organizations that still represent 14.5 million people. Queer communities and labor have definitely benefited from mutual support: from the coalitions that overcame anti-gay referendums in California, Oregon, and Washington over a 30-year period to the deliberate and surprising state-by-state adoption of marriage equality reforms between 2003-2013, all in states with union densities of 10-25 percent.

Professional workplaces are increasingly unionized. Adjunct and graduate student campaigns have been popping up on dozens of campuses. Nurses’ unions have been mobilizing aggressively to address current transformations of U.S. health care. And unionized opera singers and orchestra musicians at New York’s Metropolitan Opera made headlines in September 2014 by winning their contract battle just ahead of the annual opening night gala. That fight was professional and militant and community support was very, very gay.

KT: For its subject, scope, and source material, your book is pioneering.  You note that the book is not intended to present encyclopedic coverage or to serve as the last word on its topic.  How do you envision your book as a platform for future scholarship?  What related study would you most like to see next? 

MF: Out in the Union has already served as a research base: for a chapter in a doctoral dissertation in 2014 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, by Sara Smith (on efforts by teachers and their unions to defeat the Briggs Initiative of 1978 in California); and for a senior honors thesis at Columbia University by Jared Odessky on union activity during the notorious Anita Bryant “Save Our Children” campaign in South Florida in 1977. It will be influential in graduate studies and down the line could provide a base for other sophisticated projects. I am aware of two graduate seminars being offered this summer that will use Out in the Union as a core text, and I have been invited to speak to one of those groups.

There are a number of paths that scholars could take. Projects that focus on single industries or on a particular region would offer more intensive research opportunities than the structure of my project permitted. I am thinking on the order of two very challenging and wonderful works: 1)Anne Balay’s Steel Closets (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), a fiery and focused study of 40 queer unionized steelworkers, most of them employed at the U.S. Steelworks in Gary, Indiana. 2) Phil Tiemeyer’sPlane Queer (University of California Press, 2013). I have disagreements with Tiemeyer’s exclusive study of gay male flight attendants, but I do admire the book’s dedicated and unswerving focus on the actual work that these men perform.

Earlier this year I posted a NOTCHES entry, Organized labor, Gay Liberation and the Battle Against the Religious Right, 1977-1984, and became acquainted with Bob Cant and Brian Dempsey, both of them veteran British labor activists. They mused on the dearth of historical review about gay/labor organizing in Britain and the absence of queer consciousness in British everyday life. They discussed the possibility of a British trade union oral history project. This would have to be a huge devotion, but what opportunities that material could offer!

And now, a last word about archives: the Out in the Union oral histories, files, and related organizational materials of the Lesbian and Gay Labor Network have been deposited at New York University’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives in the main Bobst Library. Some scholars have already been working with what is available. By summer’s end, 2015, the entire trove will be available to the researching public.

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Miriam Frank received her Ph.D in German Literature from New York University in 1977, where she currently is Adjunct Professor of Humanities.  She has taught Labor History in union education programs in New York City and in Detroit, where she was a founder of Women’s Studies at Wayne County Community College. Her book, Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America(Temple University Press, 2014), chronicles the queer lives of American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013.

Katherine Turk is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Turk has written numerous articles on postwar feminist politics and the challenges of defining and creating sex equality in the workplace, in the law, and in American culture.  Her forthcoming book, Equality on Trial: Sex and Class at Work in the Age of Title VII, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in early 2016.

Photo: Katherine Turk and Miriam Frank at the “Fighting Inequality” Conference of the Labor and Working Class History Association and Working Class Studies Association, Georgetown University, May 2015. (Photo courtesy of Desma Holcomb.)

Celebrating Gay Pride Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate Gay Pride. Temple University Press has a long history of outstanding and award-winning LGBT titles. Each title documents and explores the struggles and victors of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender community as we reflect on the strides the community has made and the work still needed to be done.

A Genealogy of Queer Theory by William B. Turner

Mobilizing Gay Singapore by Lynette J. Chua

Just Queer Folks by Colin R. Johnson

Legalizing Gay Marriage by Michael Mello

Honey, Honey, Miss Thang by Leon E. Pettiway

Modern American Queer History edited by Allida M. Black

Out in the Union by Miriam Frank

Tortilleras edited by Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Perpetusa-Seva

Transfeminist Perspectives edited Anne Enke

Lesbian and Bisexual Identities by Kristin G. Esterberg

Gay and Lesbian Politics by Mark Blasius

In a Queer Voice by Michael Sadowski

Poisoned Ivy by Toni A.H. McNarson

City of Sisterly and Brotherly Love by Marc Stein

Gay and Lesbian Politics edited by Barry D Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak and André Krouwel

The Changing of the Guard by Dana Rosenfeld

Officially Gay by Gary L. Lehring

Out in the South edited by Carlos L. Dews and Carolyn Leste Law

Machos, Maricones, and Gays by Ian Lumsden

The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten by James Smalls

Q & A edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom

Courts, Liberalism, and Rights by Jason Pierceson

Gay rights as a classic case of subconstituency politics

In this blog entry, Ben Bishin, author of Tyranny of the Minority shows how gay rights issues result from the interplay of intense groups.

The last few months have seen an increased interest in the civil rights of members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered community. Most recently, this question has centered around President Obama’s unfulfilled promise to eliminate the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy that allows only closeted members of this community to serve in the armed forces. Other similar questions of civil rights are seen in the discussion of states granting rights to marriage and civil unions.

One reason that civil rights for gays is of such interest is because political conditions seem ripe for change. Polls demonstrate that the public is increasingly supportive of granting the gay community equal rights as, for instance, a June CBS poll shows that only about a third of citizens think that gays deserve “no legal recognition” of their partnership status. Similarly, a May USA Today/Gallup poll shows that over 69% think that gays should be allowed to serve openly in the military. Moreover, the last three years have seen a dramatic shift from a federal government unified in Republican hands to one of unified Democratic control.

Despite these major shifts, progress has been slow at best. The federal prohibition of same sex marriage (DOMA) remains the law of the land. Most of the states where gay marriage has been allowed, it has been initiated by the rulings of state courts which have implicitly granted these rights by striking down laws that ban gay unions. President Obama’s very limited order providing spousal benefits to same sex employees of the federal government represents perhaps the only tangible progress on this score. When taken in combination, the absence of change despite strong popular support and Democratic control of the federal government have left many wondering: what will it take for members of this community to gain equal rights?

Some, like UC Irvine professor Charles Anthony Smith, suggest that the gay community is captured by the Democrats and thus they don’t have to provide policy because the community has no alternative as Republicans are worse on the issue than are Democrats (i.e., Smith 2007). The case of gay rights strikes me, however, as a classic case of subconstituency politics—where political outcomes are dominated not by the public’s will (i.e., majority opinion) as classic democratic theory suggests, but rather result from the interplay of intense groups. Politicians acquiesce to, and work for, the preferences of subconstituencies because they provide them disproportionate resources (e.g., votes, contributions, manpower, endorsements). By offering bundles of positions across issues, politicians develop platforms of positions designed to appeal to members of these intense groups.

Historically, the LGBT movement has been disadvantaged by subconstituency politics; while they are passionate about their cause, and very active, they are opposed by an equally intense group, (i.e., fundamentalist Christians) that exists in larger numbers across a wider range of political jurisdictions (e.g. counties, congressional districts, states, etc.). While the size of the LGBT community varies dramatically across these jurisdictions, the fundamentalist community is always larger. In the congressional district representing San Francisco (CA 9), which has the largest adult gay population of any district in the country, for instance, the community of people identifying as fundamentalist Christians is about 2 points larger—a fact that provides their staunchest opponents a tremendous advantage because they are not opposed in those jurisdictions where the LGBT community is small or not vocal. In short, in most places, Republican politicians tend to be opposed to such policy while the Democrats are split, depending on the nature of their districts.

Understanding how these groups are distributed is central to describing political outcomes on this issue because, in places where one group is not represented, politicians have no incentive to reflect the views of the LGBT population. Both Democrats and Republicans will advocate the preferences of the intense group—in this case fundamentalist Christians. In contrast, in places where both fundamentalist and LGBT groups are active, politicians of different parties have the incentive to take opposing positions on the issue. Democrats tend to support gay rights in these districts while Republicans tend to oppose them. Consequently the distribution of groups across states and districts helps to explain why and where we are most likely to see advances in, and higher levels of support for, gay rights.

It also suggests however, that in order for gay rights to be recognized, confederate groups who strongly support gay rights may be needed to pressure politicians in areas where gay populations are small or inactive (or simply not vocal). Fortunately, other groups, especially the young and the well educated, see this civil rights issue as an important question of basic fairness. To the extent that politicians can bring these groups together, when these factions are combined, they provide a more potent alliance of groups. The challenge to those who advocate equal rights is figuring out how to bring these groups together toward their common goal.

Ben Bishin is the author of Tyranny of the Minority: The Subconstituency Politics Theory of Representation. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1996_reg.html