Masculinity, the Embodied Male Worker, and the Historian’s Gaze

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 143-160

  Baron, Ava ^a  

^a RIDER UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749397776     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: 14716445     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0147547906000081     Document Type: Article

References (143)

1. Ava Baron, “Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,” in Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 30.
2. Early research on masculinity largely focused on the middle class. For e.g., see: E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993)
3. J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Masculinity in Britain and America 1840–1940 (Manchester, 1987).
4. Research on work and masculinity is now extensive. For examples of early studies documenting the contested character of US working-class masculinity, see essays in Baron, Work Engendered.
5. Still, while historical studies of masculinities have proceeded at a dizzying pace, historical studies abound in which men's gender remains unmarked and unscrutinized. Judith A. Allen, “Men Interminably in Crisis? Historians on Masculinity, Sexual Boundaries, and Manhood,” Radical History Review 82 (2002), 191–207
6. Robert A. Nye, “Locating Masculinity: Some Recent Work on Men,” Signs 30 (2005), 1937–1962
7. See Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1900–1918 (Baltimore, 1982)
8. Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York, 1987)
9. Ruth M. Alexander, The ‘Girl Problem’: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, 1995).
10. On this tendency to treat women as more embodied than men in the sociology of the body, see, David Morgan, “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine: Reflections on the Male Body and Masculinities,” in Sue Scott and David Morgan, eds., Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body (London, 1993), 69–88.
11. There are some notable exceptions; but most of these, as I will show, tend to focus on and treat male workers' embodiment different than that of women workers. For an excellent exploration of the Jewish male laboring body, see, Daniel E. Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004).
12. Laura Frader provides a fascinating discussion of how working-bodies became gendered and racialized after the First World War in France, see “From Muscles to Nerves: Gender, ‘Race,’ and the Body at Work in France 1919–1939,” International Review of Social History 44 (1999), Supplement: 123–147.
13. For a sampling of feminist theorizing about bodies and sexual difference, see, Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, eds., Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (New York, 1999).
14. Kathleen Canning, “The Body as Method?: Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History,” Gender and History 11 (1999), 499–513
15. and her Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca, 1996).
16. How the workplace has been constructed to marginalize the body and to construct female bodies as “out of place” has been explored in different types of work. The work of feminist cultural geographers is instructive, see, for example, Susan Halford, Mike Savage, and Anne Witz, Gender, Careers and Organizations: Current Developments in Banking, Nursing and Local Government (London, 1997), esp. Chapter 7: “Organized Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Workplace Culture,” 228–260
17. and Linda McDowell, Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Oxford, 1997).
18. The concept of the “male gaze” highlights the importance of seeing/being seen as a crucial component of the production and reproduction of “masculinity” and “femininity.” See Laura Mulvey's important essay on feminist film theory in which she dissects how Hollywood cinema incorporates the assumption of a male viewer and a female object of his gaze, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Constance Penlye, ed,. Feminism and Film Theory (New York, 1988), 57–68.
19. Michel Foucault has heavily influenced recent studies of the body, particularly his interest in the relationship between bodies and power, what he called “biopolitical techniques,” the “disciplining” of bodies and the ways the social is “scripted” onto bodies. Feminist theorizing and analyses of female embodiment by Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Iris Marion Young have been influential in the bodily turn in history and can provide direction for studying male workers' embodiment. For an example of recent interdisciplinary efforts to theorize male embodiment, see Nancy Tuana, William Cowling, Maurice Hamington, Greg Johnson & Terrance Macmullan, eds., Revealing Male Bodies (Bloomington, IN, 2002).
20. The implications and significance of fully embodying working-class history is the subject of an essay by Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, “The Body as a Useful Category for Working-Class History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (forthcoming).
21. Robert W. Connell, “The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History,” Theory and Society 22 (1993), 595–624.
22. Examples of research highlighting historical and contemporary masculinity “crises” abound. See, for example, Toby L. Ditz, “Shipwrecked, or Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of American History 81 (1994), 51–80
23. William Pinar, The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and the Crisis of Masculinity (New York, 2001)
24. Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC, 1997)
25. Roger Horrocks, Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies, and Realities (Basingstoke, UK, 1994)
26. Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York, 2000)
27. and Harrison G. Pope, Katherine A. Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia, eds., The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession (New York, 2000).
28. For a review and critique of this theme in the historical literature, see, Allen, “Men Interminably in Crisis?” On the tendency to ignore variations as a limitation of the “crisis” approach to the history of masculinity
29. see, Clyde Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990), 183–204.
30. Kimmel, Manhood in America.
31. Michael Kimmel, “After Fifteen Years: The Impact of the Sociology of Masculinity on the Masculinity of Sociology,” in Jeff Hearn and David Morgan, eds., Men, Masculinities and Social Theory (London, 1990), 100.
32. Steven Maynard, “Rough Work and Rugged Men: The Social Construction of Masculinity in Working-Class History,” Labour/Le Travail 23 (1989), 160 and 166.
33. On the crises faced by small businessmen in the face of corporations and the nationalization of the United States economy at the end of the nineteenth century, see TJ. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in Richard Wrightman Fox and TJ. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York, 1983), 3–38.
34. Gregory L. Kaster, “Labour's True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827–1877,” Gender and History 13 (2001), 24–64.
35. Stephen Meyer, “Work, Play, and Power: Masculine Culture on the Automotive Shop Floor, 1930–1960,” in Roger Horowitz, ed., Boys and Their Toys?: Masculinity, Technology, and Class in America (New York, 2001), 13–32.
36. Ava Baron, “Acquiring a Manly Competence: The Demise of Apprenticeship and the Remasculinization of Printers' Work,” in Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990), 152–163.
37. Joshua B. Freeman, “Hard Hats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 Pro-war Demonstrations,” Journal of Social History 26 (1993), 725–745.
38. This focus on “masculinity crisis” includes my own earlier work on male workers and masculinity, see my, “Technology and the Crisis of Masculinity: The Gendering of Work and Skill in the US Printing Industry, 1850–1920,” in Andrew Sturdy, David Knights and Hugh Willmott, eds., Skill and Consent: Contemporary Studies in the Labour Process (London, 1992), 67–96.
39. Allen, “Men Interminably in Crisis?”, 206, notes 10 & 11.
40. The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago, 1997), 3.
41. It is important to note the racial assumptions embedded in the historiographic language of “masculinity crises,” and that such crises appear more in research on white men than on men in other racial groups. For a more general discussion of problems with “crises alerts” in studies of masculinity see, Joy Parr, “Gender History and Historical Practice,” The Canadian Historical Review 76 (1995), 308
42. and Allen, “Men Interminably in Crisis?”
43. See John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York, 2001)
44. Elliott Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize-Fighting in America (Ithaca, 1986)
45. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995)
46. Rotundo, American Manhood
47. Kimmel, Manhood in America.
48. For a different interpretation of middle-class men's efforts to redefine masculinity during this period, see, Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920 (Chicago, 2002).
49. Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
50. On images of the frontier man, see Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York, 1985).
51. Ava Baron, “Questions of Gender: Deskilling and Demasculinization in the U.S. Printing Industry, 1830–1915,” Gender and History 1 (1989), 178–99
52. Ava Baron, “Contested Terrain Revisited: Technology and Gender Definitions of Work in the Printing Industry, 1850–1920,” in Barbara Wright, et al., eds., Women, Work, and Technology: Transformations (Ann Arbor, MI, 1987), 58–83.
53. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 63 -64.
54. Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), Chap 3.
55. Eric Lott, “All the King's Men: Elvis Impersonators and White Working-Class Masculinity,” in Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel, eds., Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Durham, NC, 1997), 195.
56. See Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (New York, 1981)
57. and his, “Shop Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form,” in John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson, eds., Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London, 1979), 185–198.
58. Bender, Sweated Work.
59. As well, Mary Blewett has argued that male textile workers in New England in the 1870s brought with them from Lancashire a style of labor politics and notion of manly respectability that praised deference and courteousness rather than violence and aggression. See her “Deference and Defiance: Labor Politics and the Meanings of Masculinity in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century New England Textile Industry,” Gender and History 5 (1993), 398–415.
60. Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety 1870–1939 (Baltimore, 1997).
61. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990), esp. Chapter 4: “Venturing Forth: Bodily Management in Public”
62. and Carole Turbin, “Fashioning the American Man: The Arrow Collar Man, 1907–1931,” Gender and History 14 (2002), 470–491.
63. On the history of the suit in England, see Katrina Honeyman, “Following Suit: Men, Masculinity and Gendered Practices in the Clothing Trade in Leeds, England, 1890–1940,” Gender and History 14 (2002), 426–446
64. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley, CA, 2002).
65. Hands were one of the few body parts left uncovered. For an insightful analysis of hands, see Janet Zandy, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004).
66. For another example of the gulf between classes in the interpretation of muscularity, see John Berger, About Looking (New York, 1980), 27–36.
67. For an excellent interpretation of the meanings of muscularity embedded in the bronze sculpture by Douglas Tilden's, The Mechanics' Fountain, 1901, located in San Francisco, see, Melissa Dabakis, “Douglas Tilden's Mechanics Fountain: Labor and the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’ in the 1890s,” American Quarterly 47 (1995), 204–235.
68. On how New Deal art and sculpture represented the muscular laboring man, see, Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, D.C., 1991).
69. For photographic efforts to raise respect for working-class men by focusing on representations of bare-chested ironworkers, see, Lewis W. Hine, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines (New York, 1932).
70. In socialist iconography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Eric Hobsbawm points out, women increasingly were fully clothed, while the male worker was bare-torsoed. See his “Man and Woman: Images on the Left,” in Worlds of Labor: Further Studies in the History of Labor (New York, 1984), 83–102.
71. For a discussion of male labor imagery and construction workers, see Freeman, “Hard Hats,” 729.
72. That the public gaze on men's bodies was clearly “classed” is further indicated by the rules that restricted artists and medical students only to use the bodies of the lower classes, and the public outcry when middle-class men's bodies were used. See, Alan C. Braddock, “‘Jeff College Boys’: Thomas Eakins, Dr. Forbes, and Anatomical Fraternity in Postbellum Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 57 (2005), 355–384.
73. For example, vaudeville performer Eugene Sandow became famous for his muscularity, scantily and boldly displayed in tights, but because women were his audience, his masculinity was called into question. This also happened to Rudolph Valentino. See, M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 50–52.
74. Miriam Hansen has argued that masculinity is destabilized when men become the object of an erotic gaze. See her, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA, 1991).
75. On women experiencing their bodies as an object of the gaze of others, see, Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York, 2005).
76. For a perceptive analysis of the white male body as spectacle in film and its cultural meanings, see, Richard Dyer, “The White Man's Muscles,” in Harry Stecopoulos & Michael Uebel, eds., Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Durham, NC, 1997), 286–314.
77. On the complexities of applying theories of “the gaze” to male bodies in film, see, Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” Screen 24 (1983), 2–16.
78. Bederman makes the case that both “race” and “civilization” were defined in biological terms thereby fusing culture and biology. Once this link was made it was logical for whites to believe that black men were biologically incapable of manliness. See Manliness and Civilization, esp. Chapter 1.
79. See, Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 86–94.
80. On male meat packinghouse workers, see, Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904–54 (Urbana, IL, 1997)
81. and Roger Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Urbana, IL, 1997).
82. Kelley, Race Rebels, 31.
83. On examining deviation from masculinity in terms of degrees, see, Thomas Gerschick, “Masculinity and Degrees of Bodily Normativity in Western Culture,” in Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, R.W. Connell, eds., Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2005), 367–378.
84. Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 18821943 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 166.
85. On how women's behavior, dress, and sexuality were central to working-class respectability, see, Ellen Ross, “‘Not the Sort that Would Sit on the Doorstep’: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods,” International Labor and Working-Class History 27 (Spring 1985), 39–59.
86. For an example of how male workers simultaneously adopted bourgeois notions of manliness and also ridiculed middle-class men for not engaging in physical labor and risk-taking, see, Paul Taillon, “‘What We Want is Good, Sober Men’: Masculinity, Respectability, and Temperance in the Railroad Brotherhoods, c. 1870–1910,” Journal of Social History 36 (2002), 319–338.
87. On the theory of gender as performativity, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993)
88. and her, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990).
89. On the significance of male bonding in the military, see, Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago, 1996), Chapter 3.
90. Brotherhoods' racial exclusivity was widespread and is well-known and documented. See, for example, Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, NJ, 2001)
91. Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
92. Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ, 1989); Winter, Making Men, Making Class. Clawson identifies two types of fraternal associations that emerged in the nineteenth century: craft-based trade associations, including fraternal benefit societies that focused on providing aid and organizing social activities and those that evolved into trade unions and or fraternal benefit societies, and Masonic type lodges which were primarily social and tended to be broader regionally. Members of union “brotherhoods” often were members of other types of fraternal organizations as well.
93. See, for example, Patricia Cooper's insightful analysis of this contradiction in male cigarworkers' work culture in Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana, IL, 1987).
94. In this vein, David Montgomery, for example, tried to uncover the forces that limited the development of a mutualistic ethic among workers and thereby impeded the development of a powerful labor movement. See his, Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York, 1989), esp. Chapter 1.
95. For example, contestation over gender meanings of what it meant to be a maritime worker impeded British seamen's ability to win important labor disputes in the late eighteenth century. Jeffrey D. Glasco, “The Seaman Feels Him-self a Man,” International Labor and Working-Class History 66 (2004), 40–56.
96. See, Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working-Class (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 122–126.
97. Margaret S. Creighton, “Davy Jones' Locker Room: Gender and the American Whaleman, 1830–1870,” in Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World 1700–1920 (Baltimore, MD, 1996), 118–137.
98. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Disorderly Conduct (New York, 1985), 53–76.
99. There are few historical analyses of homosexuality among the working-class. For exceptions, see, George Chauncey's discussion of homosexuality and working-class culture in his Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994), Chapter 1
100. and Peter Boag's research on working-class male homosexual relationships in urban areas of the Pacific Northwest, in his Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley, CA, 2003).
101. On homosexuality among transient workers, and the potentially homoerotic appeal of the Wobblies' portrayal of workers as muscular see, Frank Tobias Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930 (Urbana, IL, 2003), 123–127 and 193–194.
102. For overviews and discussions of same-sex sexual harassment litigation, see Hilary S. Axam and Deborah Zalesne, “Simulated Sodomy and Other Forms of Heterosexual ‘Horseplay’: Same Sex Sexual Harassment, Workplace Gender Hierarchies, and the Myth of the Gender Monolith Before and After Oncale,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 11 (1999), 155–243
103. Kathryn Abrams, “The New Jurisprudence of Sexual Harassment” Cornell Law Review 83 (1998), 1169–1230.
104. Manhood in America. I am not suggesting that masculinity should be studied only in terms of men's relations with men. The pitfalls of such an approach, particularly its tendency to ignore the ways gender operates to enhance men's power over women have been discussed elsewhere. See, for example, Toby L. Ditz, “The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History,” Gender and History 16 (2004), 1–35
105. and Ava Baron, “‘On Looking At Men’: Masculinity and the Making of a Gendered Working Class History,” in Ann-Louise Shapiro, ed., Feminists Revision History (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994), 146–171.
106. Sallie Westwood, “Racism, Black Masculinity and the Politics of Space,” in Jeff Hearn and David Morgan, eds., Men, Masculinities and Social Theory (London, 1990), 55–71.
107. Maynard, “Rough Work and Rugged Men,” 159–69
108. Freeman, “Hard Hats.”
109. For an important discussion of male work culture among railroaders, see Taillon, “‘What We Want is Good, Sober Men’”, and “‘To Make Men out of Crude Material’: Work Culture, Manhood, and Unionism in the Railroad Running Trades, c 1870–1900,” in Roger Horowitz, ed., Boys and Their Toys: Masculinity, Technology, and Class (New York, 2001), 33–54
110. Stephen Meyer, “Rugged Manhood: The Aggressive and Confrontational Culture of US Auto Workers, 1930–1960,” Journal of Social History 36 (2002), 125–147.
111. On the rough culture of early nineteenth-century canal workers, see, Peter Way, “Evil Humors and Ardent Spirits: The Rough Culture of Canal Construction Laborers,” Journal of American History 79 (1993), 1397–1428.
112. On the masculine culture of cigarworkers, see, Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker.
113. For a thorough discussion of how dangerous the American workplace has been, see, Aldrich, Safety First.
114. Connell, The Men and The Boys (St. Leonard's, NSW, 2000), 188, and others have pointed out the contradictory nature of such risk-taking.
115. Nancy Quam-Wickham, “Rereading Man's Conquest of Nature: Skill, Myths, and the Historical Construction of Masculinity in Western Extractive Industries,” in Roger Horowitz, ed., Boys and Their Toys: Masculinity, Technology, and Class (New York, 2001), 96–97
116. Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor, “Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies: Masculinity in the Clydeside Heavy Industries, c 1930–1970s,” Labour History Review 60 (2004), 135–151.
117. “Man-Power: Montana Copper Workers, State Authority, and the (Re)drafting of Manhood during World War II,” in Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau, eds., Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York, 2001), 185–210.
118. Stan Gray, “Sharing the Shop Floor,” in Michael Kaufman, ed., Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power and Change (New York, 1987), 223.
119. Freeman, “Hard Hats,” 726.
120. Johnston and McIvor, “Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies,” 138 and 149, note 14.
121. Kevin Boyle, “The Kiss: Racial and Gender Conflict in a 1950s Automobile Factory,” The Journal of American History 84 (1997), 496–523, especially 503.
122. For studies exploring the significance of sexualized humor at the workplace for constituting gender and labor relations by scholars of contemporary labor studies and management, see, for example, David L. Collinson, Managing the Shopfloor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture (New York, 1992), Chapter 4: “Managing a Joke”
123. and Peter Lyman, “The Fraternal Bond as a Joking Relationship: A Case Study of the Role of Sexist Jokes in Male Group Bonding,” in Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner, eds., Men's Lives, 2d ed. (New York, 1992), 143–154.
124. Connell, The Men and The Boys, 109. I am not suggesting that this homoerotic content of male work culture suggests homosexuality, but that we need to consider elements of homoeroticism within heterosexuality.
125. Quam-Wickham, “Rereading Man's Conquest of Nature,” 96–97. Such “depantsing,” as it has been called, has been a common ritual among adolescent boys.
126. In some workplaces, males, including heterosexuals, have been subjected to a practice known as “bagging” in which other male workers grab their testicles. Phil Quick, a heterosexual welder and machine operator at a plant in Iowa, endured repeated incidents of bagging for a period of two years and his employer did nothing to curtail the practice; yet he lost his same-sex sexual harassment claim. Quick v Donaldson Co., 90 F. 3d 1372 (8th Cir. 1996). Although the Supreme Court recently recognized the claim of same-sex sexual harassment, it left unresolved numerous issues regarding sex and gender dynamics at the workplace when it involves men's relations with other men.
127. See, Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, 118 S. Ct. 998 (1998). For an overview of the various conflicting decisions and principles that have emerged in dealing with male-on-male workplace sexual harassment, see, Axam and Zalesne, “Simulated Sodomy, and Abrams, ”The New Jurisprudence of Sexual Harassment.”
128. Paul A. Gilje recognizes the homosociality of early American sailors but denies that it has any homoerotic content. He does so because he relies on modern sexual identity categories that conflate homosexual desire, acts, and identities. Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2004).
129. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 93.
130. For an elaboration of this argument see, Katherine Franke, “What's Wrong With Sexual Harassment,” Stanford Law Review 49 (1997), 691–772.
131. For historical analyses of how sexual harassment operated to enforce gender norms and police sexual boundaries, see, Daniel E. Bender, “‘Too Much of Distasteful Masculinity: Historicizing Sexual Harassment in the Garment Sweatshop and Factory,” Journal of Women's History 15 (2004), 91–116
132. and Stephen Meyer, “Workplace Predators: Sex and Sexuality on the U.S. Automotive Shop Floor, 1930–1960,” Labor 1 (2004), 77–93.
133. There are excellent studies that address women workers' sexuality. See Kathy Peiss's classic, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986)
134. Joan Sangster, Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920–1960 (Toronto, 1995), esp. Chapter 4
135. Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1999).
136. For a discussion of sexuality and work among African-American women, see, Tera W. Hunter, “‘Work that Body’: African-American Women, Work, and Leisure in Atlanta and the New South,” in Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie, eds., Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (Urbana, IL, 1998), 153–174.
137. See the insightful research by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Journal of American History 73 (1986), 345–382.
138. On service workers, see, for example, Dorothy Sue Cobble's rich analysis of waitresses, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL, 1992).
139. On sexuality and secretaries, see, Rosemarie Pringle, Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work (Sydney, 1989).
140. On the sexualization of women's work more broadly, see, Jeff Hearn and W. Parkin, “Sex” at “Work”: The Power and Paradox of Organization Sexuality (Brighton, Eng, 1987)
141. Lisa Adkins, Gendered Work: Sexuality, Family and the Labour Market (Buckingham, UK, 1995).
142. “Workers‘ Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century,” in Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York, 1979), 13. While Joshua Freeman, for example, acknowledges the sexual content of construction workers after the Second World War, he accepts the established view that earlier craft culture contained no such sexual content.
143. See his, “Hard Hats.” Mark Rosenfeld is unusual in the degree to which he recognizes the sexualization of male workplace culture. See his “‘It was a Hard life’: Class and Gender in the Work Rhythms of a Railway Town, 1920–1950,” Historical Papers (1988), 237–279.