Class

Thinking about class is always work, with all its attendant implications. Class structures how resources are distributed, hierarchies are built, identity is constituted, power is accumulated, desire is realized. Class, like work, is always raced and always sexed: Cathy Cohen’s influential scholarship has powerfully demonstrated how receiving welfare without working within a producerist economy always-already marks Black women as queer. Work, then, correlates with class, but class admits a wide latitude for determining the cultural value of work. For historians, thinking about class and sexuality together is another form of work. Like sexuality, class is an open secret in American culture. Class is colloquially understood to be different from sexuality, but writing their histories requires both a similar toolkit and an ability to understand how tightly they are interwoven. The history of class and sexuality is a history of both imbrication and of estrangement.