ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that despite efforts to turn work into a mechanism that regulates gender and sexuality, the process of work has been much more likely to produce sexual heterogeneity. Over the course of United States history, people’s work has required complex mobility patterns, kinship networks, intimate practices, and domestic arrangements, a complexity that has been a crucible for dissident sexualities. The chapter demonstrates that the practice of work has intensified social heterogeneity, magnifying distinctions around gender expression, sexual practice, ethnicity, race, class, and other axes of difference. With the arrival of the first white Protestant settlers in the Americas in the seventeenth century, work began to produce social distinctions that threatened the Enlightenment ideals that defined US republicanism. In addition to undercutting his egalitarian commitments, Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision obscured the overwhelming majority of the work that fueled the economy of the colonies and the early republic.
