Working-class Men Research Articles

THE ORGAN THIEVES: THE SHOCKING STORY OF THE FIRST HEART TRANSPLANT IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH Chip Jones. New York, NY: Gallery Books, 2020, 389 pages.

On May 25, 1968, the heart of Bruce Tucker was transplanted into Joseph G. Klett at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) Hospital. This was recorded as the world’s 16th heart transplant during a time when there was a feverish race for a successful heart transplant program. What made this transplant concerning is that Mr. Tucker was a working-class Black man, Mr. Klett was a successful White business man, and Mr. Tucker’s family was unaware of the “donation” at the time that it occurred. Mr. Tucker suffered a traumatic head injury after falling off of a 3-foot wall the day before. Mr. Tucker’s brother, William, sued MCV and lost at the hands of an all-White jury. The events surrounding the transplant and the subsequent legal case are detailed in The Organ Thieves. In The Organ Thieves, the author presents a historical account of a disturbing confluence of issues, many of which remain relevant today: access to healthcare; distrust of the healthcare establishment; the moral, ethical, and legal complexities of organ donation and transplantation; the heart transplant race; and physician/hospital authority at the expense of patient rights. The book provided a thorough description of how MCV’s growth relied on the theft of human bodies for purposes of dissection and medical experimentation. This sordid past cultivated fear and distrust in the Black community toward MCV, which is the backdrop in which Mr. Tucker’s heart was removed. There were other strengths of the book such as the rich description of the role of this legal case in advancing the legal definition of death that exists today. However, there are three concerns about The Organ Thieves. First, Mr. Tucker’s voice is absent from the book. We learn superficial things about him such as his occupation, employer, income, family structure, and hometown, but we learn little about who he was as a person. The reader is left wanting to know more about his previous interactions with the healthcare establishment, what kind of personality he had, and his relationship with his family. In the Afterward of the book, the author acknowledged his unsuccessful attempt to interview Mr. Tucker’s son, but this explanation does little to fill the noticeable void. Second, the civil unrest of the time was addressed only tangentially. There was an overemphasis on factors that contextualize the transplant race (e.g., overly detailed descriptions of space missions and Lyndon B. Johnson’s poor health), while considerably less attention was paid to the context that might shape decisions about the value of human life. Mr. Tucker’s race and social class mattered. The socio-political context of that time dictated how race and class would intersect to determine the value of human life. The Civil Rights Movement was at its height with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. just the month before. Jim Crow laws provided structural, political, and cultural legitimization to the dehumanization of Black Americans.1Wilson CA. Metaracism: Explaining the persistence of racial inequality. Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO1985Google Scholar It is well known that racist paradigms bias scientists and clinicians alike;2Washington HA. Medical Apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial times to the present. Doubleday, New York2006Google Scholar yet these issues were addressed only superficially by the author. Finally, the author inaccurately described the Tuskegee Syphilis study as one in which “the US Public Health Service recruited hundreds of African American men and gave them the painful, fatal disease.” It is well established that the Public Health Service studied the effects of untreated syphilis,3Jones JH. Bad blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. The Free Press, New York1981Google Scholar but this type of basic inaccuracy raises questions about whether there were others in the book. In summary, The Organ Thieves made good on its promise to explore medical ethics. Because William Tucker’s case against MCV focused on whether the removal of his heart terminated his brother’s life, so too did the book. This was squarely a legal question that was ultimately decided in court, regardless of whether one agrees with the decision. But historians and scholars of the medical and social sciences are left wondering how issues of race and class inequality contextualized the surgeons’ decision to remove Mr. Tucker’s heart. The author of this manuscript has no conflicts of interest to disclose as described by the American Journal of Transplantation.

Challenging Dominant Representations of Marginalized Boys and Men in Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities

Raewyn Connell famously theorized hegemonic masculinity, explaining its dominance over femininity and “subordinated” and “marginalized” masculinities. Attending to representations of the latter, we argue that “men in the margin” are commonly wrongly and/or simplistically depicted as regressive and violent in response to their marginalization. Focusing on representations of working-class boys and men, we illustrate the stereotypical treatment of “men in the margin” more broadly, making clear that this goes against Connell’s treatment of such men. Conversely, privileged boys and men are commonly held up by critical studies on men and masculinities scholars as paragons of progressive change. The characterization of boys and men in the margin as regressive and patriarchal impedes the ability to address problems like violence, misogyny, and homophobia and overlooks the possibilities for transformation that emerge among marginalized communities.

The Racialized Glass Escalator and Safety Net: Wages and Job Quality in “Meds and Eds” among Working-Class Men

Abstract Past research has shown that minority men are more likely than others to enter female-dominated occupations, but less is known about the quality of their jobs in these fields in contrast to other employment options. We use the 2004 and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine whether the female-dominated industries of education and health care produce better job quality in terms of wages, benefits, hours, and job security for working-class men relative to other industries, with emphasis on differences by race-ethnicity. We find that although workers in the education and health care industries fared better during the Great Recession compared to those in other industries, effects for wages, health insurance, hours, and layoff for working-class Men of Color were substantially lower compared to those of White men. We find strong evidence of a racialized glass escalator, but also a racialized safety net in the care sector post-recession: the health care and education industries provide better job quality for White men than for Men of Color, though they are less likely to be in these jobs, and these sectors were more protective of White men as compared to minorities during the recession.

The Sham and the Fanatic: Conrad’s Anarchists in “Ironic,” “Desperate,” and Simple Tales

This paper examines three narratives by Joseph Conrad in which the author deploys anarchist characters. The anarchists presented inThe Secret Agent are “shams” who do not attempt any performative anarchist act but instead merely recite abstract philosophies. One such sham, Verloc, leads Stevie to bomb himself instead of the Observatory in a conspiracy to warn the British police against the anarchist movement. In the aftermath of the inadvertent self-destruction of Stevie, his devoted sister murders Verloc and then commits suicide. Such acts of “madness and despair,” induced by the fraudulent anarchist, do not change the world but destroy the fanatics themselves. Similarly, in Conrad’s “The Informer,” the fake anarchist informer turns out to be a fanatic who sacrifices himself for the “amateur” Lady Anarchist. It seems ironic that Mr. X (who criticizes the lady for pretending to be an anarchist with “gestures of revolutionary convictions”) also belongs to the upper class. Both the lady and X are imposters who again contribute to the destruction of the fanatic. Finally, Conrad’s “An Anarchist” narrates the “gullibility” of a working-class man. Situated on a penal island, the protagonist meets those anarchists who lured him into the movement, and he kills them in a rage, in order to be free from their influence. This act of violence leads to dire consequences, and it seems that Conrad’s excavations of anarchy are not only prescient, but serve as a warning. Conrad’s tales of anarchists reveal that the shams, rather than the fanatics, are destructive, particularly to the fanatic or fanatically disposed.

Resisting Despair: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation Among White Working-Class Women in a Declining Coal-Mining Community

In this article, we examine how white working-class women reimagine gender in the face of social and economic changes that have undermined their ability to perform normative femininity. As blue-collar jobs have disappeared, scholars have posited that white working-class men and women have become increasingly isolated, disconnected from institutions, and hopeless about the future, leading to a culture of despair. Although past literature has examined how working-class white men cope with the inability to perform masculinity through wage-earning and family authority, gender has been undertheorized in these discussions, treating working-class women’s and men’s despair interchangeably. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews conducted in a former coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, we identify three overarching strategies that women deploy in their life histories to cope with disruption: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering. These strategies allow women to feel hopeful and worthy as they confront enormous challenges, whether starting over following relationship dissolution, learning to be independent from men, or simply surviving hardship for the sake of their children. We explore the implications for recreating gender identity in each strategy and question how different strategies might serve to protect women from, or alternatively solidify, sentiments of despair.

Maskulina läspraktiker genom tid och rum

The interaction between the local place and reading practice is continuously emphasized in literacy research. Nevertheless, the significance of place has been neglected in research on working-class men’s relationship to reading. This study responds to this gap by examining working-class men from rural areas and their relationship to reading across a life span. Through life-story interviews with two working-class men in their 60s, living in the same rural woodland municipality, the article contributes to the understanding of the importance of reading in these men’s lives, and how their reader histories interact with distinctive features of the locality. The study shows that the men’s individual reader histories have been shaped by, and have shaped, the specific local and cultural contexts and surrounding discourses. Through their reading practices throughout their life courses, the men (re)construct rural working-class identities in which hunting, fishing, sports and cars constitute significant elements. However, other movements in the men’s reading practices related to place through which the men can pursue alternative masculine positions are also present. The study highlights the importance for educators to pay attention to place as a significant feature in understanding working-class males’ reading practices.

“The Dragon Can't Roar”

AbstractThis article examines British masculinity in Kenya. It focuses on British expatriate Sydney Walker, the protagonist of Yusuf Dawood'sOne Life Too Many, who moves to Kenya at the height of British colonial rule and stays on in the new postcolonial state under black rule. It looks at how he constructs his masculinity among fellow men and in relation to the female other. Walker struggles to retain the colonial masculinity of his predecessors amid shifting terrain. Using the key concepts of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities as presented in Raewyn Connell's masculinity theory, which argues that gendered relationships in institutions are controlled by power, this article examines the diverse masculinities inOne Life Too Manyand argues that sex plays a major role as an instrument of power that heterosexual men use to dominate other men and subordinate women. It contends that the power dynamics in the sexual arena symbolically represent the shifting power relations in the postcolonial Kenyan state, in which the status of British working-class men had changed due to their loss of political power.

Safe for Whom? And Whose Families? Narrative, Urban Neoliberalism, and Queer Oral History on San Francisco’s Polk Street

In this essay I reflect on my experience as director of Polk Street: Lives in Transition, a project that drew on oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, homelessness, sex work, queer politics, and public safety in the highly polarized setting of gentrifying San Francisco. From 2008–10, I recorded more than seventy oral histories from people experiencing the transformation of the city’s Polk Street from a working-class queer commercial district to a gentrified entertainment destination serving the city’s growing elite. Oral histories enabled me to document a local past rich in non-biological family structures, which I interpreted through public “listening parties,” professionally mediated neighborhood dialogues, a traveling multimedia exhibit, and radio documentaries. The project challenged gentrifiers’ claims to be promoting “safety” and “family” by positing alternative understandings of both concepts drawn from oral histories with transgender women, queer homeless youth, sex workers, and working-class gay men who had made Polk Street their home.

Re-defining the Stay-behind Indonesian Men: Changing Masculinities in the Context of Women’s Transnational Migration

Over the last four decades, international contract migration has become a major livelihood strategy for rural denizens in Indonesia; more than 80% of the contract migrants recorded by the Bureau of Manpower were women caregivers and housekeepers to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. The feminization of migration has catalyzed a profound transformation in gender relations in sending communities, as men who stay behind are increasingly forced to renegotiate their gender practices in the absence of their wives. Based on 12 months ethnographic research conducted in Hong Kong and Indonesia, this paper situates changes in gender relations in the context of a new global economy that increasingly incorporates working-class women to the exclusion of men. I argue that left-behind men, despite economic precarity, may take on new roles as primary child caretakers and secondary providers to compensate for their inability to play the traditional breadwinner role. Departing from the feminist literature on “failed patriarchs,” which has assumed that working-class men shun housework because they cannot cope with female breadwinning, my study argues that some left-behind men experiment with women’s gender roles by partaking in childcare, housekeeping, and financial management, even while engaging in waged labor outside the home. My study, in short, engages the burgeoning literature on masculinities and migration by conceptualizing the manner in which working-class men embody a plurality of marginalized masculinities—masculinities that are subordinated due to class, race, sexuality, gender, and other axes of domination—in response to the erosion of the male breadwinner model.

On the margins: young men’s mundane experiences of austerity in English coastal towns

ABSTRACT This paper explores the everyday experiences of young white working-class men living in coastal towns badly affected by austerity programmes implemented in the UK since 2010. The lives and aspirations of marginal young men seldom feature in studies of the effects of economic crisis and austerity. These men are positioned at the intersection of several rhetorical constructions with contradictory and ambivalent affects. They are expected, and still expect, to become wage earners and providers, largely through their own efforts and self- improvement. A rhetoric of social mobility disguises structural inequality, producing a false promise of hope or ‘cruel optimism’ about future prospects. Simultaneously, young working- class men, especially those without employment, typically are constructed as a threat to (middle class) society, difficult or dangerous, and authors of their own disadvantage. We explore how young men, without regular work and often lacking family support, talk about everyday experiences, social relationships, feelings and emotions and hopes for the future in coastal towns with a particular place in the national imaginary.

Spatialities of queer globalization: Middle- and working-class Hong Kong gay men’s subjective constructions of homophobia

This article formulates a class critique that fosters productive tensions between global queering discourses and a Chinese homophobic order affecting Hong Kong and other ethnic Chinese societies. Vis-à-vis middle- and working-class Hong Kong gay men’s subjective constructions of homophobia, the findings demonstrate that class was configured through different geographical referents of everyday queer struggle, namely the West and China, with which my informants compared Hong Kong. This spatial manifestation of class was the result of an unequal cosmopolitan condition which enabled my middle-class informants to see, while excluding their working-class counterparts from seeing, Hong Kong as a gay-friendly city. Drawing on the geography of sexuality and the sociology of class and mobility, this article argues that Hong Kong is a significant site for understanding multidirectional flows of queer globalization.

"Mischievous Uncles" as Rule Breakers: Intersectional Stereotypes and Risk Perceptions During the Coronavirus Pandemic in Turkey.

Responses to crises can highlight and exacerbate class inequalities. Seemingly neutral policy measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic that aim to protect high-risk groups can lead to a shift in the public discourse that deprives citizens of their agency based not only on their age but also their class. In this article, we focus on the case of Turkey, one of the countries with the fastest growth of novel coronavirus cases in late March 2020, where the government introduced a curfew for people over the age of 65, while actively encouraging the rest of the working-age population to stay at home. An intersectional analysis of the Twitter campaign #StayatHome (#EvdeKal) and the media outlets’ news coverage of the policy implementation show that both platforms circulated human-interest stories of working-class men who defy the curfew predominantly. Both the stories and Twitter user comments often defined the subjects of those stories as rule-breakers and, therefore, as “mischievous uncles.” They became the scapegoats, while upper and middle classes avoided the label. These findings have implications for the framing of policy outcomes and welfare provisions as well as oppositional politics that push for the expansion of labor protections during the pandemic.

Expresso Bongo and Make Me an Offer: The ‘Angry Young Musical’ in the 1950s

Following on from John Osborne’s infamous play Look Back in Anger of 1956, London’s stage saw the emergence of the ‘Angry Young Man’, realistic portrayals of working-class men in a difficult age. Expresso Bongo and Lily White Boys, works of the mid-to-late 1950s, demonstrate that the angry young man was also present in London’s musicals, previously an upper- and middle-class genre. Featuring the Soho district, gangsters, prostitutes and rock music, this unique era of musical theatre changed expectations of what musical theatre could and would offer to a jaded urban audience. These astonishing musical theatre works offer potent commentary on British society, British identity and particularly disenfranchised young British men, and offer insights into American and British relations, gender roles and expectations, and the complicated role of working-class men in the new Elizabethan era.

Petticoats and pickhandles: suffrage and socialism in gendered resistance to empire and mining capitalism

abstract I recount the story of Mary Fitzgerald, a working-class Irish immigrant whose feminist and socialist identity emerge in the contest with capitalism on the Witwatersrand following the Boer War. Her life story in the early 20th Century reveals the specific nature of colonialism and mining hegemony on the Rand and the reasons for women's presence in organised working-class resistance. Hyslop (2009) has noted that white labour's confrontation in 1913 and 1914 with mining capitalism influenced other marginalised colonial subjects to challenge empire and that this was partly due to the importance of transcontinental ideas. The article turns attention to the gendered map of empire and Mary's trial on charges of public violence in 1913 to suggest that women's participation in the public sphere found impetus as much from transcontinental ideas as just grounds that the crisis of industrial health conditions on the mines posed for white working-class men and women in this period.

Possible Selves in a Transforming Economy: Upwardly Mobile Working-Class Masculinities, Service Work and Negotiated Aspirations in Australia

The relationship between working-class masculinities and industrial (and post-industrial) employment has been of sustained interest to sociologists for the last 40 years. This article draws on recent research examining the experiences of upwardly mobile working-class young men navigating casual employment within an urban part of Australia adapting to post-industrialisation. In presenting three longitudinal case studies, the theoretical frameworks of selfhood, possible selves and imagined futures are used to understand how service sector employment contributes to the development of aspirations during the transition beyond compulsory schooling. The focus is on how service employment informed the young men’s lives, aspirations and their sense of self. An argument is presented which articulates how, to varying extents, this service work is where the participants both accrue value and become valued.

Class and Masculinity in Contemporary Management Consulting Firms: Some Practical Recommendations

Abstract It is relatively unusual for white, working-class men to find employment in prestigious management consultancy firms. When they do find employment in these firms, their working-class masculinity is seen as problematic, and not in line with clients’ and co- workers’ expectations. In turn, they must modify their identity, by learning and enacting what the literature refers to as “corporate masculinity”. But how does this learning process occur? And how can consultancy firms better integrate working class men, to maximise the value of their contributions? Based on empirical research we conducted (Giazitzoglu and Muzio, forthcoming), this short piece explores the experiences of a pool of white working-class men who found employment as IT specialists in a prestigious management consultancy firm. After discussing our research and what it reveals about the way professionals from working class backgrounds learn corporate masculinity, we consider some practical recommendations.

Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France, 1870s-1913

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.

GENDER REGIMES OF RUSSIAN WORKING-CLASS FAMILIES

Purpose of the study: The study is aimed to examine working-class everyday culture gender regimes in modern Russia. The research is focused on intergenerational transmission of gender-normative patterns, macro-policy of power and domination in working-class families, forms of their discursive production and legitimation.
 Methodology: The empirical base is represented by 30 biographical interviews with the informants aged from 21 to 33, living in Tyumen city and working in the field of industry, technical maintenance, and customer service. Reflexive analysis based on the categorical field of phenomenology and social constructionism, as well as data coding procedures, has been used as the main research tool.
 Main Findings: It was found that the normative pattern of a male breadwinner, having power in a family-based on control over economic resources, still dominates among young working-class men and actively supported by the majority of young women. The financial and status dominance of a man does not cause doubts in his leadership but when a woman plays a crucial role in providing for the family, informants tend to talk about “equality” in the family.
 Applications of this study: The results of the study can be used in the teaching of sociology, gender studies, and cultural studies; it can also be applied by local policymakers while developing social policy programs targeted on the regarded social group.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: In the current research we have examined a particular social group at the intersection of three stratification features: social class, gender, and age. The approach of “agency within the structure” provides an opportunity to carry out a deep sociological analysis of the relations between the macro-social and personal aspects of the gender regimes framing.

The social stratification of time use patterns.

Time use is both a cause of social inequality and a consequence of social inequality. However, how social class stratifies time use patterns is seldom studied. In this paper, I describe the time use patterns in the years 1983 and 2015 by social class, andgender in the British context. Using sequence analysis methods, I show how the diversity of time use patterns in British society is socially stratified. I find that 13 clusters capture the heterogeneity of time use patterns and that these clusters are associated with social class, gender, and day of the week. These clusters capture patterns of paid and unpaid work schedules, as well as leisure patterns. The results show that men have experienced a reduction of the standard Monday to Friday 8-hr working day, while women have experienced a general increase in this type of schedule. On the other hand, patterns of domestic working days have reduced for women and increased for men. Important differences exist in paid and unpaid work patterns between social classes. Working-class women have experienced an important increase in shift work on weekends. They are also much more likely to be doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to upper-class and middle-class women. Working-class men are more likely to experience non-working days and leisure days on both weekdays and weekends and are more likely to be doing shift work. They are also more often doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to men in upper-class households. Patterns of childcare indicate that all families have increased their childcare time. Men in upper-class households in particular have experienced an important growth in childcare time between 1983 and 2015. I conclude by discussing how time use can further our understanding of social stratification.

‘Education ain’t for us’: using Bourdieu to understand the lives of young White working-class men classified as not in education, employment or training

ABSTRACTThis paper uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to understand the lives of a set of young White working-class men living in a deprived urban locale in the north of England. All participants were classified as NEET (not in education, employment or training) throughout the research and had spent lengthy periods of time outside education and work before the study commenced. Although none took part in formal employment, many participants engaged in illicit activities, often for material gain, during the course of the fieldwork. The data presented is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and deals with participants’ attitudes to education, work and social life more broadly. Whilst some findings are troubling, the paper challenges dominant discourses about the attitudes, values and aspirations of NEET young people, especially those from White working-class backgrounds.