"Hunkies," "Gasbags," & "Reds": The Construction and Deconstruction of Hegemonic Masculinity in Black Fury (1935) and Riff Raff (1936)

Abstract

Labour's struggle was an industrial war, with labour's forces led by manly proletarian generals against the effeminate bosses and childlike scabs. 24 And, despite the centrality of women workers to many of the labour struggles in the 1930s, "What is noticeably absent from these cartoons is any representation of the worker (and especially the union worker) as female." 25 At best, women were a d j u n c t s, a u x i l i a r i e s, o r, p e r h ap s, p roletarian mothers in need of p at r i a rchal pro t e c t i o n. Black Fury is overtly a film about class and class struggle. But as a film about class, it is simultaneously and necessarily a film about gender, about the proper place of women in relation to working men. At the same time, as a film about class and gender, Black Fury is also (and perhaps necessarily) a film about "race" and racial constructions. The film appeared eleven years after the restriction acts that put an end to the great, post-1890 immigration wave that brought masses of Southern and Eastern Europeans to the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these "new" immigrants were often represented in popular and scholarly discourse as racially separate from the native-born Anglo stock that made up much of the American labouring population. But with the influx of new immigrants, racial categories slowly began to change. A new language of ethnicity emerged to describe these foreigners who were not quite white, yet not entirely black. In the binary racial divide that had captivated the American political imagination since the eighteenth century, Italians, Jews, Greeks, and Slavs became what the historians David Roediger and James R. Barrett call "in-between peoples", neither wholly white nor entirely "other." For these "in-between peoples," race-making was a "messy process." Racial categorizations did not change overnight, but evolved slowly, in response to changing social, political, and economic conditions. By 1935, some representations of ethnicity suggested a conditional whiteness for the new immigrants (that is, i f t h ey we re pro p e rly "Americanized"), while other representations continued to associate a racial alterity with the new immigrants. Black Fury takes a "progressive" position regarding these new immigrants. 26 Although neither the words "race," nor "ethnicity" appear in the film, the narrative posits an invisible boundary that separates white Americans from the immigrants who populate the coal fields, while, at the same time, criticizing that very boundary .27 Black Fury begins with a shift whistle sounding and an industrial montage with images that dissolve and shift from a smokestack planted in a background of farmland; coal cars and company towns; miners, faceless in the shadows; to a scene of domestic support, as a mother and daughter prepare a meal for their men. Mike comes into the kitchen, yawning. "Where's Joe?" "He's not up yet," Mike's wife responds, "I woke him the same time as you. …Ah, that fella. Every morning the same thing,-Joe" she knock...

Hollywood, Bike Messengers, and the New Economy

“…It is a method by which individuals learn about the world around them. Thus, irrespective of their intellectual depth or artistic merit (or lack thereof), films provide social commentary and teach viewers lessons about society (also see Cassano, 2008a;Denzin, 1995;Frymer et al, 2010;hooks 1996). The question I ask in this paper is how do Quicksilver and Premium Rush make use of a 'bad job' (ala Kalleberg et al, 2000) in constructing stories about work and class?…”

The Magic of the Ouroboros: Reflections onClass Struggle on the Home Front

“…It implies that theorizing will always shape and be shaped by the psyche of the theorist. Graham Cassano (2009), in "'Hunkies,' 'Gasbags,' and 'Reds,'" uses this insight to great effect, showing how the 6. Hillman (1999, xxiv) claims the following: "My war-and I have yet to win a decisive battleis with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being.…”

Working Class Self-Fashioning inSwing Time(1936)

“…From the first sound picture, The Jazz Singer (1928), analyzed so well by Michael Rogin (1998), to social problem films like Black Fury (1935), gangster pictures, especially Scarface (1932), to melodramas like Frank Borzage’s Mannequin (1938), second generation immigrants were portrayed as caught between old and new worlds. Some films, like Michael Curtiz’s Black Fury (1935) and Borzage’s Big City (1937), go much further, taking a stand for social justice by vividly portraying the racism and oppression experienced by immigrant workers (Cassano, 2008b, 2009b). While rarely exposed to the level of vicious racism experienced by African Americans, Asian Americans, and indigenous peoples, the racism, forms of exclusion, and racial domination these ‘new immigrants’ did experience within the normatively ‘white’ culture of the US shaped their assimilation and Americanization.…”

“…While Romero’s motivations for pursuing Penny are never explicitly articulated, they parallel Lucky’s desire for the common world and, simultaneously, resemble the racial dialectic of desire played out in so much 1930s cinema. Racial and ethnic ‘others’ pursue white lovers precisely in order to gain access to that whiteness, to be allowed into the common world (Cassano, 2008b, 2009b). And whatever Romero’s motivations, one thing is clear: he stands below Lucky in the social hierarchy.…”

“…In short, a population of working Americans largely made up of second and third generation immigrants became a political, social, and cultural force. (On the textile strikes of 1934, see Roscigno and Danaher, 2004; for an overview of class struggles during the 1930s, see Levine, 1988; on the Popular Front and the ‘Age of the CIO’ see Denning, 1998, 2009; Cassano, 2009c; on the immigrant character of the American working class see Barrett, 1992; Cassano, 2008b, 2009b; Guttman, 1987. )…”