"You Wouldn't Want One of 'Em Dancing With Your Wife": Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II

Boris, Eileen

doi:10.1353/aq.1998.0048

Cited by 60 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…After which, the men reportedly threw the young man over the Belle Isle bridge railing and into the Detroit River below. The drop from bridge to water: approximately one hundred feet (Boris ; Catledge ; Stovall ). Historical, racialized violence on public transportation in Detroit makes the site of the city bus and its bus stops fraught spaces.…”

Section: Mapping African American Feminist Critical Geographic Wandermentioning

confidence: 99%

“It's the ’Hood. But That Means It's Home!”: African American Feminist Critical Geographic Wanderings in the Anthropology of Space and Place

Stovall

2019

Transforming Anthropology

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This article pursues an African American feminist critical geographic approach in locating experiential geographies that help shape people's perceptions of city life. I center the culturally symbolic site of Detroit bus stops as point of ethnographic departure. With my choreography as strategy approach to ethnography, I hang out at the site of the bus stop itself, finding perceptions of city life are shaped by people's subjective‐geographic understandings, and reflect the paradox of place. In other words, people's perceptions exist both within and beyond built environment and prefigured assumptions of group membership. However, the philosophical, the choreographic, and the paradox do not substitute for historical‐materialist, political economic analysis. Rather, I suggest that people's subjectivities and philosophical stances be considered alongside the political economic in an anthropology of cities. Demonstrative of such an approach, I offer several ethnographic sketches and some of the nuances that emerge as I wander bus stops in Detroit. Ultimately, I argue for an approach to urban anthropological research that prioritizes people's complex subjectivities alongside onto‐historical context.

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Section: Mapping African American Feminist Critical Geographic Wandermentioning

confidence: 99%

“It's the ’Hood. But That Means It's Home!”: African American Feminist Critical Geographic Wanderings in the Anthropology of Space and Place

Stovall

2019

Transforming Anthropology

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“…Pants could express employer control and female subjectivity, but also political resistance to the power and authority of supervisors. 17 Wartime propaganda portrayed overalls as glamorous, hoping to attract a factory labor force by feeding into a work culture that emphasized appearance, make-up, and beauty. The supervisor issued a reprimand, "saying that such a display of curves on the human body would certainly upset the whole male work force," and "docked" her pay by a half-hour.…”

Section: Safety Slacks or Sweatersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Desirable Dress: Rosies, Sky Girls, and the Politics of Appearance

Boris

2006

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

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Desirable dress on the job, whether pants, sweaters, or mini-skirted uniforms, contains symbolic meaning, but whose sexual subjectivity it expresses is not always clear. Appearance may be a proxy for other forms of contestation or just be a conveyer of pleasure that makes work just a little more humane. This essay rethinks two cases where issues of self-fashioning, appearance, sexuality, employer strictures, and state policy intertwined: the shop floors of the Second World War and the flight cabins of postwar airlines: the first, male dominated manufacturing in which women labored "for the duration"; the second, a prototypical female service industry in which fierce competition led to selling sexual allure along with comfort and safety. However mediated, voices of wage-earning women in both the 1940s and 1960s announced new expectations of womanhood, beauty, and sexual expressiveness. But while management attempted to suppress women's bodies in the shipyards and other wartime workplaces, by the 1960s airlines promoted the body of the flight attendant. In both examples, state mediation--through sources available as well as actual public policies--complicates our attempt to unravel pleasure and constraint in dressing, grooming, and sexual presence on the job. Whether or not dress requirements disciplined employee bodies, served as a guarantee of efficiency or a check against accidents and the expense of worker compensation, or opened new possibilities for sexual or gendered identities was hardly predetermined. Employers could demand slacks, women could wear them, but what dress was desirable varied with the beholder.

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“…It calls on other government agencies to enforce its decrees and whip dissenters in line." 25 This kind of mobilization from below, legitimated by government policy from above, also generated a powerful dialectic in the gendered world of consumption politics. 26 Here the key agency was the Office of Price Administration (OPA).…”

Section: A Mobilization Dialecticmentioning

confidence: 99%

Class Politics and the State during World War Two

Lichtenstein

2000

Inter. Labor Working Class Hist.

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The historiography of US labor during the Second World War has shifted away from New Left concerns with the fate of working-class militancy, becoming more attuned instead to the structure and development of the New Deal order. A quarter century ago, historians debated the extent to which the warfare state had emasculated working-class radicalism and constructed in its place a bureaucratized, corporateliberal labor movement. Few scholars doubted that trade unions were a fixed and permanent feature of the postwar political economy. But in the decades following the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when the legal, ideological, and economic structures sustaining the institutional union movement are so weak, the agenda of most historians and social scientists has shifted to one that problematizes the rise, consolidation, and postwar devolution of the mid-century New Deal settlement. For US labor and other popular social movements, World War Two had a dichotomous character. In both politics and policy, war-era corporatist structures failed to win lasting institutional expressions, either during the war or in the decades following 1945. There was no "labor-management accord," although labor's strength did generate a kind of armed truce in key oligopolistic sectors of the economy. Anti-New-Deal conservatives in Congress and the corporate hierarchy sought, above all, to divorce industrial relations issues from the larger political universe. This was the meaning of "free" collective bargaining in the years after 1947. But during the war and reconversion years right afterward, elite power at the top of the mobilization apparatus was repeatedly challenged by insurgencies from below that sought to take advantage of the unprecedented demand for labor while at the same time actualizing the pluralist, social-patriotic ethos that was the quasi-official ideology of the World War Two home front. These social movements were a dialectical product of the mobilizing bureaucracies-the War Labor Board, the Fair Employment Practice Commission, and the Office of Price Administration-that were among the most remarkable features of the wartime New Deal. Indeed, this increasingly contentious juxtaposition between a state apparatus drifting rightward and a well-organized working class represents the great paradox of the war, a dichotomy that would be resolved in the postwar years by a rapid, politically brutal divorce between popular aspirations and the state policies needed to fulfill them. My introduction to the history of the American working class during World War Two came during the fall of 1970. At that time, the Berkeley branch of the International Socialists, a "third camp" formation of New Left sensibility and Shactmanite politics, was in the midst of furious debate. Many New Leftists had just begun a "turn toward the working class" that sent thousands of student radicals into factories, warehouses, hospitals, and offices. 1

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"You Wouldn't Want One of 'Em Dancing With Your Wife": Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II

Cited by 60 publications

References 71 publications

“It's the ’Hood. But That Means It's Home!”: African American Feminist Critical Geographic Wanderings in the Anthropology of Space and Place

“It's the ’Hood. But That Means It's Home!”: African American Feminist Critical Geographic Wanderings in the Anthropology of Space and Place

Desirable Dress: Rosies, Sky Girls, and the Politics of Appearance

Class Politics and the State during World War Two

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