Spaces of Encounter: The Cultural Labor of Class Difference

Abstract

This article explores the complicated relationship between narratives of working-class America and formations of national Otherness. Arguing that class, sex, and ethnicity are deeply relational, it seeks to map the symbolic terrain and emotional depth of class difference as it circulates in the American imaginary. It ask how we might think about the cultural poetics of class difference in ways that make a difference—in ways that register class narratives as participants in constructions of the Nation and the “normal,” the irregular and the queer? Attending to the kinds of emotional and conceptual services stories of class perform, it locates “class” as part of a discursive imaginary topography that structures and turns narratives of working men and women into spaces of encounter, contest, and containment.