Flight Attendant Activism and the Family Values Economy

On Our Own: Flight Attendant Activism and the Family Values Economy A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Ryan Patrick Murphy IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Jennifer L. Pierce, Adviser December, 2010 © Ryan Patrick Murphy, 2010 Acknowledgements The foundational argument of this dissertation – that the economy has been reorganized around heteronormativity and hard work since 1970, and that this shift poses a serious threat to any effort to build a more just society – arises much less from my own brilliance than from the collective effort of doing this project. Indeed the creation of these pages depended on a multiplicity of intellectual, intimate, friendly, professional, and political relationships, bonds that are inevitably weakened by the growing reverie for privatization and personal responsibility. So rather than a testament to the prowess of the atomized individual intellectual, this dissertation is an archive of dialogue with friends in bars at all hours of the night, with my mentors in the Association of Flight Attendants’ offices in San Francisco, with displaced flight attendants in motel rooms in Dallas, Kansas City, Saint Louis, and a host of other places, and with my students and colleagues in the classrooms at the University of Minnesota. I want to briefly name just a few of the people whose solidarity most influenced the story I have chosen to tell. First and foremost, I am absolutely humbled by generosity of the dozens of front line flight attendants who made this project what it is. The political economic changes at the center of this work have grounded tens of thousands of my former colleagues, and left so many others in a career with lower wages, longer workdays, little job security, and no union protection. Nevertheless, flight attendants invited me into their homes and cooked for me as they brought me up i to speed on the industry. They let me rummage through their basements to look through scrapbooks and file cabinets. And they rearranged their flight schedules – and days in the offices, hotels, hair salons, schools, and other places they now work – to participate in my formal interview process. I am particularly grateful to so many of the 4,300 grounded former TWA flight attendants who shared the passion, hope, and hopelessness of their four-decades-long struggle with me. No one donated more time to this project than Mary Ellen Miller, who spent dozens of hours connecting me to her vast network of colleagues and rich collection of documents. Dixie Daniels and Victoria (Frankovich) Gray constantly clarified nuts and bolts questions for me about government regulation, contract negotiations, strike tactics, and corporate merger policy. Paula Mariedaughter’s trove of visual materials will bring vibrancy to the book I hope to base on this dissertation. And interviews that were hilarious yet bitterly painful with Janet Lhuillier, Richard Wagner, Diane Watson, Kaye Chandler, and so many others kept me determined to finish this project even on days when I was ready to give up. The mentorship that I got from my role models at the Association of Flight Attendants Council 11 in San Francisco lent me the tenacity and the savoir-faire to make this project happen. I learned what it means to be a union leader from Dawn Marie Bader, whose passionate commitment to my coworkers, deft political skills, and generous friendship – despite me joining the local as a 24-year-old green horn – are a model for my own workplace activism today. Stan Kiino ii opened a million doors for me at AFA, and his constant work at the intersection of anti-racist, queer, and economic justice activism made me want to follow him though those doors. Kathy Lynch taught me that graciousness will carry me far, and that a touch of style is absolutely necessary for making political change. Terry Sousoures and Jeanne Heier-Donnellan taught me the value of technical knowledge; that the nuts and bolts of aviation safety, airline operations, and contract negotiations build strong and effective political activists. And thank you to everyone whose humor and solidarity made my time at AFA deeply inspirational to my academic work, especially to Roxanne Ng, Christine Black, Beth Skrondal, Joan Simms, and Dante Harris. My most sincere thanks to the intellectuals who have influenced this project. For the better part of two decades, Peter Rachleff has been a mentor and close personal friend. What I find so hopeful about Peter is his constant commitment to reinventing his social and scholarly worlds. While workplace justice movements have faced daunting setbacks in the decades that Peter has been a professor, and while those difficulties have presented an academic and emotional challenge to all labor intellectuals, Peter has responded to the upheaval by demanding that all of his students think and read broadly: in political theory, in critical race studies, in political economy, and especially in the performing arts. That constant willingness to engage with sometimes unfamiliar intellectual and artistic traditions motivates my own approach to scholarship – and to life. Thanks to my academic advisor Jennifer Pierce for her unflagging commitment to my iii work. Refusing the hierarchical mandates of the academy, Jennifer showed me solidarity and kinship in the workplace that I had come to know and value in my previous life at AFA. Whether in her comments on every graceful or ungainly incarnation of my dissertation, in the ten billion email volleys as co-editors of Queer Twin Cities, or on the endless social and professional events for the Department of American Studies and the GLBT Oral History Project, Jennifer always showed me leadership, but always made me feel like her comrade rather than her underling. Thanks to Lisa Disch, my dissertation committee chair, for demonstrating why being a good teacher matters. In the “postmodern” era, many lament that the medium has trumped the message. Lisa proves that we should ditch this binary. Her vigor and her stage presence in her graduate seminar in political representation – and the substance of her critiques of Derrida and Spivak and Mouffe – have been a role model for my own intellectual practice. Thanks to Kevin Murphy for always asking the hardest question on every exam. Kevin is immensely generous with his time, constantly helping me with the nuts and bolts of academic life: suggesting readings for a new syllabus, sending me citations to deepen arguments I make in my work, and quelling my anxieties about new work as I produce it. But he always pushes me on the broad significance of my work, which gives me direction as a thinker and a writer. I am honored to be taken so seriously. And thanks to Kale Fajardo for showing me the importance of the craft of academic writing. Kale’s interest in the ocean affirmed my own commitment iv to aviation as an academic subject, which has driven my own commitment to interdisciplinary writing. I am deeply indebted to all of my colleagues for their inspiration and their support on the long road to the Ph.D. Jason Stahl proves that friendship is the key to making a taxing workplace sane. Our alliance began at GradTRAC, the union organizing effort for “grad employees” in 2004, in which I was the minister of information and Jason was one of the ministers of paper distribution. Though the administration’s success at cynically stoking our peers’ anxieties about smartness, about individualism, about class, and about race beat us at the polls, the personal solidarity that grew between Jason and me in union work got us through the remainder of our time in graduate school, and carries us through life outside the University. Thanks to Alex Urquhart, who taught me the value of collaborative work. Alex and I were always together at our most vulnerable, designing syllabi when we had never taught, writing book proposals when we had never published, and slogging though dissertation chapters when we had no real idea what our projects were about. But in every one of those instances, sharing that vulnerability produced documents and ideas that flourished when my own would have withered. I look forward to days when we will practice that collaboration again. And thanks to Danny LaChance for lending me the humor to get through graduate school. On my way to Helga Leitner’s critical geography seminar on my first day at the University, Danny asked if I had bought a super expensive Rand McNally atlas to enhance my performance in the geography department. That set v the tone for the next six years. Thanks especially to Danny for all the late night therapy sessions at Barbette. I honestly think those are why we both finished our Ph.D.s. Thanks to all my colleagues who have been so generous in reading my work over the last years. Our reading group with Alex Urquhart, Jason Stahl, Lisa Arrastia, and Adam Bahner allowed me to survive my prelims, even while I publicly blurted “this has just got to be done!” in Walter Library in frustration. Thanks to Ryan Lee Cartwright and Michael David Franklin for all of the sharp ideas that helped me make the final push to my defense. And thanks for everyone whose feedback on my writing has allowed me to meet the challenge of interdisciplinarity, especially to Marion Traub-Werner, Rajyashree Reddy, Dara Strolovitch, Helga Leitner, Eric Sheppard, Regina Kunzel, Tracey Deutsch, Martin Manalansan, Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson, David Seitz, Trica Keaton, Connor Donegan, George Henderson, and so many others. My most junior colleagues – my undergraduate students – made me a hopeful person on my darkest days.

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