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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Alisa Balestra Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy ____________________________________ Director Kelli Lyon Johnson ____________________________________ Reader Theresa Kulbaga ____________________________________ Reader Timothy Melley ____________________________________ Graduate School Representative Mary Kupiec Cayton ABSTRACT SHIFT IN WORK, SHIFT IN REPRESENTATION: WORKING-CLASS IDENTITY AND EXPERIENCE IN U.S MULTI-ETHNIC AND QUEER WOMEN’S FICTION by Alisa Balestra This dissertation offers a more accurate and inclusive model of the working-class in the U.S., one that rejects, on the one hand, the racialization and feminization of blue collar work and its workforce and, on the other, reductive ideas about class based on outdated models of the white and male industrial worker. When the U.S. shifted away from its industrial base in the early 1970’s, women and minorities replaced the white and male industrial worker as “ideal” in an economy where labor relations were more flexible. Literary critics have been slow to acknowledge how the nature of blue collar work and its workforce shifted. The result has been twofold: women and minorities are more frequently viewed as conceptually separate from the working-class, their labor not recognized as “blue collar,” and class is often reduced to race and gender in the race/class/gender triumvirate. By examining fiction produced at the time of these global shifts but heralded for reasons other than class, I demonstrate how the fiction of Leslie Feinberg, Toni Cade Bambara, Sandra Cisneros, and Helena María Viramontes reflects shifts in the global economy as its authors respond to the consequences of these shifts. In doing this work, I aim to shift literary critics’ understanding of class in the triumvirate in light of shifts in the global economy. SHIFT IN WORK, SHIFT IN REPRESENTATION: WORKING-CLASS IDENTITY AND EXPERIENCE IN U.S. MULTI-ETHNIC AND QUEER WOMEN’S FICTION A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by Alisa Ann Balestra Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2011 Dissertation Director: Kelli Lyon Johnson © Alisa Ann Balestra 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS Certificate for Approving the Dissertation Abstract Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter One 10 White and Male Industrial Worker No More: Invisible Female and Minority Labor in the “New” Economy Chapter Two 26 Classing Queerness: Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and the Praxis of Queer Liberation Chapter Three 45 From Working-Class Center to Middle-Class Margins: Upward Mobility and Intraracial Class Conflict in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love Chapter Four 64 Space as Material Geopolitical Issues and Not “Signifying Spaces”: The Creation of House/Self in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street Chapter Five 83 Tools to Tear Down and Rebuild: An Assault on Racist Patriarchal Capitalist Systems in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus Conclusion 100 Towards a New Theory and Practice Works Cited 111 iii For my parents, Mason and Julie Balestra – that they are alive and able to bear witness to this dissertation and its commitment to working-class people. E per mio nonno, Massimo Balestra (1913-2008) – che ha potuto vivire per vedere questo giorno. E’a lui e la sua vita che dedico questa testi. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are a number of people who assisted in some way with the development of this dissertation project. I would first like to thank my Director, Kelli Lyon Johnson, for her willingness to take on this project and for the countless hours she spent listening to ideas, reading drafts, and providing encouragement when necessary. I would also like to thank her for the license she gave me in writing this project. My readers, Theresa Kulbaga and Mary Cayton, tirelessly supported this project and provided very constructive feedback throughout the writing process. I would especially like to thank Mary for reading this project the first time around even though she didn’t have to. Her insight as a historian provided an appropriate critical lens for the first chapter. I would also like to thank Michelle Tokarczyk, Professor of English at Goucher College and past-president of the Working-Class Studies Association, for her feedback on the fourth chapter of this dissertation project. I am particularly grateful for her comments and for her continued support of this project and its contribution to working-class studies. I would also like to acknowledge the scholars/friends in working-class studies whose conversations at the 2009 and 2010 Working-Class Studies Association conferences provided me with the inspiration and momentum to write this dissertation project. Among those friends, I would like to thank Tim Libretti, Christie Launius, Michele Fazio, and Cherie Rankin. I would especially like to thank Tim for his enthusiasm about my work and for sharing with me his ideas about Marxism and radical racial and ethnic literatures. Outside the academy, I would like to thank all my friends who listened patiently when I vented about this dissertation and who shared in my joy when the writing went well, especially Laura Huffman Schultz, Justine Stokes, and Becky Vulcan. I would especially like to thank Scott Leonard, my emergency 911, for sticking by me all these years. Thanks, as well, to my parents for sharing with me their stories about class and for reminding me why I wrote this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Kelly Walsh, for her support, encouragement, friendship, and love. She gave up our office space and took on most of our household chores all so that I could sit and write. It is to her that I give my greatest thanks. v Introduction A colleague of mine once asked, “How do you respond to the accusation that ‘working- class’ is synonymous with ‘white’?” In the public imagination, the working-class is often presented as white. It is also stereotyped as predominately rural, conservative, and male. Yet the reality of the working-class is that it is, as Barbara Ehrenreich observes, more reliably liberal than the middle-class and, particularly given shifts in the last half-century in the global economy, it is increasingly comprised of women and minorities.1 Questions such as the one posed by my colleague reflect this tendency in the U.S. to associate “working-class” with white men – an association ultimately based on outdated models of the white, male, and heterosexual industrial worker. When the U.S. economy shifted away from its industrial base in the early 1970’s, the nature of blue collar work and its workforce also shifted: in a “new” economy driven by service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing, blue collar work is no longer stable, secure, or mainstream. Most of the individuals performing this work are not unionized and are more routinely subject to low-wage strategies that include part-time or contingent work with subsistence-level wages without benefits. White and male workers, having shifted along with the globalizing of the economy, are also subject to these low-wage strategies, yet this fact has been obfuscated by ideas about class based on outdated models. These outdated models, as they have concealed how white and male workers are exploited in the “new” economy, have also meant that as a group women and minorities are frequently viewed as conceptually separate from the working-class, their labor not recognized as “blue collar.” Many literary critics since the late 1980’s have viewed women and minorities as belonging to a class separate from the working-class, with “class” in the race/class/gender triumvirate often read (when it is read at all) as a class of the poor. What these critics do not always recognize, however, is that poverty is not a class but a condition that affects the more disadvantaged members of the working-class. Because women and minorities have historically occupied such a position, they experience poverty in greater numbers. Yet it would be a mistake to collapse class with race and/or gender as doing so disregards the many white men in poverty and leaves unexamined the low-wage strategies and un- and underemployment that cause economic inequality. It is necessary, then, that critics revise their definition of class in the triumvirate, in part because reducing class to race and/or gender further divides the working- class as it also misses the class component of exploitation and/or disenfranchisement. Moreover, it makes little sense to talk about race and/or gender without also talking about class as women and/or minorities don’t experience identity or consciousness in singular ways, as if race and/or gender can be cordoned off from class as it is lived through these categories. This study urges literary critics to realize, as they are concerned with “race, class, and gender,” how the feminization and racialization of blue collar work and its workforce (what it means to recast gender and race as more significant than class) have obscured some of the particular forms of the political and economic disenfranchisement of the working-class at a time when the reality of globalization has never been more apparent. When the U.S. economy shifted away from industry, it depended on an “ideal” (here more easily exploited) workforce to meet the demands of service and agricultural work and unskilled manufacturing. Women and minorities, who had long performed this work as sexism and racism exacerbated their economic situations, replaced the white and male industrial worker as “archetypal proletarians” in an economy where labor relations were more flexible.

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