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"Historians have noted that gay identity is central to the history of capitalism, but because of an assumption that workplaces were "straight spaces" in which queer people passed, historians of sexuality have had almost nothing to say about work, instead directing their attention to the street and to the bar. This book presents employment and the accompanying fear of job loss as one of the most salient features of queer life for most of the twentieth century, and looks at the political and legal developments of gay labor in the workplace, alongside the histories of women's, minorities', and immigrants' labor. Starting midcentury with the Lavender Scare-the federal government's massive purge of gay people from the Civil Service-the book traces how workplaces opened to gay workers, albeit unevenly, over the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on a number of archival sources and interviews, this is a history of the workplace that shows larger structural change while also giving voice to many underrepresented individuals. Throughout, Margot Canaday emphasizes the concept of precariousness, a commonly deployed category within labor studies to designate that expanding category of workers in industrial societies who are detached from permanent, standardized, secure, and protected employment. While women and racial minorities also share this longer history of precarious work, the LGBT experience was a particularly powerful precedent for the changing character of economic life at the end of the 20th century. Despite that, the book shows that workplaces were surprisingly responsive to demands from gay employees for protection and benefits. Canaday shows that business was out ahead of both the government and labor unions in offering antidiscrimination protection and domestic partner benefits to gay workers. The final part of the book traces how gay rights came to be the most marketized/privatized civil rights social movement and how we should consider the gay experience in the workplace not as marginal or atypical but as central and predictive for all workers."

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today. Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control--immigration, the military, and welfare--and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. She begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the state first stumbled upon evidence of sex and gender nonconformity, revealing how homosexuality was policed indirectly through the exclusion of sexually "degenerate" immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating poverty, violence, and vice. Canaday argues that the state's gradual awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and through the postwar period as policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality to define who could enter the country, serve in the military, and collect state benefits. Midcentury repression was not a sudden response to newly visible gay subcultures, Canaday demonstrates, but the culmination of a much longer and slower process of state-building during which the state came to know and to care about homosexuality across many decades. Social, political, and legal history at their most compelling, The Straight State explores how regulation transformed the regulated: in drawing boundaries around national citizenship, the state helped to define the very meaning of homosexuality in America.

This essay examines the work of Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib, two philosophers who have demonstrated that feminist theorists can usefully draw upon both postmodernism and the critical theory tradition, with which Fraser and Benhabib are more clearly associated. I argue that each theorist claims the universal ideals and normative judgements of modernism, and the contextualism, particularity, and skepticism of postmodernism. I do this by revisiting each of their positions in the now well-known Feminist Contentions exchange, by examining the diverse ways in which they reconcile universalism and difference, and by exploring each theorist's critique of the Habermasian public sphere.

"These highly readable essays unite recent scholarship on the meaning and use of state power with investigations of the history of intimate experience-marriage, sexuality, reproduction, family life-exploring the porous boundaries between public and private realms. In analyzing the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to today, this volume makes the case that "intimate governance"-the binding of our private daily experience to the apparatus of the state-should be central to our understanding of modern American history. For the state is always with us, even in our most private, seemingly independent actions"--