Transgender Shopkeepers: Passing and the Managed Achievement of Class Status at Midcentury

• In Event: Where Has Class Gone?: Midcentury Transfemininity and Class Mobility

Abstract

This paper challenges narratives of transgender life that divide starkly along class lines, splitting the community into assimilationist v. anti-assimilationist, bourgeois and street. As we argue across the panel, trans and queer lives have been understood without adequate reference to material concerns, as if gender presentation could be understood primarily as a matter of identity and individual agency. This paper aims to address this gap by considering class aspiration in narratives of transition. Class aspiration is often seen in a negative light in the framework of progressive criticism, as either crassly material or assimilationist. But the desire for “the things of this world” (Carolyn Steedman), if understood in the context of a fully materialist analysis, can be understood as part of the project of survival and thriving.

Consulting US midcentury sources such as Harold Garfinkel’s account of Agnes and Esther Newton’s Mother Camp, I consider the way that desires for upward mobility are voiced and represented. In particular, I am interested in the significance of the class designation lower middle class, or petite bourgeoisie, which for Marx consisted of small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans. This class is often described as inherently conservative because it aspires to bourgeois status. I consider the coincidence between aspiration and transition, attending in particular to critical responses to Agnes’s midcentury femininity.

I argue that more attention to class formation will give us a richer account of transgender history and less polarizing ideological frameworks.

Author

• Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania