Fembot’s Books Aren’t Dead (BAD) is back and we’re kicking it off with Mara Williams’s (Doctoral Candidate, University of Oregon) interview with Lisa Henderson (Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst) on her book, Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production (New York University Press, 2013). You can listen to this interview at:
http://fembotcollective.org/blog/2016/06/06/books-arent-dead-bad-interview-lisa-henderson/
About Love and Money:
Love and Money argues that we can’t understand contemporary queer cultures without looking through the lens of social class. Resisting old divisions between culture and economy, identity and privilege, left and queer, recognition and redistribution, Love and Money offers supple approaches to capturing class experience and class form in and around queerness.
Contrary to familiar dismissals, not every queer television or movie character is like Will Truman on Will and Grace—rich, white, healthy, professional, detached from politics, community, and sex. Through ethnographic encounters with readers and cultural producers and such texts as Boys Don’t Cry, Brokeback Mountain, By Hook or By Crook, and wedding announcements in the New York Times, Love and Money sees both queerness and class across a range of idioms and practices in everyday life. How, it asks, do readers of Dorothy Allison’s novels use her work to find a queer class voice? How do gender and race broker queer class fantasy? How do independent filmmakers cross back and forth between industry and queer sectors, changing both places as they go and challenging queer ideas about bad commerce and bad taste?
With an eye to the nuances and harms of class difference in queerness and a wish to use culture to forge queer and class affinities, Love and Money returns class and its politics to the study of queer life.
About the Author:
Lisa Henderson is Professor of Communication, recent past Chair of the Department of Communication, and Affiliate Faculty in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Her research and teaching interests include cultural production, sexual representation, feminist media studies, and cultural studies of social class, with essays in a number of collections and journals as Feminist Media Studies, GLQ, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, and Screen. In 2011, Henderson received the Roy F. Aarons Award for Outstanding Contribution to GLBT Education and Research from the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Her recent book, Love and Money: Queers, Class and Cultural Production (NY Press, 2013) was a finalist for the annual Lambda Literary Awards (aka Lammys) in the LGBT Studies category in 2014. Her new work looks at collaboration between cultural scholars and artists, at friendship as a political form, and at the relationship between cultural participation and thriving.
About the Interviewer:
Mara Williams is a PhD candidate in Media Studies at the University of Oregon. Her current research concerns non-reproductive queer futurities in online fandom.
