Love and Money: Queers, Class and Cultural Production by Lisa Henderson (review)

In Love and Money: Queers, Class and Cultural Production, Lisa Henderson argues that to see queer culture clearly we must not ignore the lens of class. Questioning, linking, and refiguring sexuality and social class throughout the book, Henderson reexamines the stakes of queer cultural production through the negotiation of queer class recognition. Drawn along disciplinary lines of queer theory, feminist theory, and critical cultural studies Love and Money contributes to vital scholarly debates over the emancipatory potential of cultural recognition versus economic redistribution. As a scholar of communication, Henderson adds valuable complexity to this discussion, highlighting the ways in which queer visibility depends on a class–race reduction mediated through tropes of bodily excess, disenfranchisement, and trauma. Through timely and profound analysis she weaves together disparate experiences and expressions from a variety of queer cultural texts to present a language of queer–class engagement that articulates the categories of race and gender while working to recenter class as a vital frame through which to understand the production of sexual difference.

Henderson begins by exploring queer visibility, race, and social class. Taking up popular commercial texts such as Will and Grace, The L Word, and George Lopez, she argues that class distinction becomes visible through racial and sexual markers. She posits bodily control of the good queer, bodily excess and failure of the bad (often black or brown) queer, and family as the locus of normalcy as important markers by which queer worth is measured. These class markers bridge popular culture and everyday life and imbue media expression with importance and the potential for alternative attachments. It is in this spirit of hope that Henderson continues to lead the reader through subtle moments in film, queer class solidarity in fiction, and a creative relay between queer and straight worlds of cultural production.

Asking scholars of media, queer culture, and critical communication to consider the simple question of “how to be,” Henderson delves into the work of independent filmmaker and author Miranda July, whose film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) illustrates the gentle and painful moments of getting by and “directs a graceful queer beam on the beaten turf of rage and pronouncement” (69). From here she pivots to the readers of radical feminist lesbian author Dorothy Allison’s fictional works for a parallel encounter with the reparative openness that marked July’s work. Informed by her working-class Southern background, Allison’s work speaks poignantly to the complex issue of queer class identification and, as Henderson demonstrates, her novels succeed in generating a readership community committed to support and healing. Asking what might be queer about class, Henderson draws on extensive interviews with readers to explore the ways queerness, race, and class become entangled through the cultural politics of recognition. Rather than calling on the language of class recognition as a distributive remedy, Henderson hopes class concerns will be called upon in the service of queer critique and solidarity.

To ground her approach to queer class recognition in praxis, Henderson turns to the conditions of queer cultural production through her concept of relay. Presented as an alternative to the stark divide between queer subculture and straight mainstream culture, relay addresses queer anxiety with the crossover between queer and straight worlds of cultural production. Relay appears as an uneven process of “cultural passing off, catching, and passing on,” which draws attention to people and practices as they “navigate the cultural and institutional fault lines on the stages of everyday cultural life” (117). To illustrate queer relay Henderson examines the plot and production of the independent short film Desert Motel (2005), which depicts the conflicted attachments among a group of lesbian women and female-to-male transfolk, focusing on the complexities of butch-fem sex and transgender acknowledgment and anxieties. Through a deep analysis of the creative queer sensibilities and solidarities operating on screen and on set, in contrast to the financial and professional demands of commercial production...