On shaky grounds: Constructing white working-class masculinities in the late twentieth century

In the late 1980s and early 90s, the poor and working-class white boys and men we interviewed narrated “personal identities” as if they were wholly independent of corroding economic and social relations. Years after industry has fled their communities, they are drenched in a kind of post-industrial, late-twentieth-century individualism; the discourse of their “identity work” appears to be draped in Teflon. The more profoundly economic and social conditions invade their personal well-being, the more the damage and disruption is denied. Hegemony works in funny ways. Especially for white working-class men who wish to think they still have an edge on “Others”-white women and people of color.