Description:
In 1975, National Airlines was shut down for 127 days when flight attendants went on strike to protest long hours and low pay. Activists at National and many other U.S. airlines sought to win political power and material resources for people who live beyond the boundary of the traditional family. In Deregulating Desire, Ryan Patrick Murphy, a former flight attendant himself, chronicles the efforts of single women, unmarried parents, lesbians and gay men, as well as same-sex couples to make the airline industry a crucible for social change in the decades after 1970.
Murphy situates the flight attendant union movement in the history of debates about family and work. Each chapter offers an economic and a cultural analysis to show how the workplace has been the primary venue to enact feminist and LGBTQ politics.
From the political economic consequences of activism to the dynamics that facilitated the rise of what Murphy calls the "family values economy" to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Deregulating Desire emphasizes the enduring importance of social justice for flight attendants in the twenty-first century.
Review Quotes: "Deregulating Desire is a stunning cultural analysis of political economy that explicates both the rise of neoliberal economic policies within the airline industry and flight attendants' creative, activist response. Ryan Patrick Murphy shows us how the 'family values economy' came to operate and how flight attendants exploited the fissures within it. At this moment of divergent political responses to economic emergency, Murphy's tale is as necessary as it is gripping."--Nan Enstad, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century