Thursday, December 19, 2013

Dying with Class

It's out! Yesterday Living with Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture came off the presses. It's edited by Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz and includes essays by bell hooks, Stanley Aronowitz, Lisa Nell, Henry Giroux and others.

I've got an essay in the book that looks at class, race, religion and hospice use called, "Dying with Class."

You can by it here.

Read more about Living with Class at the Palgrave Macmillan site.

Here's the book's table of contents:

Introduction: Working Class; Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz
1. Class Dismissed: The Issue Is Accountability; bell hooks
2. Letter from a Lovelorn Pre-Radical: Looking Forward and Backward at Martin Luther King Jr.; Kevin Bruyneel, 
3. In Search of a New Left, Then and Now; Dick Howard
4. The Status of Class; Stanley Aronowitz
5. 'Fix the Tired': Cultural Politics and the Struggle for Shorter Hours; Kristin Lawler
6. Literary and Real Life Salesmen and the Performance of Class; Jon Dietrick
7. Money Changes Everything?: African American Class-Based Attitudes toward LBGT Issues; Ravi K. Perry, Yasmiyn Irizarry, and Timothy J. Fair 
8. Democracy without Class: Investigating the Political Unconscious of the United States; M. Lane Bruner
9. Re-Forming Class: Wealth, Culture, and Identity in South Africa; Lisa Nell
10. Whiteness as Currency: Rethinking the Exchange Rate; Emily M. Drew 
11. Dying with Class: Race, Religion, and the Commodification of a Good Death; Ann Neumann
12. New Materialisms and Digital Culture: Productive Labor and the Software Wars; Ted Kafala
13. Feminist Theory and the Critique of Class; Robin Truth Goodman
14. Criminal Class; Eric Anthamatten
15. Consuming Class: Identity & Power through the Commodification of Bourgeois Culture, Celebrity, and Glamour; Raúl Rubio
16. When Prosperity Is Built on Poverty, There Can Be No Foundation for Peace, as Poverty and Peace Don't Stand Hand in Hand; Pepi Leistyna
17. Solon the Athenian and the Origins of Class Struggle; Thomas Thorp
18. Memories of Class and Youth in the Age of Disposability; Henry A. Giroux

A Closely-Held Business

You can read the latest installment of my "Patient Body" column at The Revealer! I look at the current cases pending in the US Supreme Court, brought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, that challenge employees' rights to full health care coverage. Here's an excerpt:


Conflating Conestoga Wood Specialties with the Hahn family, which the repeated use of “closely-held” means to do, is a way to erase the separation between the family and the corporation. Non-profits are exempt from some general laws that are otherwise meant to protect the rights of workers. Why aren’t “closely-held” corporations? The real question before the US Supreme Court then, despite the other many arguments for and against the “contraception mandate,” is this: whose beliefs are more important, an employer’s or an employee’s?
The Conestoga appeal states:
The question presented is exceptionally important. Our nation was founded on freedom of religion, and our free-enterprise system allows entrepreneurs to pursue profit while also serving the common good. But the decision below puts these two foundational principles at odds. Must religious believers check their consciences at the door of their businesses, or may they generally live integrated lives of faith at work?
In other words, you own the business, you decide what “lives of faith” look like there. In a dissenting opinion of the district court decision Judge Kent Jordan wrote, “The government takes us down a rabbit hole where religious rights are determined by the tax code, with nonprofit corporations able to express religious sentiments while for-profit corporations and their owners are told that business is business and faith is irrelevant. Meanwhile, up on the surface, where people try to live lives of integrity and purpose, that kind of division sounds as hollow as it truly is.”
But what of Conestoga employees’ “integrity and purpose?” What must they check at the door? While contraception–and abortion, for that matter–are legal, and discrimination against employees for race, gender, disability or religion is clearly illegal, the question of an employee’s rights is swept away in the structural details of the case.