Queer Labor

LGBTQ people in the workplace face different challenges, especially those of color. This chapter shares a glimpse of the LGBTQ world and how others can learn more about ways to support and nurture them. This chapter shares a glimpse of the LGBTQ world and how others can learn more about ways to support and nurture them. It begins by previewing some of the scholarship on queerness, organizations, and labor and some of the challenges faced by LGBTQ workers. The chapter then attempts to put queer theory, based largely in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, in conversation with business fields. The rise of homonormativity also means that LGBTQ workplace issues often matter the most to middle- and upper-class gay men and women in white collar professions. Homonormativity alerts us to fissures and frictions between LGBTQ communities, the politics of power and dominance in LGBTQ spaces, and the challenges of talking across queer particularities. Yoshino, K. argues that covering happens on four levels: appearance, affiliation, activism and association. Queer media studies scholarship shows how constructions of LGBTQ identities can ossify in mainstream media and in media produced by and for LGBTQ audiences.