Deregulating Desire By Ryan Patrick Murphy

Introduction by
David K. Seitz
Published
March 6, 2018
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The recipient of the Organization of American Historians’ 2017 David Montgomery Award for the best book on a topic in U.S. labor and working-class history, Deregulating Desire offers an empirically rich and beautifully written account of the politics of gender, sexuality and race in late 20th-century U.S. flight attendant organizing.

The following book review forum takes up Ryan Patrick Murphy’s book Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice (2016, Temple University Press).

The recipient of the Organization of American Historians’ 2017 David Montgomery Award for the best book on a topic in U.S. labor and working-class history, Deregulating Desire offers an empirically rich and beautifully written account of the politics of gender, sexuality and race in late 20th-century U.S. flight attendant organizing. At its core, this impressive book tells an exhilarating story about how 1960s and 1970s feminist and gay movements enriched the analysis, demands, and gains of flight attendant labor organizing. It also offers a powerful indictment of what Murphy calls an ascendant “pro-work, pro-family” ideology that mobilized reactionary, highly gendered cultural assumptions about who constitutes a “breadwinner” to claw back flight attendants’ hard-fought improvements in wages and working conditions. Murphy’s book provides ample material and analysis for engagement and critical consideration by economic, social and cultural geographers interested in questions of labor, social movements, difference, and desire. The forum on this book reflects an in-person conversation that had been planned for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Boston in April 2017, but was relocated to the Canadian Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting in Toronto that June in response to the U.S. administration’s travel ban. The organizer of the AAG/CAG panel, David K. Seitz, would like to thank author Ryan Patrick Murphy and reviewers Weiqiang Lin, Caitlin Henry and Alan Sears, as well as two original participants, Carmen Teeple Hopkins and Marion Werner, who were unable to participate in the relocated conversation.

essays in this forum

Deregulating Desire: A Response by Ryan Patrick Murphy

While I also illustrate how activists have contested objectifying practices, the participants in this author meets critics session argued that Deregulating Desire’s original contribution lies in my decision to reimagine flight attendants as subjects of desire. As Alan Sears put it, the book tells the story of a social movement built around “struggles for sexual subjectivity.” My work places desire at the center of that narrative, documenting how flight attendants mobilized to win the pleasures, the experiences, and the relationships that they wanted.

By

Ryan Patrick Murphy

Deregulating Desire: Reviewed By Caitlin Henry

Ryan Patrick Murphy’s "Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice" is a rollercoaster of a read. I laughed, scoffed, and stifled yelps.

By

Caitlin Henry

Deregulating Desire: Reviewed By Alan Sears

Ryan Murphy’s "Deregulating Desire" models an integrative analysis in the examination of the ways gender, sexuality, race, and class have played out in worker activism among flight attendants in the United States. This book is an important contribution to the fields of labor studies and studies in gender and sexuality, showing how flight attendants used worker activism to fight for sexual subjectivity and resist the limitations of dominant gender roles.

By

Alan Sears

Deregulating Desire: Reviewed by Weiqiang Lin

Through the airline industry, "Deregulating Desire" provides a masterful narrative on some of the leading problems plaguing the political economy in the last few decades. Documenting a history of labor activism that spans no fewer than four decades, the book provides a meticulous and enrapturing chronicle of the numerous advances won, and retreats suffered, by labor movements among US flight attendants since the 1970s.

By

Weiqiang Lin

Deregulating Desire By Ryan Patrick Murphy

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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

  • Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
  • Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
  • They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
  • I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

  1. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
  2. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
  3. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

What’s a Rich Text element?

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The following book review forum takes up Ryan Patrick Murphy’s book Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice (2016, Temple University Press).

The recipient of the Organization of American Historians’ 2017 David Montgomery Award for the best book on a topic in U.S. labor and working-class history, Deregulating Desire offers an empirically rich and beautifully written account of the politics of gender, sexuality and race in late 20th-century U.S. flight attendant organizing. At its core, this impressive book tells an exhilarating story about how 1960s and 1970s feminist and gay movements enriched the analysis, demands, and gains of flight attendant labor organizing. It also offers a powerful indictment of what Murphy calls an ascendant “pro-work, pro-family” ideology that mobilized reactionary, highly gendered cultural assumptions about who constitutes a “breadwinner” to claw back flight attendants’ hard-fought improvements in wages and working conditions. Murphy’s book provides ample material and analysis for engagement and critical consideration by economic, social and cultural geographers interested in questions of labor, social movements, difference, and desire. The forum on this book reflects an in-person conversation that had been planned for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Boston in April 2017, but was relocated to the Canadian Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting in Toronto that June in response to the U.S. administration’s travel ban. The organizer of the AAG/CAG panel, David K. Seitz, would like to thank author Ryan Patrick Murphy and reviewers Weiqiang Lin, Caitlin Henry and Alan Sears, as well as two original participants, Carmen Teeple Hopkins and Marion Werner, who were unable to participate in the relocated conversation.