Boyz, bastards, virgins, and pretty women: Class and gender in American fiction and film of the 1990s

In the second half of the 20th century, identity politics and their resulting academic disciplines have flourished in relation to race, gender, and sexuality. However, class remains a less examined category of identity. The very nature of the class system in America presents stumbling blocks to deploying class as an analytical tool, specifically the unacknowledged and submerged character of class in American culture, the belief in the mutability of American class identity, and the non-binary nature of class as a subject position. In this project, I foreground class as the primary terms of analysis in order to examine how a broad range of American fiction and film produced in the early 1990s handle the issue of class identity, most often when the text itself does not overtly acknowledge its significance.;Popular Hollywood movies (Pretty Woman (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), The Bodyguard (1992), and Indecent Proposal (1993)) involving cross class romances demonstrate how class status inflects gender dynamics in interpersonal relationships. The literary novels The Virgin Suicides (1993), The Ice Storm (1994), and Bastard Out of Carolina (1993) use narrative frames to generate structures from which emerge classed perspectives. In films about African American underclass men attempting to escape from extremes of poverty---Boyz N' the Hood (1990), Menace II Society (1993), and Hoop Dreams (1994)---the pleasure of the social mobility stories undermines the political critiques. I argue that at each class strata the texts deploy narrative strategies that accommodate the submerged nature of class in American culture. These strategies---lower class rehabilitation, nostalgic irony, complicitous critique, modified Bildungsroman---allow the texts to frame their engagement with class in ways that create a space for processing these dynamics within a culture that resists recognizing their force.