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Hamilton Carroll Working-Class Masculinities

Men's Soaps : Automotive Television Programming and Contemporary

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Author’s Note: I would like to thank Lara Cohen, Eric Lott, Liam Kennedy, and Doreen Piano for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Thanks are also due Todd Kuchta for his insightful comments during our conversations about American Chopper. Portions of this essay were written while I was a fellow at the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, and I would like to acknowledge the support of the institute. Thanks also to the anonymous reader from Television & New Media.

Television & New Media Volume 9 Number 4 July 2008 263-283

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Men’s Soaps Automotive Television Programming and Contemporary Working-Class Masculinities Hamilton Carroll University of Leeds, United Kingdom

In this paper I argue that the Discovery Channel’s reality-based automotive show American Chopper produces a recuperative blue-collar masculinity that attenuates the putative losses suffered by working-class men under the postindustrial service economy of the contemporary United States. In its on-screen presentation of blue-collar work, American Chopper valorizes a form of working-class manual labor at precisely the moment when such labor has all but disappeared in the United States. In its presenta- tion of a world of masculine labor and fraternal affect, American Chopper constructs a nostalgic world of blue-collar work in which the skilled manual laborer—always understood to be male—still reigns supreme, untroubled by the supposed defeats suf- fered by hegemonic masculinity in the post-civil rights era. By celebrating neoliberal consumer capital and the traditional consumption of the American dream as cotermi- nous discourses of celebrity identity, the show elides the still vast gaps in opportunity and remuneration in the contemporary United States.

Keywords: reality television; masculinity; labor; whiteness; celebrity

[American Chopper’s] popularity is demonstrable, if resolutely inexplicable.

—David Chater, The Times

These guys are highly volatile.

—Steve Nigg (producer), American Chopper

Americans have, of late (and perhaps again), developed an infatuation with blue-collar labor. To take professional sports as an example, the 2004 champions in each of the country’s three major sports leagues (the NBA, the NFL, and Major League Baseball) all claimed solidarity with the American workingman. The NFL’s

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New England Patriots secured their third Super Bowl in five years despite a much- heralded lack of superstars. The Detroit Pistons of the NBA took pride in their self- proclaimed status as a team of “blue-collar workers” who brought their “lunch pails” to every game. During their run to the World Series, the Boston Red Sox rallied around the nickname “the idiots” and claimed to be a team of hard-working individuals who reflected the blue-collar heritage of Boston—this despite a team payroll in excess of $121 million (second only to arch-rivals the New York Yankees) and individual salaries of as much as $19.8 million (with twenty players earning over $1.5 million each).1 Since the 1970s, however, the transformations of globalization and the post- industrial service economy have produced marked transformations in the landscape of American labor that simultaneously belie and account for this infatuation. As a result of these transformations, “the labor force as a whole is being polarized into a mildly expanding top echelon, a shrinking middle, and an enlarged bottom” (Lowe 1995, 34). As traditional forms of industrial work and blue-collar manual labor have been replaced by the knowledge and service work of the new economy, the blue- collar laborer valorized by the millionaire athletes of the Patriots, Pistons, and Red Sox has all but vanished.

Transformations in the labor economy of the United States have produced a series of cultural effects that, as George Lipsitz has pointed out, have “worked to detach individuals from the traditional authority of work, community, and family” (Lipsitz 1990, 630). In the United States, this detachment from “traditional authority” has produced an understanding of worker disenfranchisement that—predictably— manifests itself along gendered lines of demarcation as transformations in labor roles require reconstitutions of domestic labor in the private sphere of home and family. As Mike Hill suggests, “the conditions of labor now impinge on the traditional domestic arrangements that it once required, with the consequence of diminishing the real numbers of traditional male-headed heterosexual families” (Hill 2004, 93). Such erosions of patriarchal enfranchisement produce marked effects across the spheres of work and family. In Stiffed, her bestselling study of the “betrayal of the American man,” Susan Faludi, for example, claims that the decline in traditional “masculine” jobs has led to a rise in insecurity in the American male psyche. Increasingly marginalized in the postindustrial service economy of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, American men, Faludi suggests, are suffering a crisis of masculinity. Hobbled by a lack of education and by a cultural climate that understands the majority of available service/knowledge work to be feminized (and feminizing), the working-class male in contemporary America has become the foremost victim of neoliberal labor eco- nomics (Faludi 1999, 51-101). While there can be no doubt that blue-collar labor has become increasingly scarce in the United States and that certain sectors of the work- force have become increasingly disenfranchised, arguments such as Faludi’s play into a broader and more pernicious culture of white male injury or victimhood.

White injury—phantasmagraphic though it may be—is a phenomenon that attempts to recoup political, economic, and cultural authority. Under the so-called “crisis of masculinity,” white men, whose franchise on opportunity in the United States has

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putatively been revoked, are commonly understood to be the individuals most affected by recent social transformations. David Savran has suggested that the phe- nomena of white male injury “represent[s] an attempt on the part of white men to recoup the losses they have allegedly suffered at the hands of those women and persons of color who, in fact, have had to pay for the economic and social prosperity that white men have historically enjoyed” (4). As such, white injury is a response to what Thomas DiPiero has described as a “contemporary push toward opening up new raced, gendered, and sexual identities that do not take the white male as their nor- mative ground” (2). Savran argues, however, that the new interest in—or visibility of— white masculinity should also be seen as “an attempt by white men to respond to and regroup in the face of particular social and economic challenges,” the most signifi- cant of which is “the end of the post-World War II economic boom and the resultant and steady decline in the income of white working- and lower-middle-class men” (5). In what follows, I use an analysis of the recent cycle of automotive programming on cable television to examine such contemporary discourses of masculinity at the level of cultural representation. In particular, I focus on a reading of the Discovery Channel’s highly successful reality-based television show, American Chopper, which stands at the vanguard of a number of popular reality-based automotive programs that have appeared in the past few years. In addition to American Chopper, for example, the Discovery Channel also airs Monster Garage, Motorcycle Mania, American Hotrod, and Biker Build-Off. Popular automotive shows on other channels include MTV’s Pimp My Ride, Spike TV’s Ride with Funkmaster Flex, TLC’s Overhauling, and The Speed Channel’s Tuner Transformation, Build or Bust, and Dream Car Garage.

American Chopper premiered as a two-episode pilot in September of 2002, emerging as a fully-fledged series in March of 2003. With over seventy episodes having aired to date, the show follows the day-to-day trials and tribulations of father and son team Paul Teutul, Senior (Senior) and Paul Teutul, Junior (Paulie), the own- ers of Orange County Choppers (OCC), a custom motorcycle shop located in upstate New York. Other central “characters” in the show include Mikey Teutul, Senior’s youngest son, and OCC employees Vinnie Dimartino, Cody Connelly, and Rick Petko. The show consistently attracts over three million viewers per week and is amongst the highest rated non-sports shows on cable television.2 A typical episode of American Chopper follows the Teutuls and their employees as they design and build a one-off, custom motorcycle (chopper) built around a specific theme. Episodes of American Chopper have seen the Teutuls build bikes for companies such as Snap-on Tools, Gillette, Nike, Trim Spa (a diet product company), NAPA, and Caterpillar. The Teutuls have also built bikes for individuals such as the golfer Davis Love III, “Tonight Show” host and motorcycle enthusiast Jay Leno, and the actor Will Smith (as a tie-in for the film I, Robot). In addition to commissioned bikes such as these, the Teutuls have also built commemorative theme bikes saluting U.S. vet- erans of the Vietnam War, the American worker, and the New York City firemen3

who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

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While American Chopper’s phenomenal success can be attributed in part to its position within the broader cycle of reality-based television that has recently saturated network and cable television, the show’s central appeal derives from its presentation of men at work and its production of a masculine family melodrama.4 The combative relationship between Senior and Paulie is a central focus of the show, and the on- screen arguments between the two men are highlighted in the show’s advertising. I situate American Chopper within the broader cultural paradigm of white male injury and examine how the show produces a recuperation of the prerogatives of patriarchal authority. If, as Hill (2004) suggests, “the encroachments of capital upon the patri- archal family unsettle masculinity” (93), capital also has the capacity—and the motive—to restore masculine authority. I argue here that American Chopper pro- duces a recuperative blue-collar masculinity that attenuates the putative losses suffered by working-class men under the postindustrial service economy of the contemporary United States. White masculinity, DiPiero suggests, should be understood not as a fixed identity position, but “as a symptomatic reply to cultural demands” (DiPiero 2002, 3). In its presentation of the Teutuls as authentically blue collar, American Chopper valorizes a form of working-class manual labor at precisely the moment when such labor has all but disappeared in the United States.

“A Very Patriotic Theme”: Myths of Mobility and Blue-Collar Celebrity

I worked for everything in my life. I never got anything given to me.

—Paul Teutul, Senior

We have some of the most affluent audience in the history of the network, it’s not downmarket in the least.

—Clark Bunting, Discovery Channel General Manager

Central to the allure of American Chopper is the mythic status of the custom motorcycle and the “outlaw” biker lifestyle in American culture. The custom motor- cycle embodies a powerful set of symbolic resonances that integrate the outlaw lifestyle of the biker gang with the myth of the American frontier that still maintains a powerful hold on the American psyche. Riding a chopper, Senior tells the viewer in one episode, is “kind of a real freedom feeling.” Like the western gunslinger, the outlaw biker is a figure of fantasy wish fulfillment. Symbolizing freedom from the constraints of society, the chopper and the outlaw biker evoke a series of potent American myths about civilization, individuality, and social responsibility. Mythologized in films such as The Wild One (1954) starring Marlon Brando, outlaw motorcycle clubs and the motorcycle subculture arose in the United States in the

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immediate aftermath of World War II. The GIs returning from Europe brought back army surplus motorbikes and began riding, racing, and customizing them for recreation. The outlaw chopper culture of Southern California that grew out of these clubs— most notoriously depicted in Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrifying Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (1966)—became a powerful symbol of youthful rebellion and of the counterculture movements of the 1960s. The chopper’s status as a sign of countercultural rebellion was codified in Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s classic anti-establishment film Easy Rider (1969).

In the current nostalgia boom fueled by the purchasing power of the newly afflu- ent baby boomer generation, the custom motorcycle has become a nostalgic symbol of youthful rebellion co-opted (apparently without irony) to display middle-class affluence. Retaining the patina of its original symbolism, the custom motorcycle serves as a powerful signifier of rebellion and individuality for the middle-class con- sumer while also connoting economic success. The motorcycle’s countercultural symbolism has made it a potent icon for the members of the baby boomer genera- tion who, “finally [have] the time and money to buy the choppers they could only long for in their youth” (Flaherty 2004, 15). For the middle-class consumer of the motorcycle, the mutual imbrications of these two symbolic functions are a much- desired aspect of the motorcycle’s commodity function as economic affluence provides consumers the freedom to rebel—albeit only symbolically. As the baby boomer generation has moved up the socioeconomic ladder and come to command an increasingly large percentage of the nation’s purchasing power, popular culture has undergone a series of transformations that reflect the values of the baby boomer gen- eration and a nostalgic longing for the popular youth cultures of the 1950s and 1960s. Following David Harvey’s work on postindustrial modes of flexible accumulation, Lowe suggests that “the new pattern [of capital accumulation] favors the production and consumption of a variety of rapidly changing, specialized products targeted at specific market segments” (Lowe 1995, 18). American Chopper illustrates the degree to which the outlaw biker and the blue-collar worker have become commoditized identities made available for middle-class consumption. While the show valorizes a particularly working-class form of manual labor, it does so for a predominantly middle-class audience. As the success of shows such as American Chopper and the renewed popularity of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle as a symbol of economic success might suggest, the counterculture has gone mainstream; the motorcycle has gone from being a countercultural symbol of dissatisfaction with the traditional val- ues of bourgeois American nationalism to precisely a symbol of it. As the asking price of a new Harley-Davidson (which can cost in excess of $20,000)5 or an OCC chopper (upwards of $50,000)6 would seem to suggest, only the truly affluent can afford to be rebels in contemporary America.

The Teutuls’ upward economic mobility is as significant to the success of American Chopper as the outlaw status of the motorcycles they build and, while the show celebrates the Teutuls as genuine blue-collar workers, it also betrays a slavish attention

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to their economic success. As such, American Chopper evidences an often-contradictory set of impulses that nevertheless replicate traditional American beliefs about the interrelationships between individuality, community, and social responsibility. The voice-over narration for the second American Chopper pilot calls OCC “an American Dream built on blood, sweat, and steel,” and since the show first aired, OCC has grown into a multi-million dollar enterprise. The Teutuls have become icons of a rejuvenated working-class masculinity at precisely the moment they transcend it. In each season of American Chopper, OCC has moved into ever more spacious accom- modations, and the Teutuls’ increasing economic affluence has been put on display for the viewer: new homes, expensive cars, and extravagant gifts such as custom Harley-Davidsons, have all featured prominently on the show. The Teutuls have also been transformed by their celebrity status and have become frequent guests of late night television hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman. The massive popularity of the show and its stars has significantly increased the asking price for the Teutuls’ bikes. While a “basic” OCC chopper currently starts at about $50,000, theme bikes built on the show have cost as much as $250,000.

Because of the increasing popularity of the show, the celebrity status of the Teutuls, and the marketability of OCC as a recognizable brand, the relationship between the show’s stars, the bikes they build, and the corporations who commission them has become increasingly complex. In addition to direct endorsement by the Teutuls and on-air product placement on American Chopper, the creation of theme bikes for corporate clients is a central aspect of the show. When a company such as Gillette commissions a one-off bike from OCC, they are purchasing not only the bike itself but also—through the episodes in which the bike is built—a one or two hour-long advertisement for their product and the implicit endorsement of the Teutuls. Advertisements for Gillette razors, for example, prominently book-ended each segment of two episodes during which the Teutuls built a bike for Gillette themed on the style and colors of the company’s new Mach III razor. The first episode began with the Teutuls taking a tour of Gillette’s headquarters in Boston and using the company’s products. In addition, the Discovery Channel names each individual episode after the company or product around which the bike is being built (i.e., “Gillette Bike,” “Caterpillar Bike,” “NAPA Bike”). The Teutuls have also been hired to advertise and endorse companies such as AOL, 7-Eleven, and NAPA Auto Parts (for whom the Teutuls built a theme bike during two show episodes). As Senior observed, “we’re so marketable, we could sell ice to the Eskimos” (Flaherty 2004, 14).

While episodes of American Chopper that feature the building of bikes for corpo- rate clients clearly indicate the increasingly entwined connections between cultural production and consumer capital, the show also relies on an affective nationalist discourse that cites consumption as the proper location for patriotic citizenship. Early in American Chopper’s second season, for example, the Teutuls were commissioned by Miller Electric (a company that manufactures welding equipment) to build a bike commemorating the company’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Rather than seeing the bike

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as a commissioned project for a corporate client, however, the Teutuls understand it to be, in the words of Paulie, a “tribute to the American worker.” The “Miller Electric Bike” constructs a fantasy of American masculine labor in which the blue-collar worker is cast in a nostalgic position of anteriority and is abstracted to a series of beliefs about American national identity. In its discourse of commensurate affect, American Chopper produces a form of blue-collar patriotism that situates the American worker as a nostalgic figure, and the Teutuls’ celebration of working-class masculinity should be understood to be a response to the declining labor opportunities in the postindustrial economy of the late-twentieth century. John Hartigan, Jr. has suggested that references to white trash, redneck culture, and “downmarket chic” have surged in concert with the “dramatic changes of the post-civil rights era and the rise of postindustrialization in the United States” (Hartigan 2005, 119). American Chopper betrays a similar fascination with the laboring body as it recuperates a form of working-class patriotism from the wasteland of traditional labor forms.

The affective logic of working-class masculinity evinced in the “Miller Electric Bike” is codified through a series of explicitly patriotic cross-identifications in which comparisons are made between blue-collar labor and patriotism. Commenting on the bike’s red, white, and blue color scheme, OCC mechanic Vinnie Dimartino makes this connection explicit for the viewer when he proudly observes that “every- thing about this bike definitely screams ‘Made in America.’” During the bike’s unveiling in front of an audience of workers at the Miller Electric plant, Paulie claims that the bike “really is a tribute to the American worker,” and Miller Electric Vice President Jeff Rappold echoes Vinnie’s earlier observation when he emphatically proclaims, “make no bones about it, this is a ‘Made in USA’ bike.” The final words of the episode belong to Senior, who claims, “it’s all about the red, white, and blue and to me, you know, this is a special project for us.” The relationship that is evoked in these statements between U.S. patriotism and traditional labor practices produces a form of working-class nationalism that turns on the celebration of core American values.

Many of American Chopper’s early episodes feature similarly patriotic themes. In the first pilot episode, for example, Paulie builds a “Jet Bike,” modeled on a U.S. military aircraft, that he describes as a “very patriotic theme” that “people are just going to eat . . . up.” Other episodes from the first two seasons of the show see the Teutuls build a “Liberty Bike,” plated in copper reclaimed from the Statue of Liberty, and a “Comanche Bike,” modeled after a top secret U.S. Army helicopter. Commemorative projects such as these concatenate the show’s idealization of working-class identity with traditional American values such as liberty and freedom and a form of militaristic patriotism that codify the affective engagements with working-class labor evidenced in the “Miller Electric Bike.” Arjun Appadurai has suggested that “late industrial consumption relies on a peculiar tension between fantasy and nostalgia that gives substance (and sustenance) to consumer uncertainty about commodities, money, and the relationship between work and leisure” (Appadurai 1996, 81). American Chopper negotiates that tension by constructing a fantasy of blue-collar labor in the

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present that is predicated on a nostalgic form of exemplary citizenship. The Teutuls literally embody the interrelationship between nostalgia and fantasy.

In the “Miller Electric Bike,” the link between the working class male body and the tools of its trade are sentimentalized as the bike becomes an opportunity to celebrate Senior’s own labor history. During the build, Senior recalls his own humble beginnings as a freelance welder and explains the personal significance of the bike. “I’m kind of excited about this project,” he states, “because, you know, for the past thirty five years these tools and what not have been a pretty big part of my life.” “In a way,” he continues, “you can say that they made me what I am today and I think that it’s great that OCC is getting an opportunity to pay tribute to that.” “I think that,” he continues, “you know, it’s special that, you know, you’re able to build this bike for the people that build the product that allows you to build the bike for them.” As an opportunity for Senior to celebrate his own working-class roots, the bike both pays tribute to an abstract notion of working-class identity based on the patriotic cross-identification signified in the statement “Made in America” and explicitly signifies the working- class origins of Senior’s own economic success. If Stanley Aronowitz is correct and globalization is “capital’s counterattack against the constraints on its power won by labor movements throughout the world, including the United States,” then the trans- formation of physical labor into commodity spectacle obfuscates the lived effects of capital’s assault on opportunity (Aronowitz 2003, 27).

In its celebration of Senior’s own humble beginnings, American Chopper con- catenates the mythic figure of the outlaw biker and the sentimentalized figure of the blue-collar laborer. An overbearing and physically imposing giant of a man, Senior is presented as a hardworking and industrious individual who, before he started OCC, single-handedly built a multi-million dollar company (Orange County Ironworks) from the humble beginnings of a single welding machine and a second-hand truck. As Paulie states of his father, “he built himself an empire from a pickup truck, so he has earned anything that he wants to do.” Paulie’s choice of the word earned situates his father within a clearly definable frame of American individualism and condones his success: coming from nothing he is entitled to everything. Senior is portrayed as the apotheosis of the nostalgic logic of blue-collar labor, a workingman who has achieved the American Dream through hard work and sacrifice and who is now able to reap the benefits of his hard work. “It was really cool watching my father drive the bike in, you know,” states Paulie, “he started in business thirty years ago and he’s come such a long way since then.” Despite the show’s focus on labor, Paulie’s description of his father’s journey involves more than just his business success.

American Chopper situates the Teutuls within a habitat of addiction, self-help, and recovery. Despite Senior’s business acumen and resulting success, however, during the early years of the ironworks his personal life was a shambles as he struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. In the second pilot Senior admits that “most of my life I was involved in drugs and alcohol” and describes a cycle of depression, addiction, and destructive behavior that ultimately led to the breakdown of his marriage. In the

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same episode Paulie describes the effect his father’s problems had on him when he was a child. “With alcoholism he wasn’t always there,” he claims, “so there was a lot of bitterness.” Despite being a talented athlete and a member of his high school football team, Paulie followed Senior into an early adulthood of alcoholism and unmet expectations. “It got really bad and I actually, like, experienced a nervous breakdown,” Paulie explains. Having hit bottom, Senior “got involved in programs and . . . got sober.” Paulie, likewise, was saved when he discovered religion, and he is shown attending church while a voice-over describes his battle to overcome his own addictions.

Recovery is understood in American Chopper to be a sign of masculine strength, and the show portrays the Teutuls’ problems with addiction within a narrative arc that replicates their socioeconomic ascendance. Senior cites the time when he overcame his addictions as the hardest period of his life, but he also points out that it was the period when he was able to properly focus on his business. Similarly, for Paulie, “it wasn’t until I got cleaned up that I was able to function properly and really get cre- ative on the level that we’re at now.” By presenting the Teutuls as recovered addicts, American Chopper mobilizes a logic of recovery and self-help in which both men are ultimately strong enough to help themselves and do not require the intervention of the state. By yoking its discourse of recovery to the American Dream of economic and social mobility, American Chopper mobilizes an “antipolitical politics [of] national sentimentality” in which the home and the family have become the appro- priate sites for individual action (Berlant 1997, 11). As such, the Teutuls produce a powerful corrective to the ills of the welfare state. The proper recipients of the opportunities offered by America, the Teutuls stand as exemplars of both the promise and the reward of the American Dream, proof that hard work and native know-how are all you need to get ahead in America.

Although the Teutuls’ talk of addiction and recovery seemingly runs contrary to the rugged individualism of the outlaw lifestyle and blue-collar masculinity American Chopper ostensibly valorizes, it seamlessly fits into the show’s sentimental logic of masculine affect and neoliberal citizenship. Thus, when Senior states that he “never got anything given to [him],” he should be understood to be talking about both his economic success and his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Hardworking, independent, highly motivated, and patriotic, the Teutuls are presented as exemplary citizens who want nothing given to them and have earned everything they have. As such, the show evinces what Lauren Berlant has called a “conservative ideology” that “has convinced a citizenry that the core context of politics should be the sphere of private life” (Berlant 1997, 11). Inasmuch as recovery is understood to be a sign of masculine strength, American Chopper sites individual responsibility that eschews the welfare state as the proper way to deal with addiction. The example of Senior and Paulie’s self-help situates the privatization of public life under neolib- eralism at the heart of a sentimentalized masculine citizenship.

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“Nothing You Do Motivates Me”: Family Melodrama and the Cultural Politics of Visible Labor

His failure as a son is your failure as a father.

—Mikey Teutul

We’re from two different schools.

—Paul Teutul, Junior

As much as American Chopper draws on the cultural resonances evoked by nostalgic blue-collar labor and the outlaw biker lifestyle, conjoined through the custom motor- cycle, the show also trades on a complex set of beliefs about the nature of work in American culture. The show devotes considerable attention to a long-running series of arguments between Senior and Paulie that are a central aspect of its popularity. These arguments are often about the nature of real work and reproduce a commonplace series of cultural dichotomies: public/private, production/consumption, masculine/ feminine, physical/mental, work/leisure. In the distribution of labor at OCC (at least as it is presented on American Chopper), Senior is a self-made businessman and Paulie is an artist. However much Senior may enjoy the fruits of Paulie’s artistic labor, he doesn’t quite trust it. The value of Paulie’s artistic labor to the success of the business is a common subject in the arguments between the two men. When Paulie is able to show concrete progress on a build (the fabrication and welding of a gas tank, for example) his father is happy, however, when Paulie is engaged in the mental labor of artistic and conceptual work (during which he may spend an hour or a whole work day staring at a bare motorcycle frame as he comes up with design ideas), his father inevitably appears and an argument ensues. During the course of these arguments, Paulie is inevitably accused by his father of being lazy, self-absorbed, and unaware of the significance of deadlines. “Here we are, already behind schedule,” quips Senior in one memorable incident, “and Picasso is changing his mind about what he wants on this bike.” By derisively referring to Paulie as “Picasso,” Senior is equating his son’s work with leisure and a type of luxury he believes he cannot afford. This dynamic relies on commonplace beliefs about the relationship between manual and mental labor and is largely a product of Senior’s inability (or unwillingness) to recognize mental labor as work.

Senior’s inability to recognize Paulie’s labor as such is hardly surprising. Despite the real economic benefits he derives from it, what Senior sees when he watches Paulie is not what he expects work to look like. The distinctions between labor and leisure that motivate Senior’s distrust of Paulie’s work ethic also reflect trenchant beliefs about the relationship between gender and work in American culture. As Michael Denning has suggested, “culture is seen as the equivalent of leisure, not labor” (Denning 2004, 91). If Senior’s view of labor (as something tangible and

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quantifiable) is trenchantly masculine and working-class, Paulie’s labor (intangible and unquantifiable) is both feminine and bourgeois. The mental labor Paulie must engage in to build the theme motorcycles that account for OCC’s success is not rec- ognizable to his father as real work because he understands it to be a feminized form of leisure that stands outside the sphere of real work.

Because of his experiences running Orange County Ironworks, Senior is used to being able to measure and reward the output of his employees. His status as the signer of weekly paychecks is often raised as a threat to Paulie and other workers whom Senior believes to be slacking on the job. As its name might suggest, Orange County Ironworks functions under the traditional logics of capitalist accumulation. Raw materials come in, finished products go out; each employee has a function in a chain of tasks that must be completed, and their value to the company can be clearly evaluated. Under such a system, the value of each individual worker and their cor- responding remuneration is clearly quantifiable. As Paul Willis points out in Learning to Labour, “the productivity of capital is the liberated productivity of labour power given not as a quantity but as a capacity” (Willis 1977, 131). Indeed, this is one of the grounding assumptions of wage labor, and Senior fully expects OCC and its employees to manifest just such a recognizable relationship between labor and pro- duction. Paulie’s mental labor, then, is untrustworthy to his father because it isn’t vis- ible or quantifiable labor; it is not measurable in the form of a weekly pay packet.7

Senior also believes that Paulie’s ineffective work habits are linked to time (“here we are, already behind schedule”), and the producers of the show rely on this link for much of the show’s narrative tension. Because almost every episode of American Chopper revolves around a tightly scheduled bike build, the issue of time and its relationship to labor is invested with great significance. “‘Time is money’,” Willis (1977) suggests, “but the real measure which connects the two is abstract labour” (131). Indeed, if the deadlines that seem to constantly plague OCC are understood from Senior’s perspective, they are imbued with an almost moral weight. The confla- tion of domestic melodrama with labor dispute is a central aspect of the show’s appeal. As Senior himself suggests, “it’s a family show. And people have the same struggles we do, and they identify with it” (Howard 2004, 2). To the considerable degree that Senior believes that Paulie is always behind schedule, he finds his son’s tardiness to be a moral failure and a sign of Paulie’s lack of commitment both to the company and to his father. To measure the passage of time (and to ensure that time is being spent wisely), Senior is always looking for recognizable signs that Paulie is working; when he cannot find them he gets upset. “You don’t get involved in any- thing that you gotta get your hands dirty with” quips Senior at one point. Because his own labor history is such a significant part of his self-identity, Senior views Paulie’s seeming rejection of his values as a personal attack. Paulie—for whom their arguments are about the value of artistic expression—often complains that his father doesn’t understand the artistic process and that his continual interference only causes further delays. During one such argument, Paulie tries to explain the nature of artistic

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labor and its different relationship to time to his father: “There was a lot of staring at this bike that just needed to be done to figure out what had to be done,” he argues, “even when there was time that we were here working there was still a lot of figur- ing, you know what I mean?” What is clear is that Senior doesn’t know what Paulie means. Thus, while Paulie is understood to be the artistic member of the partnership, Senior is presented—and self-identifies—as “Old School.”8 For Senior, the term Old School signifies authenticity, tradition, and the value of hard work and manual labor.9

The valorization of manual over mental labor that Senior exemplifies in his cham- pioning of Old School ways upholds a gendered division of labor that compliments traditional capitalist modes of production. As Willis (1977) suggests, “manual labour is associated with the social superiority of masculinity, and mental labour with the social inferiority of femininity. In particular manual labour is imbued with a masculine tone and nature which renders it positively expressive of more than its intrinsic focus in work” (Willis 1977, 148). As such, the reversal of the manual/mental dichotomy func- tions hegemonically as it assures capitalist production of a willing workforce, in part because manual labor becomes tied to assumptions about masculinity and the rela- tionship between work and the body. And this, perhaps, is why Senior’s response to people mistaking Orange County, New York for Orange County, California is to get a large “OCC New York” tattoo (a process that is shown on air). However, as Willis also points out, “in the capitalist mobilization of the mental/manual distinction it is conventionally, and according to the dominant ideology, the mental labourers who have the legitimized right to superior material and cultural conditions. Mental work is held to be more exacting and therefore to justify higher rewards” (148). Thus, while Senior believes that his work habits are authentic and Old School, it is Paulie who is more instep with the realities of the contemporary neoliberal guise of com- modity capitalism. If, as Appadurai (1996) suggests, “consumption has . . . become the driving force of industrial society,” American Chopper turns industry into a form of consumption (and vice versa) (82). The arguments between Senior and Paulie about the nature of real work are both a dramatization and—as importantly—a work- ing through of the transformation to neoliberal modes of capitalist production and consumption.

“Like Martha Stewart on a Motorcycle”: Gender, Class, and the Laboring Body10

They get way too much play for cake decorators.

—Bill Dodge, West Coast Choppers

The issue of authenticity is a central aspect of debates about American Chopper, and the Teutuls’ celebrity has made them problematic figures, signifying counter-cultural rebellion and working-class authenticity for some and bourgeois co-option for

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others. Like the arguments between Senior and Paulie about the nature of real work, the debates about authenticity often break down along a common fault line of class and gender-based assumptions. As the epigraph from Bill Dodge (an employee of West Coast Choppers, an OCC competitor)—“they get way too much play for cake decorators”—suggests, their fellow bikers often deride the very aspects of the Teutuls’ bikes that make them popular with a mainstream audience. That derision is regularly produced as an issue of gender inauthenticity. As “cake decorators,” the Teutuls are situated in the domestic sphere of family, leisure, and femininity. Deemed to be insufficiently masculine, the Teutuls do not warrant the respect of hardcore bikers. Because they build choppers for corporate clients and—in the eyes of some—do little more than assemble their bikes from pre-fabricated parts, the Teutuls are believed to have lost touch (if they ever had it) with the authentic roots of the biker community. As such, many other chopper builders actively work to dis- tance themselves from the media-fueled celebrity of builders such as the Teutuls. Scott Long of Central Coast Choppers, for example, says, “people tell me [my bike] doesn’t look like the choppers they see on TV, and that’s about the biggest compliment I can get.”11 Yoshi Hannya of Rodeo Motorcycles echoes Bill Dodge’s complaints about the overly decorative sort of bikes the Teutuls build when he states, “I don’t think a chopper should have any parts on it that don’t make it go faster or look better. Original choppers were basically just frames, motors, and a few parts for style— that’s all” (Seate 2004, 12). Because their design aesthetic more often relies on the embellishment than the paring down of the motorcycle’s basic components, the Teutuls’ choppers signify leisure, feminized domesticity, consumption, and inauthentic for bikers such as Hannya and Dodge.

Authentic masculinity is an issue of skill and dedication that has become diluted by culture, leisure, and consumption. As Mike Seate claims in his book Outlaw Choppers, “riding and managing not to crash a radical chopper back in the day labeled the rider a hard man amongst men, the sort of guy who chases his tequila with Jack Daniels” (Seate 2004, 59, italics added). Warren Fuller, the creator of a biker lifestyle web site, highlights the relationship between consumption and authenticity that ground such beliefs when he claims that the Teutuls do not truly represent the chopper community. “These guys are pulling a $25,000 motor out of a box,” he says, “what’s so special about that?”12 Because they can afford to buy an expensive motor, the Teutuls evidence a form of consumerism that holds little value for the biker com- munity, which places more value in abilities, such as bartering, that are driven by economic necessity. Such comments, then, reflect a two-fold complaint about the Teutuls’ work and—implicitly—their celebrity status that further highlights the rela- tionship between gender and socioeconomics. Therefore, while American Chopper presents the Teutuls as authentic examples of both the outlaw biker and the blue- collar worker, they do not function as such equally for everyone. The Teutuls are deemed to be inauthentic because of both the feminized nature of their work and their newfound socioeconomic standing.

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The problematic status of the Teutuls is also an issue for American Chopper’s fans. The relationship between consumption, class, and authenticity arises most clearly in arguments about the relationships between the Teutuls and OCC employees such as Vinnie Dimartino and Rick Petko. These debates, which take place on online discus- sion boards devoted to the show (such as the one hosted by the Discovery Channel on its web site13), focus on whether OCC’s employees are given enough respect and acknowledgement by the Teutuls for their contributions to the success of OCC. Vinnie and Rick perform the real work at OCC and possess the real mechanical skills, the argument goes, and without them the Teutuls would be exposed for the fakes they really are; Senior and Paulie have gained a financial success that is incommensurate with their mechanical ability, while highly skilled mechanics such as Vinnie do the “real” work. While viewers of the show often debate whether OCC’s employees are given enough credit for their contributions to the Teutuls’ success, this question seems doubly relevant in the case of the invisible workers who produce the OCC-branded merchandise that accounts for a large percentage of the economic windfall the Teutuls have realized since the show has been on the air.

While a significant portion of American Chopper’s success results from the show’s validation of a world of blue-collar manual labor that—coded through the Teutuls’ laboring bodies—is understood to be both masculine and definitively male, the economic mobility the Teutuls have gained comes in large part from the labor of others who are rendered invisible in the show’s making. Fans of American Chopper and OCC who are unable to afford the astronomical asking price for an OCC chop- per but who still wish to buy into the show’s performative masculinities, can buy a myriad of American Chopper and OCC-themed merchandise such as t-shirts and baseball caps.14 The Teutuls have attained celebrity because of their putative status as (and claimed solidarity with) blue-collar workers, and benefit economically from the hidden labor of others. The solidarity the Teutuls espouse for the American worker in American Chopper does not seem to extend to the laborers—many of them women of color—of the garment industry. This is, in part, because the forms of solidarity with working-class labor the show valorizes have been transformed into the elective choices of postindustrial consumer society. “Mass culture has won,” suggests Denning (2004), “all culture is mass culture under capitalism” and, as such, “there is no work- ing-class culture that is not saturated with mass culture” (103). American Chopper contextualizes consumption as a form of labor that attenuates the real issues of class, gender, and racial inequality produced under neoliberalism. Therefore, such workers do not count in the show’s index of authentic labor, despite the actual loses suffered by women under the neoliberal service economy of contemporary America.

In disputes about their authenticity, the Teutuls are often compared to Jesse James, the owner of West Coast Choppers, the subject of a Discovery Channel special Motorcycle Mania, and the host of the channel’s other hit automotive reality show, Monster Garage. James is presented as a far more rebellious figure than the Teutuls. While the Teutuls are “cake decorators,” Jesse James is “an artist and people see the dignity in the way [he] makes his living” (Halliday 2004, 8). While American Chopper

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focuses on family relations, in Motorcycle Mania James is portrayed as a loner and an outlaw. James claims to be a descendant of the Jesse James of American frontier mythology (the stylized chambers of a pair of six shooters are a signature piece that embellish many of his motorcycles), and the show presents him as the last of a dying breed of real men. As with American Chopper, Motorcycle Mania also conjoins the iconography of the biker with blue-collar labor and devotes much attention to James’s considerable skills as a metalworker. James is portrayed in the show as an artisan who pays tribute to the workers who have come before him and to the old- fashioned/traditional ways of working with metal that have been rendered obsolete in the contemporary world of automated manufacturing. He is repeatedly hailed— not without hyperbole—as the last worker of his kind in the world. By positioning James as the last of a dying breed, Motorcycle Mania also constructs a nostalgic view of manual labor. As an artisan, James is understood to be the embodiment of an authentic manual labor that makes a space for culture by coding artistic labor as artisanship and craft.

Over the course of the three Motorcycle Mania specials, the viewer sees James make a gas tank from scratch out of sheet metal, use an obsolete metal rolling tool he sal- vaged from an abandoned factory to smooth out sheets of steel, and take a pilgrimage to learn how to work with copper from one of the last skilled copper workers in the country. The viewer also sees James’s scarred and bloody hands—proof that he does the work himself and a sign of his dedication to the old ways.15 The motorcycles James builds are believed to embody an aura of authenticity that they gain from their status as one-off, hand-built machines. Like the Teutuls, however, James also builds bikes for corporations (such as R. J. Reynolds and AOL), and the asking price for his motorbikes (which begin at $40,000) places them squarely out of the reach of the average consumer. Indeed, much like OCC, West Coast Choppers has become an identifiable brand name and, because of the visibility brought on by Motorcycle Mania and Monster Garage, a recent addition to the company’s buildings in Long Beach includes a storefront for the sale of WCC merchandise. James also has an extensive celebrity client list that includes the likes of basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, wrestler Goldberg, rock star Kid Rock, and male supermodel Tyson Beckford. Despite the differences in representation between the Teutuls and James, the comparison between them indicates how the original status of the custom chopper as a signifier of countercultural rebellion sometimes conflicts with its newfound position as a consumable object of bourgeois fantasy identification.

“From the Heart”: The Affective Production of Male Sentimentality

This project had more than mechanical aptitude and ability; it had deep, deep meaning.

—Dan DaVinci, DaVinci Performance

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Watching Chopper, you learn a little about bikes and a lot about how men express love with outbursts and power tools.

—James Poniewozik, Time

American Chopper’s affective discourse of working-class sacrifice and commemo- ration achieved its most potent expression in a bike the Teutuls built to commemorate the New York City firemen who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. The single most popular OCC creation and a significant reason for the overall success of American Chopper, the “Fire Bike” was built over the course of three episodes that first aired in April and June of 2003. The “Fire Bike” distills American Chopper’s affective logic of working-class masculinity in the figure of the New York City fireman. The elevation of New York City’s firemen to everyday heroes after September 11, 2001 produced a potent affective logic of unimpeachable masculine sacrifice into which the “Fire Bike” successfully feeds. As the Teutuls celebrate the fallen firemen of September 11, they situate those heroic figures within a realm of working-class masculine sacrifice and domesticity. The valor and heroism for which the fallen firemen are being celebrated comes to signal the value of working-class masculinity in general. The affective commemoration of New York City firemen becomes a cele- bration of the white ethnic working-class masculine identity the Teutuls themselves embody for the audience of American Chopper. Through a series of cross-identifications, the “Fire Bike” episodes situate the Teutuls within the same representational space as the fallen firemen.

The relationship between the Teutuls and the firemen they wish to commemorate is rendered both explicitly and implicitly. While Paulie is designing the bike, he and Mikey visit a firehouse in the Bronx where Mikey’s best friend, Al Ronaldson, is a junior fireman. When Paulie and Mikey visit the firehouse, they help the firemen cook dinner and, replicating a task he is often seen performing at OCC, Mikey takes out the trash. The two brothers also eat with the firemen and follow them when they go out on a call that interrupts the meal. After the visit, Paulie claims that, “ever since I was younger I’ve always admired firemen.” “Getting a chance to spend some time with these guys,” he continues, “really helped me to see a little more into the mean- ing of the project other than just building a bike.” The finished bike is later unveiled at the same firehouse for an audience of New York City firefighters. The connections between the Teutuls’ authentic blue-collar roots and the figure of the fireman are also produced in more implicit ways, most clearly in the presentation of Paulie as an exemplary citizen.

If the “Miller Electric Bike” episodes cited Senior as the proper locus of blue-collar commemoration, the “Fire Bike” episodes situate Paulie in a similar logic of affective engagement. During the course of one “Fire Bike” episode, Paulie shows a visiting group of high school-aged students around OCC and the iron works. Hosting the students is a significant nostalgic moment for Paulie because they attend a Board of

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Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) continuing education/high school equivalency institution in New York State that Paulie himself attended.16 Much like the focus on Senior’s humble beginnings in the “Miller Electric Bike” episodes, the inclusion of the students’ visit to OCC during the “Fire Bike” episodes situates Paulie as an exemplary figure. As one student claims when asked about the trip, “I never thought that someone who was in a program like me could succeed like this.” The success of Paulie and OCC in the eyes of the BOCES students codifies the affective value American Chopper gives to blue-collar labor because it highlights the rags to riches transformation of the American Dream while still valuing manual labor as a bona fide origin point for economic success. Moreover, this gesture also replicates traditional sentiments about the intrinsic value of manual labor. Seeing someone like Paulie succeed is good for the students, the BOCES instructor tells the viewer, because it shows them that “anything they do with their hands is worth doing well.” The placement of this encounter during the “Fire Bike” build is significant because the viewer is encouraged to view Paulie’s success as the result of a form of sacrifice and hard work that mirrors—albeit with starkly different results—the sacrifice of the firemen. Manifesting a commensurate logic of affective production, Paulie’s authentic blue-collar identity is being celebrated alongside that of the firemen.

The “Fire Bike” episodes also create a masculine sentimentality in which each of the principle builders involved in the creation of the bike professes the emotional effect their involvement in the project has had on them personally. Paulie lays out the emotional stakes of the project at the very beginning, claiming that, “ever since 9/11 I think that, you know, it’s been in my heart to do something for the firemen, you know, just to pay tribute.” “These guys are true heroes,” he states later, “there’s just no question about that. I just hope I could create a bike that will honor them in the way they deserve to be honored.” In the understanding of many of the men involved in the build, working on the “Fire Bike” changed them. Paulie himself claims, “I don’t know what it is about this particular bike, but it’s really affected me in a way that no other bike has.” In a proclamation about the significance of the bike that must have thrown his father into conniptions, he tells the viewer, “this bike is more important than any deadline.” By referring to the issue of deadlines, Paulie’s statement interrupts the show’s normal narrative logic by producing a transparency that transcends the artifice of television. Because of the solemnity of the bike’s commemorative subject matter, both the show’s normal rules of operation and the Teutuls’ disputes are to be put on hold during the course of the build.

Woking on the “Fire Bike” is also a significant experience for the vendors OCC contracts during the build. Justin Barnes, the bike’s painter, explains the effect the bike has had on him, claiming, “I’ve never worked on anything that has affected me quite like this bike.” “There were a couple of times when we were working on it that the whole meaning of the bike really hit me hard,” he continues, “especially when we started doing the ’343’ . . . what that number represents.”17 Working on the bike not only has a profound affect on its builders, but this affectivity is also understood

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to exact a physical toll—it also takes a lot out of them. The builders of the bike’s gas tank and wheels, for example, each claim that they “put a lot of heart and soul into this one.” This statement highlights the investment in physical labor as a form of feeling in which—as it was in the “Miller Electric Bike”—affect is routed through the relationship between the body and the machine. The sentimental burden of com- memoration is transformed into the expenditure of manual labor. The “Fire Bike” places tears back at the center of the “blood, sweat, and steel” of American Chopper’s American Dream by producing an affective equivalency between steel and tears as both become the product of emotion and the correct response to American valor and sacrifice. In the affective economy of manual labor evidenced in American Chopper, the bike’s builders channel their emotions through a proper conduit, and the affective discourse of commemoration is routed through an inanimate—and overtly masculinized—object. As much as the “Miller Electric Bike,” the “Fire Bike” is a concrete expression of the exhortation to “buy American.” Because that object— the custom motorcycle—has become a signifier of bourgeois success, consumption is presented as a proper means of emotive expression.

American Chopper presents an idealized realm of masculine interaction that reproduces traditionally coded divisions of public and private, masculine and feminine, labor and leisure while updating those divisions in the face of the corrosive pressures of the neoliberal service economy. Collapsing the separate spheres of public and private, work and home into pseudo-domestic world of fraternity and labor that is the OCC workshop, American Chopper relocates the franchise of masculinity. If, as Robyn Wiegman has argued, the white male subject in contemporary American culture “is cast not only as a minority identity but as one injured by the denial of public representation,” then automotive television programs such as American Chopper raise to view the white, male laboring body and situate that body at the heart of a nostalgic construction of authentic citizenship (Wiegman 1999, 116). In its presentation of a world of mascu- line labor and fraternal affect, American Chopper constructs a nostalgic world of blue-collar work in which the skilled manual laborer—always understood to be male—still reigns supreme, untroubled by the supposed defeats suffered by hegemonic masculinity in the post-civil rights era. By celebrating neoliberal consumer capital and the traditional consumption of the American dream as coterminous discourses of celebrity identity, the show elides the increasingly vast gaps in opportunity and remuneration that separate the haves and the have-nots in the contemporary United States. As Vinnie Dimartino, OCC head mechanic and American Chopper’s moral center says, “it’s just the way you do something, and then the way it’s shown on TV” (Flaherty 60). What American Chopper shows on TV every Monday night is a world of fraternity and male bonding that rehabilitates blue-collar labor by presenting the world of work as an emotionally fulfilling habitat in which men are still free to be men and masculine identity is produced as consumer choice. Through the example of the Teutuls and their employees, American Chopper constitutes a patriarchal form of normative citizenship predicated on modes of consumption that elide the real loses suffered by both men and women under neoliberalism. Moreover, by collating the

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Teutuls’ American Dream and the privatized neoliberal consumer subject, the show incorporates the very losses it elides into the structures of possibility it celebrates. Searching for the exemplary neoliberal citizen, American Chopper finds him at the heart of the American Dream.

Notes

1. For salary details, see http://asp.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salaries/ (accessed February 7, 2006).

2. See Stilson (2003) for a brief analysis of American Chopper viewing data. 3. I am intentionally using the term firemen rather than a more gender-neutral term such as firefighter in

this essay to highlight the fact that it is undoubtedly men who are being valorized in this commemorative affec- tivity. For an interesting discussion of this investment in gender specificity after September 11, see Terese M. Floren’s insightful article, “Too Far Back for Comfort,” Firework, October 2001.

4. While American Chopper’s status as a reality-based TV show is significant, genre is not the central focus of this analysis. Therefore, while I attend to the formal aspects of the show and do not wish to sep- arate it from the broader cycle of reality television in which it is situated, I am more interested in questions of cultural politics that are not predicated solely on the genre conventions of reality TV. For a discussion of the reality TV cycle, see Murray and Ouellette (2004).

5. See www.harley-davidson.com (accessed February 7, 2006). 6. See www.orangecountychoppers.com (accessed February 7, 2006). 7. In his discussion of the relationship between time, money, and labor, Willis suggests, “in middle

class professions it is clear that the yearly salary is paid in exchange for the use of continuous and flex- ible services. Remuneration here is not based on the particular amount of time spent on the job and of course those ‘on the staff’ are expected to work overtime and at home for no extra cash. Such workers, their wage form makes clear, are being paid for what they are: for the use of their capacities, for their gen- eral potential as managers, accountants, etc. The social implications of the weekly wage packet are very different. The general capacity of labour power which is recognized by the salary form is here broken up into weekly lumps and riveted to a direct and regular reward. Weekly wages, not yearly salaries, mark the giving of labour. The quantity of the wage packet is the quantitative passing of time. Its diminution is loss of measured time, its increase ‘overtime’” (1997, 131).

8. The authenticity of Senior’s “Old School” roots are confirmed when he and Mikey restore one of Senior’s first choppers, originally built in 1974. The bike was later featured in the Harley-Davidson enthu- siast magazine V-Twin Motorcycles under the title “Paul Sr.’s Pride and Joy” (Garson).

9. Needless to say, this hasn’t prevented him from turning it into a commodity identity, and OCC now features a signature line of bikes, the Old School Paul Sr. Series, with an asking price of $55,000. See http://www.orangecountychoppers.com/occweb_ver2_oldschoolseries.php (accessed February 7, 2006).

10. Mikey Teutul used this witty term during a “best of” episode to describe his father’s desire for cleanliness. While I will not discuss them here, a number of major arguments between Senior and Paulie center on issues of neatness and Paulie’s inability to keep his workspace tidy.

11. Mike Seate (2004, 32). There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that Long makes this statement in a book that would not exist without the popularity of shows like American Chopper.

12. Ann Oldenburg (2004). See also http://www.choppersrule.com (accessed February 7, 2006). 13. See <http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/amchopper/talk/talk.html?clik=fanmain_leftnav>. 14. OCC-related products include t-shirts and baseball caps bearing the OCC logo, coffee table books,

Teutul bobblehead dolls, American Chopper DVDs, “Full Throttle” cologne, miniature models of the theme motorcycles built on the show, children’s coloring books, and a video game in which the player gets to ride the bikes built on the show.

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15. In this light, it is interesting to note that one of the few work-related injuries seen on American Chopper involves OCC employee Rick Petko getting his hand caught in a drill. Despite his young age, Senior believes that Rick is “Old School” like him, a belief that is confirmed by the fact that Rick returns to work immediately after visiting the emergency room for stitches. For a discussion of hands and the laboring body, see Janet Zandy, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work.

16. See http://www.ouboces.org for further information about the program (accessed February 7, 2006).

17. A total of 343 firefighters lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

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Hamilton Carroll is a lecturer in American Literature and Culture in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His work is broadly interdisciplinary and, within the framework of a critical U.S. American Studies, interrogates the effects of globalization, neoliberalism, and transnationalism on the form of the contemporary nation-state. He is currently completing work on Affirmative Reaction: White Masculinities and the Politics of Representation, a book-length examination of contemporary forms of masculinity in U.S. culture.

Carroll / Contemporary Working-Class Masculinities 283

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