Duggan, Lisa. “Crossing the Line: The Brandon Teena Case and the Social Psychology of Working-Class Resentment.” New Labor Forum 13(3) Fall 2004: 37-44. Print.
Writing amidst the “‘class war’ against the working and middle class, the unemployed and underemployed, and the poor in the United States” under the George W. Bush Administration, Duggan turns to Brandon in order to think about why LGBT movements should be “more connected to women’s issues, race questions, and class politics” (37). Duggan offers a personal anecdote, her experience at a screening of The Brandon Teena Story at an academic conference in Berlin, to highlight the ways in which LGBT populations and academics more broadly maintain prejudices towards working-class and poor peoples, especially those in rural areas of the South and Midwest and especially those ensconced in religious and conservative cultures. Likewise, Duggan points out that U.S. labor movements typically distance themselves from folks marginalized by their gender and sexuality. Duggan performs a concise analysis of the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexuality contributed to the violence that was visited upon Brandon, DeVine, and Lambert, noting in particular how the lone social capital afforded Lotter and Nissen in economically impoverished rural Nebraska was a white masculinity that had to be defended at all cost. Overall, Duggan wants us to consider the real need for a labor movement that is attendant to race, gender, region, sexuality, and class.